THIS year marks the 35th anniversary of Bolton Mountain Rescue Team. From simple beginnings, they now have a small fleet of Land Rovers and some of the most cutting edge equipment available. But as Roger Williams learns, the dedicated volunteers will not be celebrating -- they are far too busy.

TALK to any member of Bolton Mountain Rescue Team and before long one subject is certain to crop up.

Team leader Garry Rhodes, in common with most volunteers, remembers years of jibes.

"It was always a joke: 'Where are the mountains in Bolton?' " he says, "but we were called that because it was the organisation we were part of nationally."

Yet it is a testament to the way the team have set about putting themselves on a level footing with the other emergency services that the sniggers have stopped.

Garry says: "We always used to have the mickey taken out of us, but that has ended. It's all about public recognition."

And it's hardly surprising awareness of the team's work has shot up. In the space of a few years they have gone from handling half a dozen calls a year to being busier than most traditional teams based in places such as the Lake District.

Last year they were the busiest team in the Mountain Rescue organisation, with 99 call-outs. This year there have already been 66, and the figure looks set to top 100 for the first time.

But the reason for the upsurge in responses is not that the terrain around Bolton has become as treacherous as the Himalayas.

Instead, it owes everything to a change in the team's role -- the way it operates is vastly different to when it was founded in 1968 by a small group of enthusiastic fell walkers.

Then volunteers had only a stretcher, a rudimentary first aid kit and a basic set of ropes and had to use their own vehicles to reach jobs. The only uniform they had was orange waterproofs.

"We looked smart -- when it was raining," recalls deputy team leader Geoff Seddon, a towering figure in the group's history who has been a member almost from the outset. He joined in 1969 aged just 18.

These days the team has three Land Rovers, with a fourth on the way, all loaded with state-of-the-art medical and rescue equipment: defibrillators, oxygen therapy kits, vacuum mattresses and an array of stretchers. Life jackets and throw-in lines are also at hand if they are needed for reservoir rescues.

But Mr Seddon is keen to stress that the team was still effective in its earliest days.

He says: "It has changed enormously in the sense that the number of call-outs has increased dramatically. But I think the ethos and the camaraderie are the same."

There was a real watershed for the team, however, in the late 1980s, when it began to work more closely with the ambulance service to handle cases where casualties are difficult to reach. This can mean the moors, reservoirs or steep drops where casualties have to be winched out.

One of the recent recruits, Dave Sarti, joined the team after meeting them when they had been called to a helicopter crash on the moors at Brinscall, near Chorley.

The 38-year-old says: "The variety of incidents we are called to, anything from sprained ankles at the side of reservoirs to aircraft crashes, means you have to be prepared for anything."

And that's exactly what the 49 members are. There still aren't any mountains, but there is a mountain of essential work to do.

MEMORABLE INCIDENTS

A frantic search involving the mountain rescuers and police was launched when little Amy Croft went missing from her home in Little Hulton for seven hours last year. There were emotional scenes when two team members found her asleep under a bush on a golf course and reunited her with mother Nicola Wharton.

The team had to rescue two teenagers who had fallen 80 feet off a wall down the chillingly named Dead Man's Cliff, Little Lever, in June 2001. Hannah Nuttall, aged 13, and Warren Rennie, aged 16, were both saved.

There was a less happy conclusion to a search in February 2000 after a helicopter crashed on Anglezarke Moor. Volunteers and colleagues from the Rossendale and Bowland-Pennine teams were among the first on the scene. A 32-year-old Bury man and two others were killed.

Among the most memorable incidents in Geoff Seddon's long career was a search for young Christopher Holmes who had been separated from his father in appalling conditions in the Trough of Bowland. Team members, with support from an RAF Sea King helicopter, found him asleep in heather.

Chairman Tony McNally says: "Around that time we decided we were going to have to make changes. Otherwise, we felt we might just as well establish ourselves as a walking club and not even pretend to be a mountain rescue team."

Increasingly, Greater Manchester Ambulance Service (GMAS) are drawing on the team's expertise, even when they are simply overstretched.

One afternoon last month, they were called out to help on five occasions, including a motorbike crash in Rivington and a man complaining of chest pains in Brownlow Fold.

The team have to be prepared for all contingencies. They train weekly and members are put through courses covering everything from lifesaving to driving an emergency service vehicle (their Land Rovers are equipped with flashing blue lights).