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If they average 80 per year in that area, they could be spending probably 1/4 that many millions a year depending on how may choppers and other sophisticated equipment is used as well as how many men. <<<<<<<<<<

Exactly! And I'm sure those signs are operated remotely by computer. The one on my road was at the entrance to the road, and anyone not familiar with the area would have probably gone down the block to the truck stop/travel center (open 24/7) for alternate directions. I'm not saying we have to pamper motorists by having signs everywhere, but for a road that is misleading on maps and computerized mapping services, it would sure save on SAR ops.

My number was hasty.

Obviously not every SAR is for someone who took the wrong turn in a snow storm.

Plane crashes, people falling out of boats, the kid that wanders away from camp, the older person whose mind is not so good anymore...all are subjects for SAR.

But just two or three massive searches like this one a year amount to big bucks.

I tried to look up the Oregon budget for SAR and the reports I found were too difficult to work through although anyone with the patience could find out about anything he wanted to know.

They have SAR broken down by county, type of event, sex of missing person, on and on and on.

By resident county of lost person.

And by the month of the year.

So you would have to find that county, look at the winter months, look for the type of search and total a zillion numbers. I am not that interested.

However, one number that jumped out at me and I may not have looked carefully enough, but it appears that only 4 or 5% of searches are for out of state people.

So it looks like that those on this thread who have ranted about the dummies that drive up from CA that have no brains about survival and get lost, etc, are not really as much a problem as those savvy survivalists that live in OR.

Really funny, if I read the numbers correctly.