03/08/2026
ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN NEWS | INVESTIGATIVE REPORT
LOST IN PLAIN SIGHT
National Search and Rescue Is in Crisis. New York Shows Why It Doesn't Have to Be
Adirondack Mountain News routinely reports on wildland search and rescue operations in New York State and around the region. Covering New York State alone doesn't tell the whole story. New York's model is actually a rare exception in a system that, across most of the country, is failing.
Across the United States, the people charged with finding those who get lost in the wilderness are being asked to do more with less. Search and rescue calls in national parks more than tripled between 2015 and 2021. Outdoor recreation participation has surged to record levels, with 7.7 million Americans trying a new outdoor activity for the first time in 2023 alone. And yet the ranger force responsible for responding to emergencies in those parks has spent years contracting, reaching its lowest staffing level this century even before the mass federal layoffs that began in early 2025.
The collision of those trends, more people, less experience, fewer responders, is producing a rising number of fatalities and serious incidents, and a policy conversation that rarely reaches the scale the problem demands. But understanding that crisis requires understanding what search and rescue actually is in this country, and why the answer differs dramatically depending on which side of a jurisdictional line you happen to get lost on.
In the Adirondack High Peaks, when a hiker fails to return from Wright or Algonquin, a New York State DEC Forest Ranger takes command. That ranger is a sworn police officer, a Wilderness First Responder, trained in technical rope rescue, swift water, and incident command. He or she lives in the assigned district, knows the terrain the way most people know their own neighborhoods, and is backed by a statewide force with a clear chain of authority and a statutory mandate. The system is far from perfect. There are never enough rangers for the scale of the territory they cover. But the structural framework is coherent, well-defined, and built for exactly this work.
In most of the country, that is not the model. The National Park Service operates a patchwork system in which a given ranger may or may not have specialized rescue training, where the ratio of law enforcement staff to rescue demand has collapsed over the past two decades, and where the word 'ranger' describes an enormous range of professional capabilities and job duties, from interpretation and education to full technical extraction. The gap between what the NPS asks of its personnel and what it has resourced that personnel to do has never been wider.
The Numbers Behind the Surge
From 1992 to 2007, the National Park Service documented 65,439 SAR incidents involving 78,488 individuals, an average of 11.2 incidents per day. (Heggie and Amundson, Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, 2009.) The NPS recorded at least 3,371 search and rescue incidents in 2021, more than triple the 1,103 recorded in 2015. (PEER, FOIA-extracted NPS data, 2024.) That increase coincides with the COVID-era outdoor recreation boom, which sent millions of first-time and returning hikers onto trails they had never visited before, often with inadequate gear, no navigation skills, and a level of confidence calibrated to Instagram rather than to topographic maps.
National park visitation reached a record 331.9 million visits in 2024, though the Trump administration declined to issue a public announcement about the figure. (NPS data; National Parks Traveler, March 2025.) That record number of visitors is being managed by a park service that lost nearly half (48%) of its law enforcement positions between 2010 and 2023, with a 27% reduction occurring just since 2021. Seasonal ranger positions have essentially been eliminated: 43 seasonal law enforcement slots remained in 2023, compared to 323 in 2021 and 825 in 2010. (PEER, August 2024.)
What Is Driving the Surge
Trail use increased 79% between March and July 2020. (Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.) Penn State research found that 20% of Americans began regularly participating in outdoor recreation during COVID-19. By 2023, 175.8 million Americans, 57.3% of the population aged six and older, participated in some form of outdoor recreation, a record, growing 4.1% in that year alone. (Outdoor Foundation / Outdoor Industry Association, 2024.)
The problem is not simply that more people are outdoors. The problem is the composition of who those people are. A significant share of the COVID-era cohort arrived in parks and wilderness areas without the foundational skills that previous generations of outdoor recreationists had developed over years: navigation by map and compass, layering for weather, understanding turnaround times, wilderness first aid basics, or even simple terrain assessment. Rangers at parks across the country have described receiving distress calls from visitors who did not know how to read a map, who underestimated descent time after a sunset hike, or who called for helicopter rescue after a blister. Each of those calls, regardless of how it resolves, consumes the same finite pool of qualified personnel.
Technology has sharpened the contradiction. The satellite communicator, a genuinely valuable tool in genuine emergencies, has also become a crutch that substitutes for preparation. Visitors who might once have solved a minor problem themselves now reach immediately for a device, and every call, however minor, draws from the same finite pool of responders.
Climate instability compounds all of it. More unpredictable weather windows, earlier and more dramatic afternoon thunderstorm development at elevation, reduced snowpack affecting summer water sources and route conditions, and longer shoulder seasons that draw inexperienced visitors into technical terrain during conditions for which they are not prepared: all of these factors are increasing the frequency of rescue-triggering events independent of the skill level of any individual hiker.
The National Park Service Model: A Jurisdictional Patchwork
The National Park Service does not operate a single, unified search and rescue program. Individual parks manage their own SAR capacity, draw on their own training pipelines, and coordinate with a shifting combination of county sheriffs, volunteer SAR teams, local fire departments, state agencies, and, where they still exist, specialized NPS ranger units. The quality and capacity of that system varies enormously from park to park.
