Anchorage Daily News

A man who gave his name as Dave Roberts went on a walkabout in the Brooks Range in September. He spent two months alone in the cold and ever-increasing darkness far north of nowhere before finally turning on an emergency beacon to summon rescuers.

For this, Roberts, was broadly chastised both here and in Australia, the country he claimed as his homeland.

"Alaskans angry at 'stupid' Aussie" headlined the Dec. 6 issue of "The Australian," which went on to report the taxpayer-funded rescue cost $93,000.

The Alaska Air National Guard, which performed that rescue, ended up in the unusual position of defending the action while Roberts himself tried to explain he wasn't some totally unprepared dimwit. He did, it should be noted, spend two months alone in the winter wilderness in a tent. How many Alaskans of today could spend two months alone out there even if they had a cabin?

For all we like to trash ill-fated tourists who get into trouble in the Bush or the Alaska Range mountains, Alaskans aren't any better. They might even be worse.

Not long after Roberts' rescue made front-page news, Alaska State Trooper Shayne Calt, 28, and former trooper Kevin Baker, 27, headed south from Willow on a Christmas Eve snowmobile ride, and they got lost.

It happens. The Susitna drainage is a maze of unmarked snowmobile trails in winter. If you haven't been lost out there at some point, you just haven't ridden enough.

I got lost once, and then ran out of oil. A friend along at the time called me an idiot, got out his sleeping pad and bag, and went to sleep for the night along the trail. I took off on a night-long hike to get oil and return.

This is not, however, what Calt and Baker did.

According to Alaska State Trooper spokeswoman Beth Ipsen, the two called troopers at 12:58 a.m. Christmas morning to report they were lost and low on gas near the Susitna River, south of the Iditarod Trail.

This would put them not far west of Flathorn Lake, where live people would lend gas to someone in this predicament. Calt and Baker might have been able to go there and borrow fuel, and they certainly could have gotten a nice fire going, set up camp along the trail, and waited for Christmas Day when there would be sure to be riders on the trails from whom they could likely bum fuel.

But that isn't what Calt and Baker did.

According to Ipsen, Calt reported they were cold, in below-zero temperatures and feared losing cell phone reception. Actually, what Ipsen told a Daily News reporter was that the men were cold and feared getting lost further, but you can't get more lost than lost. Losing communications, on the other hand, is a legitimate fear.

That's why if you have communications and know your coordinates, you call a friend to report them, get a fire going so you can stay warm through the night, settle in and await for the arrival of more gasoline. Calt and Baker instead gave troopers the GPS coordinates for their location, said they were going to start digging a snow cave, (why I have no idea) and asked for a rescue.

It came a couple hours later in the form of a trooper helicopter. The two men were picked up around 3:30 a.m., said Ipsen, who then went on to add this comment about this rescue and another farther north on Christmas day:

"The main thing is ... (they) called before things got really bad. Cut your losses early and call for help before things get really dangerous. In Alaska, even our backyard can be deadly."

No mention was made of what the Calt rescue cost, unlike with Roberts, though cost is a far more relevant issue for the Troopers than the National Guard. The latter, which exists primarily to rescue pilots downed behind enemy lines, uses its Alaska rescue work as training. If the crews from the 210th, 211th and 212th rescue squadrons are in state -- instead of standing watch in Afghanistan, Iraq or some other troubled corner of the world -- they're either training by retrieving real, live goofs like Roberts or chasing after dummies used to simulate downed pilots.

I know some of the pararescuemen involved in these operations, and I can tell you they'd prefer to spend government money, destined to be spent anyway, looking for people in need great or small. Real search and rescue, SAR as it is commonly called, is more stimulating than looking for inanimate objects.

The troopers, unfortunately, are not the air guard. There are no trooper pararescue specialists in need of training. There are, in fact, no trooper pararescue specialists. Tthe troopers have one lieutenant assigned to oversee SAR, and access to state resources (helicopters, troopers) which can be called off regular public-safety assignments to assist with search and rescue.

The Troopers had a paltry $390,000 to spend on SAR operations statewide this fiscal year. The governor has proposed cutting that in the next fiscal year.

Think about this. Depending on what figure you believe for the cost of rescuing Roberts -- reports have ranged form $60,000 to $90,000 -- one such rescue could gobble up 15 to nearly 25 percent of the state's annual SAR budget. It should be obvious from this that troopers simply can't afford to be involved in a lot of unnecessary SAR operations.

All of which has to make any responsible citizen wonder if the agency really wants to abandon its long-standing message of "Be Prepared" in favor of some sort of new message about how people should "Cut your losses and call for help" early.

Granted, these two messages aren't directly contradictory, but the rescue of Calt and Baker sure doesn't look good against this backdrop.

Then again, maybe there's more to this than has been revealed. I confess I don't know. I wasn't there, and I haven't been able connect with the state's SAR coordinator to find out if there is more to this story. Maybe the men were facing some threat of which we are all unaware, although Ipsen did report they had matches and had been trained in winter, wilderness survival.

If that is true, it would certainly appear the duo could have saved some of those precious state SAR dollars by camping out for the night and getting someone to bring them fuel by snowgo in the morning, a cheap delivery compared to the cost of firing up a helicopter.

Then again, maybe I'm just some sort of dinosaur. I can remember when it was embarrassing to get rescued. Alaskans were expected to be able to take care of themselves out there. Sometimes now, it seems like it's only the foreigners and the tourists we expect to be able to take care of themselves in the backcountry these days, and lord knows we don't want anyone to be embarrassed.

I know some friends and acquaintances in the SAR community are going to again take me to task for even hinting at the idea rescue should be embarrassing. There are some who earnestly believe that embarrassment is such a horrible thing that it might discourage people from calling for help when they really need it.

I don't buy it. I've never encountered any survivor of a real life-or-death situation who was thinking about anything other than how to survive.

But let's grant for a minute that the argument about embarrassment is valid. Then there are some key questions about SAR that we all must face:

If the new standard for safe travel in the Bush is to stress speedy reliance on a GPS and a telephone -- cell or satellite -- instead of preparation, self-sufficiency and good survival skills, what happens when the weather makes rescue impossible? What happens when limited SAR resources are fully engaged retrieving the merely uncomfortable, while those truly in danger need help? What happens when batteries go dead, as they always seem to do at the worst possible times?

And lastly, who pays the cost as increasing numbers of people decide they don't really need to take care of themselves because they can always call on the government for help here in Alaska, the most socialist of conservative states?

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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