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SAR in our national parks

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SAR in our national parks
January 08, 2022 07:09AM
Which parks get SAR calls the most often? Want to guess? We guessed three of the top five...but not the other two:

So which parks have called on SAR teams the most over the past two years?

Once you're done guessing, here is a link: https://www.backpackthesierra.com/post/ ... rous-parks

Or a link to a more in-depth look on Outforia: https://outforia.com/search-and-rescue-hotspots/



Check our our website: http://www.backpackthesierra.com/
Or just read a good mystery novel set in the Sierra; https://www.amazon.com/Danger-Falling-Rocks-Paul-Wagner/dp/0984884963
Re: SAR in our national parks
January 08, 2022 02:31PM
The first stat they present - parks with largest number of SAR incidents - is sort of interesting, but they provide no analysis or context whatsoever. Your blog comment about Mt. Whitney being in SEKI accounting for the apparently high number of incidents there is more than they provide.

I'm curious, for example, in the number of incidents per number of visitors, but they don't present statistics for that - that would take getting a different set of data and crunching some numbers. It's not that that information isn't available at all: see https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm. For all the numbers presented by outforia, they don't really discuss much of anything, but seem to have taken number straight from NPS and republished them on their site: regarding their "methods", they have this (pathetic) statement: "We submitted a freedom of information request to the National Parks Authority asking for information relating to the number of search and rescue incidents between 2018-20 across all national parks in the USA." Clearly the writers at outforia have never written an article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Interestingly, the "number of visitors" NPS page linked to above provides numbers for 2020 (I assume 2021 will become available in a few months; the NPS page listed above was last update February 25, 2021), and Yosemite doesn't even make the top 10 for national parks, presumably b/c of visitation restrictions imposed in 2020 in response to the Wuhan virus. That NPS page includes a listing of "recreation visits per year", and while they don't define what constitutes a "recreation visit" or say if that's limited to parks designated as "national parks" or all parks administered by the NPS (I assume the latter), the numbers show a generally upward trend through 2019 (though with some minor dips, e.g. in 2013 and 2018, but there may be reasons for those), but then a huge drop from 2019 to 2020: from 327,516,619 to 237,064,332.
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