Park Service averages 11 searches per day

Whether it's saving a stranded hiker with a broken leg or fishing out a capsized boater, a new study says national parks launch 11 search-and-rescue operations on an average day.

Travis Heggie, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota who headed up the study, analyzed search-and-rescue reports from 1992 to 2007, when there were more than 65,000 operations in national parks with costs exceeding $58 million.

Those most commonly in need of help? Day hikers, young men and boaters. Weekends were the busiest.

The results are similar to an earlier analysis by Heggie of national parks in Utah, which found young men on day hikes were among the most likely to need a rescue.

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 the mother of one of the boys 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.

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.

Individual parks pay for operations that cost $500 or less, while regional or national offices pick up higher tabs.