This article has some more interesting information from the American Radio Relay League:
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2010/02/22/11353/?nc=1

"Priem asked the amateur on the other end of the radio -- Gary Gosney, K6USN-- where he was located. "He said, 'I'm in Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs, Boulder County, 120 miles away." Gosney was monitoring a local Colorado Springs UHF frequency that links to the Mountain Amateur Radio Club’s (MARC) 146.82 repeater located in Woodland Park, Colorado.

"When Steve pulled out his radio and started calling for help, he wasn't sure of the frequencies that were programmed into his handheld transceiver," Ryan said. "He started flipping through the memory channels and calling MAYDAY. He told me that he was still unsure how he was communicating with a ham in Colorado Springs from Guinn Mountain. When I informed him of the MARC Woodland Park repeater, he told me that he had never heard of it, so he was perplexed as to why it was programmed in his radio."

"A quick check of the Colorado frequency database revealed two other repeaters in Colorado on that frequency -- and Steve recognized one in Grand Junction. "He told me that he used to travel to Grand Junction and had programmed that repeater into his handheld transceiver years ago," Ryan told the ARRL. "That repeater is more than 150 miles to the west and would be impossible to hit from Guinn Mountain. Coincidently, it is also the frequency of the Woodland Park repeater -- which sometimes has a CTCSS tone required for input -- but fortunately for all on this day, the tone access was turned off, allowing Steve's signal to key up the machine." The path between Woodland Park (about 9000 feet above sea level) and Guinn Mountain (about 11,500 feet above sea level) is about 75 miles. There is a lot of high terrain preventing a direct line-of-site path, so Steve's signal must have been either knife edging or bouncing off of nearby granite."

"The rescue teams coordinated via Amateur Radio, using both simplex and the mountaintop repeaters maintained by Rocky Mountain Ham Radio, the Rocky Mountain Radio League and the Colorado Connection Repeaters."

Very nice group assist on this one!

Sue