Do you have to pay for mountain rescue? If you’re injured, sick or lost on a mountain and can’t get down by yourself, this question should be the furthest thing from your mind, and yet there are countless cases of people delaying and even evading rescue for fear of receiving an astronomical bill in return.
There’s the story of a climber on Mount Baker who descended 3,000ft on a fractured ankle before submitting to rescuers. The lost trail runner in Tucson who hid from his rescuers overnight to avoid a bill. A woman who delayed in calling mountain rescue for hours while she searched for her missing husband at high altitude on the Colorado 14er Mount Evans in increasingly deteriorating conditions. And a paraglider who had crashed into a mountain and tried to slide down scree slopes with what would turn out to be permanent spinal injuries rather than have a team stretcher him out.
