'Dead Men Walking': search and rescue in US national parks

A 2009 study in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine that analysed Park Service search-and-rescue records, showing thousands of operations a year concentrated in a few parks.

2009 CE · 38.90, -77.05 · status: official

The account

Travis and Tracey Heggie analysed Park Service annual reports and found that in 2005 there were 2,430 search-and-rescue operations, half of them in just five park units. Later Park Service figures run from roughly 2,300 to over 4,000 incidents a year depending on the definition, with well over a hundred deaths a year. These numbers give the base rate missing from the Missing 411 books: with so many searches, a small share that end badly or never end will always produce cases that look strange when collected together.

Connections in the atlas

• No central list of the missing in US national parks
• Kyle Polich's data analysis of Missing 411
• Robert Koester, 'Lost Person Behavior'
• 'Missing 411' and Yosemite

Sources

1. PubMed: Dead men walking: search and rescue in US National Parks