Young Men Most Likely To Need Rescue
The most likely rescue victim in a national park? Young men hiking on a weekend who make a bad decision or two and end up hurt, exhausted or lost. On average, 11 search-and-rescue operations are launched in national parks every day. While expenses average about $900, the price can easily jump into the thousands of dollars, according to a new analysis of search-and-rescue operations over 15 years.
Travis Heggie, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota who headed the study, also found that roughly 20 percent of the people who called for help likely would have died if they had not been rescued.
Nearly half of the calls for help are for hikers, often for the day, who are caught unprepared, get hurt or sick, or underestimate the wild landscape. The results are similar to an analysis published earlier this year of national parks in Utah, which found young male day hikers were among those most likely to need rescuing.
In the last couple of weeks, rescuers helped a father and son whose ultralight plane crashed in Utah's Zion National Park, pulled three teenagers and one of the boy's mothers from a cliff face at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on the Utah-Arizona border and launched four separate searches over two days for missing hunters and hikers in Arkansas' Buffalo National River area.
Heggie's study, published in the latest issue of the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, was an attempt to quantify the "untold story" of national parks' search-and-rescue operations and see how much they cost. He found more than 65,000 operations in 1992-2007 with expenses exceeding $58 million.
The study also said that in 2005, half of the operations were in just five spots: Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park, New York's Gateway National Recreation Area, California's Yosemite National Park, Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park and Nevada's Lake Mead National Recreation Area.
In a typical year, rescues include people stranded on cliffs, desert dunes, mountaintops and in the water of man-made reservoirs. Some parks have full-time rescue teams while others rely on park staff with other jobs who have rescue training.
In 2007, $4.7 million was spent in national parks across the country looking for lost, stranded or injured visitors, according to Park Service figures. More than 97 percent of searches were successful within 24 hours.