Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked. Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Hello and thanks for choosing to listen to this. I'm Rachel Stewart. Now 20 years ago,

the majority of volunteers involved in Mountain Rescue in Scotland were men. Today, the picture,

of course, is changing and women are regularly part of the highly skilled teams, though they're still

in the minority.

I spoke to a very experienced group of women in Tayside who are keen to encourage more

females to get involved and hope their stories may provide some inspiration to those

considering whether to apply. I joined them during a kit check at their base in Blair

Gowdy. I'll open up the vacuum mattress and now we can check and make sure that that is going

to be not having any holes or anything and everything's working fine with it. So this is the

pump for it and this is the vacuum mattress which we use to

put casualties in and it kind of keeps them all stable inside when they're on the stretcher. So,

and it's full of polystyrene balls, which when you soak the air out of it, it goes nice and stiff like a big stooky so what

I'll do now is I'll let the air back out again which is good fun my name's Alison Todd and

I've been in Mountain Rescue for approximately 30 years and I've been in four teams over that time and I have

totally enjoyed my time in Mountain Rescue and as a female I've seen over the years

changes in Mountain Rescue so that nowadays people are much more akin to seeing females in teams.

It is getting better. We're quite lucky in Tayside here.

...