SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — In 2020, Daniel Stih spent a night on a ledge in Zion National Park.
It wasn’t part of any travel plan.
“I was down about 200 feet,” Stih explained, “when, the way my climbing partner says, that the rope flipped around the bush or broke, I don't know which, and I started swinging.
“I swung around the corner, into a corner, a wall.”
Stih broke his hip. The next day, a National Park Service helicopter flew him off the ledge to an ambulance below.
In 2022, the National Park Service conducted about 3,400 search and rescue operations nationwide — everything from a child lost on a hiking trail for a few minutes to rescues off sinking boats or bone-chilling mountains.
“We just see a lot of people coming here,” said Daniel Fagergren, the chief ranger at Zion National Park. “And for some of them, they have the worst day of their life.”
Bowling Green State University Professor Travis Heggie, who studies injuries in the outdoors and used to work in risk management for the Park Service, said he’s found that — among federal agencies — only the U.S. Coast Guard rescues more people.
Heggie contends the Park Service hasn’t done enough to prevent hikers, boaters, climbers and all the other 300 million visitors a year to the parks from getting into trouble.
“There's over 1,000 saves every single year,” Heggie said. “And that ‘saved’ means if the Park Service wasn't there in some shape or form, to do a search and rescue operation, those 1,000 people probably would have died.”
The National Park Service pays $6-7 million a year in direct costs for search and rescues, Heggie said. But they probably cost a lot more than that.
Those figures don’t take into account costs to local law enforcement who sometimes assist nor when military helicopters are called upon to help find or rescue park visitors.
Even donors chip in. Volunteers in Utah raised $60,000 for a rescue vehicle serving Arches and Canyonlands national parks.
“People that are maybe working on [a] trail one moment,” Fagergren said, “and the next minute, they're helping carry a litter and saving a life.”
Zion is one of the busiest parks for searches and rescues. Fagergren said he and his rangers see a lot of ankles and knees twisted or broken; when the temperatures reach 100 degrees, hyperthermia is common.
In 2015, a flash flood killed seven Zion visitors in a slot canyon. This January, a Utah Highway Patrol helicopter hoisted two hikers stranded in a snowy canyon.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office search and rescue team gets notified of any major rescues and is asked to help for complicated rescues or when park staff is busy with other rescues. Park staff and county search and rescue were training in the Virgin River in late April when they were notified that Canadian visitor to Zion fell into the water.
The two teams rescued the woman and performed CPR to revive her. A helicopter flew her to a hospital.
Darrell Cashin, the commander of the Washington County Search and Rescue, said the Park Service will assist on rescues outside of Zion, but otherwise the county receives no compensation for helping inside the park. (Counties don’t receive compensation for rescues on other federal lands either.)
“A program that could help reimburse the counties for some of that would be welcomed,” Cashin said.
The Park Service has tried to keep visitors from harm with some videos on social media and a few signs inside the parks with safety warnings.
But when FOX 13 News scanned national parks homepages, safety information was usually confined to weather forecasts. Visitors have to go to a pulldown menu under the “Plan Your Visit” tab to find detailed safety warnings.
“It'd be more effective,” Heggie said, “if [visitors] receive a message before they even arrive in the park.”
Heggie did his doctoral thesis work at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. He found such an education program there greatly reduced serious accidents.
Day hikers and boaters are the groups most likely to need rescue, but over the years the parks have allowed more and more extreme athletes like Stih. For that group, he sees search and rescue figures tied to increased visitation in the parks.
“No, I did not think I would ever break my hip and need a helicopter rescue,” Stih said.
“Climbing is not safe,” he added. “It was never meant to be.
“But that's also not to mean it's, ‘Dangerous. Stay away.”