October 20, 2009, 1:46 pm
The ripest recipe for trouble 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 around
$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 up the study, also found that
roughly 20% 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.
"They're coming into what they perceive is a
safe environment," said Heggie, a former ranger who once worked on a
park service risk management program.
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 recent days, 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 mother 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.
The costs vary widely depending on the rescue's
difficulty, the terrain and the equipment necessary, he said. In
Yosemite, for instance, costs exceeded $1.2 million in 2005 while Zion
spent about $139,000.
