An hour after fielding the call last Saturday, the third of its kind in less than a month, Lieutenant Todd Bogardus stood at the edge of a steep trail, barking orders to gathering officers and volunteers in a race to save yet another hiker trapped in the White Mountains.
With winds howling at over 60kph, the sun slipping over the horizon and temperatures plummeting, the leader of the state's rescue team traced the GPS signal from the victim's cellphone. He radioed the coordinates to the National Guard crew hovering nearby in a Black Hawk helicopter, which soon afterward spotted the hiker's headlamp in the high, fog-shrouded snowdrifts of the Pemigewasset Wilderness.
From 45m above, the crew in the helicopter lowered a cable carrying a crewman, who snatched up Benjamin Davis, 28, a Suffolk Law School student suffering frostbite. If it weren't for the rescue, he probably would have died.
"I would say he was negligent," said Bogardus, coordinator of the search and rescue team for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, which oversees rescue efforts in the White Mountains.
"His leather boots were inadequate for the hike, and he didn't follow the weather reports. Had he followed the weather, he wouldn't have put so many people in danger."
Since the beginning of the year, Bogardus' team has launched 11 missions to rescue lost, missing, or injured people, two of whom died and at least another four of whom required medical attention after losing their way in the White Mountains.
Such missions, which state officials say are becoming more frequent and more expensive, have raised questions about the responsibilities of hikers who venture into the wilderness at the expense of public agencies. They have also sparked an effort by New Hampshire lawmakers to pass new legislation that would require more lost hikers to repay the state for rescuing them.
From 2004 to the end of last year, the state spent more than US$1 million and devoted about 14,900 hours to rescue 725 people, according to the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Of those victims, 28 percent were rescued last year.
Last fiscal year, the department spent more than US$257,000 on rescue operations and for the first time ended the year with a deficit in its search and rescue account.
State officials and local mountaineers in part blame a growing class of novice adventurers, many of whom gain false confidence from new GPS devices, cellphones and flashy gear from proliferating outdoor stores such as REI and Eastern Mountain Sports.
In recent years, Brad White, the director of the International Mountain Climbing School in North Conway, has received more and more calls from people in the mountains asking for help.
"People call and say, 'I think I'm lost,'" he said. "They have a GPS system, but they don't know how to use it to figure out the coordinates. Sometimes, when we send the calls to Fish and Game, they say they've figured out they're still on the trail. There are lots of calls these days from people who just want someone to come in and get them, but it just doesn't happen like that."
He and others who have helped rescue lost hikers tell stories of people venturing deep into the mountains without compasses or maps. They rely on GPS devices and cellphones, but then the batteries die. Last Monday, two Virginia men caught in a torrential rainstorm and 2m-deep snow got lost when they followed their GPS the wrong way. It took rescuers two days to find Alex Obert, 30, and Steven McCay, 29, of Arlington, Virginia, who were on a 30km trek across the Presidential Range in the White Mountains. As the men tried to make their way out of the Dry River Wilderness on the south side of Mount Washington, a helicopter crew found their tracks in the snow.
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