A walk on the wild side? Perils lurk in Shenandoah National Park for the unprepared

Cruising along serene Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park (SNP), it’s easy to forget how quickly the park juts into backcountry wilderness, where innumerable rocky trails lead to breathtaking vistas, cliffs and waterfalls but also expose Sunday tourists and even experienced hikers to perils for which some are ill-prepared, from sprains and fractures to hypothermia and heart attacks.

The park, shaped like a jagged lightning bolt across the Blue Ridge Mountains, draws nearly 1.6 million visitors a year. The stream of visitors to the park swelled more than 25% to 141,812 in the first three months of this year, customarily a slow period.

Most are day-trippers who take pictures at the dramatic overlooks, stop for a picnic, hike to a waterfall, then drive back home. Others camp out or stay in the park’s lodges at Skyland and Big Meadows and cabins at Lewis Mountain and along the Shenandoah River. Some are midway through their months-long, 2,200 hike along the Appalachian Trail between Georgia and Maine.

When someone makes that 911 call for help—if they can find cell service atop a mountain or at the bottom of gorges—they are relying on what amounts to a public-private partnership of park rangers, state and local emergency responders, and a phalanx of professionals and volunteers from nearby local fire departments and rescue squads such as the Old Rag Mountain Stewards and the Shenandoah Mountain Rescue Group.

Paramedic Peter Nichols, 22, belongs to both groups and spends several weekends a year prepositioned with rescue gear out along the trails that wind four-plus miles up to Old Rag’s rugged summit. “I kind of use the outdoors as escape from work,” said Nichols of Fairfax, whose day job is with a medical transport company.

On a recent cloudy morning, Nichols was lowered by ropes off steep Franklin Cliffs to maneuver a litter bearing a 150-pound dummy down its face, with nearly a score of rangers and volunteers gingerly pulling or relaxing ropes attached to a tree and a boulder and yelling “SLOW!” and “STOP!” intermittently. Several of the rangers recently returned from a week of intensive training in Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio.

They practice frequently to prepare for the inevitable calls for help from hikers who make a wrong step atop a cliff or waterfall or simply get lost in backcountry wilderness.

Nichols dangled casually from the cliff overlooking a hollow and the valley town of Stanley. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s like if you watch a scary movie over and over and over again, it’s not that bad.” Later, a young ranger took a turn wrestling the stretcher down and back up the cliff.

There was no steward, ranger or anyone else around when college student Jared Goodson tumbled 170 feet off a ledge in a remote part of Old Rag in December 2022, dislocating an ankle and sustaining other injuries. He yelled for help for 30 minutes, but no one heard him.

In excruciating pain, “I summoned every ounce of strength and managed to drag myself back up the treacherous cliff edge,” he later posted on Instagram. He called 911 on his Apple Watch, but it still took 2½ hours before three hikers reached him and hours more before park rangers and volunteers—20 in all—were able to trundle him down the mountain to an ambulance.

“It typically takes four to six people on the edge of that litter to just wheel them up or down the trail,” said Supervisory Ranger Kevin Moses, who was leading the training off Franklin Cliffs. “It’s grueling work. While there’s only four to six people on the litter at any moment, we usually want 12 to 18 (rescuers) because they need a break.”

Marco Yurachek, a professional wilderness guide, also was in a pivotal position during the Franklin Cliffs’ training. 

Yurachek got involved in volunteering after he himself was critically injured in a 2010 fall in the George Washington National Forest along the West Virginia-Virginia state line. His own protracted rescue took hours longer than it should have. 

“That’s really what got me into (assisting) the training at Shenandoah,” said Yurachek, who lives in the Richmond area and has a second home in Alaska.

Importance of volunteers

Volunteers are crucial because the NPS has struggled for years under budget constraints and staff cuts. 

Rangers at Shenandoah make the callout for search and rescue volunteers several dozen times a year, including 16 callouts already in 2024. Some are for hikers missing off trails and others with medical emergencies. Fatalities in Shenandoah are rare. But some 911 calls come from tourists who hiked down a long trail to view a waterfall and underestimated the difficulty of getting back up.

Chief Ranger Cynthia Sirk-Fear leads a staff of 17 law enforcement rangers who patrol the park, buttressed by rangers hired seasonally, and  two unarmed Preventive Search and Rescue Rangers—PSARs—who offer friendly advice and try to spot people who might get themselves into a predicament.

“We start a conversation like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ and suggest they bring a rain jacket if it’s going to rain and they’re wearing cotton shorts and a T-shirt,” said PSAR Ranger Avery Shirvani. “Sometimes I’ll joke, ‘I don’t want to see you later when I have to come and rescue you.’ That actually does jolt them back.”

Almost 80,000 of the park’s roughly 200,000 acres are designated wilderness, which “not a lot of people on the East Coast think about,” said Sirk-Fear, a 25-year NPS veteran. “Since it’s close to D.C., people think, ‘We’re just going to drive down Skyline and maybe take a quick hike and not go far.’ They underestimate how long it can take for someone to rescue you if you get in trouble.”