The NPS has all but abandoned the requirement that individual parks conduct Law Enforcement Needs Assessments every three years. The agency has simultaneously declined to respond to FOIA requests on recent SAR incidents, a refusal serious enough to prompt PEER to file a federal lawsuit seeking those records. (PEER, 2024.) The combination of collapsed staffing, abandoned self-assessment, and withheld data raises serious questions about whether the agency can evaluate its own operational needs.
Since January 2025, the NPS lost 24% of its permanent staff. (National Parks Conservation Association, July 2025.) Parks including Joshua Tree and Yosemite reported reduced capacity for search and rescue and basic medical services. Gateway National Recreation Area reduced lifeguarded beach coverage. Zion National Park, which had already experienced more than 200 major SAR incidents in a single recent year, nearly double its typical volume, closed multiple fee stations and reported that emergency response times were slowing.
New York's Different Architecture
New York State does not operate its wilderness search and rescue through a park service model. The DEC Division of Forest Protection, specifically its Forest Rangers, holds statutory authority over SAR operations on state lands under the Environmental Conservation Law. That authority is not shared, delegated, or negotiated in the field. When a rescue is required in the Adirondack or Catskill Forest Preserves, the Forest Ranger is the incident commander, period. Other agencies, state police, county sheriffs, NYSP Aviation, local fire departments, volunteer ground teams, operate in support roles at the Ranger's direction.
The Forest Ranger force is listed at 153 on DEC's main Rangers page; a December 2024 graduation class brought the count to 156. Rangers are sworn police officers with full law enforcement authority across all state laws. Each ranger is assigned a geographic district in which they are required to reside, a structural feature that produces terrain familiarity of a kind no visiting responder can replicate. Rangers complete Wilderness First Responder training, technical rope rescue certification, ice rescue, and swift water rescue as standard qualifications. They operate year-round, in all conditions, across more than five million acres of public land and conservation easements. (NYSDEC.)
In 2023, DEC Forest Rangers conducted 370 search and rescue missions statewide. In 2024, that figure was 362. (NYSDEC press releases.) The state's response to the most complex missions, helicopter insertions, high-angle extractions, multi-agency winter operations, has historically drawn praise from rescue professionals nationally as a model of clear command structure and integrated response.
But the structural differences between the New York model and the NPS model are real and consequential. New York's Forest Rangers juggle wildfire suppression, law enforcement, public education, and resource protection alongside search and rescue. The difference is that their SAR authority is unambiguous, the training baseline is defined, the territorial familiarity is built into the assignment structure, and the chain of command is clear. None of those conditions hold uniformly across the national park system.
But the structural differences between the New York model and the NPS model are real and consequential. New York's Forest Rangers carry multiple responsibilities, but their SAR authority is unambiguous, the training baseline is defined, the territorial familiarity is built into the assignment structure, and the chain of command is clear. None of those conditions hold uniformly across the national park system.
The Question of Accountability
Nineteen states have enacted legislation allowing, in some form, for the recovery of rescue costs from individuals whose recklessness contributed to their own emergency. New Hampshire's system, often cited as the most aggressive, has permitted cost recovery from hikers who ignored posted warnings or engaged in unreasonably dangerous behavior. Proponents argue such programs create a deterrent without discouraging legitimate use; critics contend they discourage people from calling for help until situations become more dangerous.
New York has not adopted a cost-recovery model. The state's position has historically been that the cost of rescue is a public safety expenditure, not a personal financial liability, and that creating financial barriers to calling for help produces worse outcomes than the rescues it might deter.
At the federal level, the vast majority of NPS rescue costs, which averaged $895 per operation from 1992 to 2007, a figure that has grown substantially since, are absorbed by the agency and, ultimately, by federal taxpayers. (Heggie and Amundson, 2009.) With a ranger force half the size it was in 2010, those costs are being absorbed by a system with less capacity to bear them.
What the Data Cannot Yet Capture
The PEER FOIA lawsuit filed in 2024 seeking NPS SAR records, crime reports, and staff attack data was still unresolved as of this writing, a measure of how actively the agency has resisted transparency about its own operational record. The absence of a comprehensive national database of wildland SAR incidents makes rigorous interstate comparison difficult.
What the available data does establish clearly is the direction of the trend: more rescues, higher complexity, longer operational reach into backcountry terrain, conducted by a responding workforce that has been reduced in size, funding, and institutional support at every level of the federal system simultaneously. The outdoor recreation boom that COVID catalyzed has not receded. The number of Americans who entered the wilderness without adequate preparation between 2020 and 2023 is now a permanent addition to the population of people who recreate in wild places, a cohort that will return to those places for years with skills and habits formed in that initial, often unsupported, entry.
The agencies responsible for keeping those people safe have fewer people, fewer resources, and less institutional coherence than at any point in recent memory. The gap between what the system is being asked to do and what it has been resourced to do is not a weather event. It is a policy choice, made incrementally and across administrations, that has now compounded into a structural failure with no near-term corrective in sight.
Filed by John Bulmer
Publisher, Adirondack Mountain News
NYS SAR Crew Boss
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A note on sourcing and methodology: This report draws on federal data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, peer-reviewed research, publicly available agency records, and the author's direct experience as a New York State wilderness search and rescue crew boss and founding team member, and former ground searcher. All statistics are sourced to named institutions and publications. Where data gaps or reporting inconsistencies exist in the public record, they are identified as such in the text. No claims are made beyond what the available evidence supports. Adirondack Mountain News covers wildland search and rescue as a beat, not a feature. That ongoing coverage informs the context and judgment applied here.
