The NPS will present a bill for SAR costs in very egregious situations, under the heading of "creating a disturbance"(or very similar wording. This is done on a case by case basis, and only rarely.

One thing about the SAR victims I have known is that their common denominator is experience, or, rather, lack thereof. Once a person has learned a bit,the chances of their getting into trouble decline rather significantly. My own early history illustrates the point beautifully. On my very first hike in mountainous terrain, I narrowly avoided serious injury or death, only by dump luck not suffering about a fifty foot fall. I emerged uninjured and somewhat wiser. I have often thought about that incident when I have been on scenes where victims were not as fortunate.

Well, maybe in there somewhere is some common ground for us all. I would still prefer people be more accountable for themselves, especially when they know what they are doing has risk involved. But you can't consider all possible outcomes of a given course. It would be nice, at least, to see someone offer a mechanism for indemnification suitable for the adventurous. I haven't seen anything like that yet.

If I were to go much further we'd be squarely into the realm of politics. So I'll simply say that I'm fine with pooling the collective costs and risks of things like SAR. To me it's little different than using taxes to build highways, fix bridges and field a military. IMOHO it's the reason civilization exists.

You might prefer something like the practice in Europe, where mountaineers purchase rescue insurance which defrays the cost of choppers and planes, etc. that get involved. I encountered one such gentleman on Denali some years ago. He came to us complaining of frostbitten feet, along with general malaise , etc. It was pretty clear that he wasn't having fun any more and wanted the NPS to whisk him off the hill right away (This was at the 14,500 foot advance base camp)which I gather would have been the practice back home. We directed him to insure that his feet didn't thaw until he reached the hospital, and start his journey there by skiing down to the airstrip (7000 feet). This was standard practice twenty-five years ago -I am not clear on current policies, but it worked fine back then.

Rescues and recoveries on Denali do get a bit pricey, but here is another twist on the situation. The popularity of Denali, one of the Seven Summits, brings a lot of high spending alpinists to Alaska, who pump a significant amount of cash into the local economy, enabling those pesky taxes

Yes, that's it! Just a mechanism to reimburse the costs. So that when the services we taxpayers provide does get used, it gets paid for. Make it like driving a car, where most states require you to have insurance because of the inherent risks and costs involved.

Is that really asking too much?

The point is that this gentleman with the frost-bitten feet was as wimpy as they come, and also hadn't paid attention during his mandatory briefing before starting up The Hill. His use of "rescue insurance" significantly degraded his self reliance. He still scarfed up tax dollars. We spent at least an hour dealing with him.....

At first glance the European model of buying rescue insurance seems atttractive. However I'm not convinced it would be all that workable in the US. (Note that I only have very limited experience in Europe, so any of our members from that part of the world feel free to correct me if I've got any of the following wrong.)

As I understand it the European system is focused on mountaineers, and climbing is highly concentrated in the Alps. Mountain rescue is handled by a small number of national rescue services. These folks operate out of a small number of centrally located bases, and are paid, full time professionals. They have highly trained rescuers, helicopters, physicians, dogs, etc available 24/7. Climbers are billed for rescues, so climbers buy insurance ahead of time from their national alpine clubs. Outside of the Alps Western Europe doesn't have, for the most part, that many large wilderness areas where people recreate. All this paid and insured rescue activity happens in the Alps.

In North America, on the other hand, climbing areas are much more dispersed. There are climbing areas in many states, and in almost every region of the country. Because our areas are so dispersed, having a full time paid rescue staff would be very inefficient and costly. Unlike Europe we also have large areas of wild and semi-wild land, particularly in the western states. That wild land is administered by a wide range of entities (national parks, national forests, county, state, tribal, private etc). We have large numbers of people doing all sorts of activities in the out of doors on those lands. Much of it is recreation, but a lot of people are out there for work. Most of these people are doing things that are not usually all that risky. Yet from time to time these folks become subjects for SAR. Sometimes from doing dumb things, but often from shear bad luck.

For example, take a look at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management publication on Search and Rescue: Accumulated Totals for 1997 to 2013. The maps show that these searches and rescue happen all over the state. When looking at the activities of the people rescued (page 37), you will also see that all sorts of people doing pretty ordinary things get rescued. Note that climbers are way down the list. In fact the second highest number are "Motor Vehicles". You might recall that some years back there was a huge search in Oregon for the Kim family, who simply got lost while driving from Portland to the coast. Now the Kim's certainly did some dumb things, but I doubt they thought they were doing anything risky, and they probably would not have bought rescue insurance. (I myself grew up in the Northwest, and I have gotten really lost on some of those logging roads. I was just lucky enough to find my way back before I got stuck.)

In Alaska, just about everyone does something outdoors. Fishing, hunting, berry picking, hiking, XC skiing, snow machining, running on trails, walking their dogs, kids playing in the woods on the edge of town. Just about all of these folks can and sometimes do become subjects for SAR missions. Virtually everyone in Alaska is a potential SAR mission at sometime or another. Maybe even you!

Hence to make a European climber insurance type system work for us, EVERYONE would need to pay for insurance. And that would mean we would need yet another bureacracy to administer that system. Somebody would need to collect the money, mail out the cards, check to see if you paid etc etc etc. I don't think we need more bureaucrats. Since to make it work fairly, nearly everyone (not just climbers) would need to buy into it, why would that be any different than just doing it the way we do it now? Nearly everyone pays taxes in some form or another. Why is making a separate rescue insurance fee more fair? Just to create a new bureacracy? Do we really need the "Alaska State Office of Search and Rescue Insurance Administration" in a big new building in downtown Anchorage? And a similar office and bureacracy in each of the other 49 states?

I think not.

Or just bill those who need it, have a credit/bank card terminal in hand when you find them, I'm sure they cough up the dough real quick.

Without getting too far afield, I am in general in favor of less taxation. With that said, the system that we have, where SAR is available for all and those who really deserve it get billed, seems to work reasonably well by my lights. If we have to err, I would prefer to err on the side of compassion.

Excellent point about the inevitable administrative costs....

Plenty of people get into trouble without consciously assuming any kind of risk. Some years ago a couple was camped in the back country of Navajo National Monument at Keet Seel ruin in a designated and approved, etc.etc., NPS campsite.

During the day, there was spontaneous rock fall from the adjacent high cliff, killing one woman in the party, despite the presence of an experienced nurse (whom I knew personally) in the adjacent campsite. What was she doing wrong? Sometime stuff happens.

Sometimes we even rescued animals - stranded horses or on one occasion, a dog in a mine shaft. Our group chalked it up to training. There is a definite threshold in volunteer SAR. You need enough events to keep the membership active, but not overloaded and burned out. The pet owners were really grateful. For years the largest donation we ever received was from the grateful owners of the dog down the mine shaft