“If you call 911 in town, an ambulance is going to be there pretty quickly,” said Moses, who was leading the training.

“Here, this is the ambulance,” he said, tapping his well-worn, dusty boots. “We call these LPCs: leather personnel carriers.”

While most persons reported missing turn up, inevitably some do not, whether by mishap or the person’s volition. Nichols took part in a prolonged search in May 2023 for a 21-year-old George Mason University student with reported mental health issues. Attention turned to Shenandoah almost two weeks after he was last seen. His car was found in a parking lot near Skyline Drive’s highest point, but the body was not recovered until five days later.

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When that search came to an end, the long list of volunteers the NPS thanked included both the Old Rag Stewards and Shenandoah Mountain Rescue Group as well as Piedmont SAR, Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group, Virginia Rescue Dog Association, Christian Ministries SAR, SAR Tracking Institute, Blacksburg Volunteer Rescue Squad, Blue and Grey Rescue Dogs and TrotSAR Mounted SAR.

According to an analysis by Backpacker magazine, 12% of the approximately 240 deaths each year in the 428 sites managed by the National Park Service (NPS) are suicides, about the same as those who die from heart attacks and other medical issues. 

Calls for rescue

Sirk-Fear said most calls for rescue come from the park’s central district, between the Thornton Gap Entrance Station off Route 211 between Luray and Sperryville and the Swift Run Gap entrance off Route 33, a 35-mile stretch that includes Old Rag and rugged White Oak Canyon. Fewer calls come from the north end of the park that starts in Front Royal or the south end where Skyline Drive connects with the Blue Ridge Parkway.

When someone is reported missing, a pair of rangers will carry out what they call a hasty search near where that person was last seen or headed. If that turns up nothing, the rangers coordinate a much larger “grid” search with the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and enlist its regular volunteers.

It discourages untrained individuals from showing up and seeking to join in the coordinated search.

“You don’t have to be associated with a formal group, but there is paperwork [volunteers] have to fill out,” said Sirk-Fear. “We have very specific procedures for how we  search and it’s something that you need to have training in. We don’t know their physical capabilities.”

The rangers will sometimes rescue someone on horseback, getting a horse from the park’s riding concessionaire, and on rare occasions by a U.S. Park Police helicopter that flies in from Anacostia Park in Washington.

That “is definitely less labor intensive, but any time you launch a helicopter, you’re injecting a hazardous situation into the operation,” said Moses, a 30-year NPS veteran and former Army Ranger in the 82nd Airborne Division.

A week earlier, a 49-year-old woman who’d been hunting mushrooms off trail, spent a night lost in the woods, but emerged unscathed at daylight as a large search party was gathering. She’d spent the chilly, early spring night sleeping under leaves.

Moses urges hikers not to  rely on their cellphones for a light or in place of a good, waterproof map for navigation. “We have an almost epidemic problem of overreliance on the cellphone,”  he said. “I want to be clear: take your cellphone hiking. It’s a tool. But don’t bring only it and nothing else.”

Moses, whose wife Melissa is also a ranger, said that most of the  injuries aren’t people falling off cliffs. “Most just stumble on our rocky trails,” he said. “We get a lot of twisted ankles, sprained knees and lower leg injuries.”

Lost hikers aren’t billed for the cost of their rescue, but rangers can issue citations for disorderly conduct if the hikers made a series of poor, risky decisions that got them into peril.

Rangers also field another kind of call.

“We get a lot of calls from visitors who’ve gotten to the bottom and say, ‘Well, I can’t get back up to the top. I need someone to come and rescue me,’” said Sirk-Fear, the chief ranger. “That is not something we typically will do. We say, ‘We know, it’s going to take a while and it’s going to be hard—but you just need to start hiking out.’”

Christopher Connell is a reporter for Foothills Forum, a nonprofit organization that supports local news in Rappahannock County.

10 essentials for hikers

The National Park Service recommends hikers carry these 10 essential first aid and emergency items in the event of minor injuries, sudden weather changes or unexpected delays. 

1 NAVIGATION | Map, compass, and GPS system 

2 SUN PROTECTION | Sunglasses, sunscreen, and hat

3 INSULATION | Jacket, hat, gloves, rain shell, and thermal underwear

4 ILLUMINATION | Flashlight, lanterns, and headlamp

5 FIRST-AID SUPPLIES | First Aid Kit

6 FIRE | Matches, lighter and fire starters

7 REPAIR KIT AND TOOLS | Duct tape, knife, screwdriver, and scissors

8 NUTRITION | Food

9 HYDRATION | Water and water treatment supplies

10 EMERGENCY SHELTER | Tent, space blanket, tarp, and bivy sack or blanket

Source: National Park Service

Foothills Forum is an independent, community-supported nonprofit tackling the need for in-depth research and reporting on Rappahannock County issues.

The group has an agreement with Rappahannock Media, owner of the Rappahannock News, to present this series and other award-winning reporting projects. More at foothillsforum.org.