In late May 2020, a six-person Portland Mountain Rescue team was hunkered down in a snow shelter on a cold and windy night after finding a lost climber suffering from hypothermia on Mount Hood.
Using the body heat of rescuers to keep the climber’s temperature from dropping further, Paige Baugher held his head in her lap and draped her arm over him.
“He kept calling me Claire,” Baugher said. “My name isn’t Claire.”
They spent about five hours like that, in zero visibility, before they could extract the climber by putting him on a litter and hauling him out. He has since recovered.
The rescuers had been awake for 20 hours. This time, at least, Baugher didn’t have a Monday morning class to teach.
Baugher’s day job is as a biology professor and department chair at 鶹Ӱ. She specializes in the study of cancer cells and has contributed to The Encyclopedia of Cancer. She has researched the interaction of salal with human cells, publishing her finding that the plant boosts estrogen receptor-positive human breast cancer cells.
In fact, after she earned her PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Texas, she was on track to be an academic researcher at Vanderbilt University, but she realized she missed teaching. She started looking for schools where she could both teach and conduct research and found her match at Pacific in 2008.
When she arrived in the Northwest, Baugher was an active outdoorsperson. She had climbed rocks, hiked and spent abundant time in the outdoors. She developed her mountain climbing skills, in party, with Pacific's OUtdoor Pursuits program, where she now teaches students mountaineering.
Portland Mountain Rescue is one of a handful of volunteer rescue teams that respond to reports of missing hikers and fallen climbers. It specializes in high-angle rock extractions, so the team is often sent into the harshest, most challenging conditions.