Skamania County is on pace to set a new record for search and rescues this year. The 67 rescues in 2025, as of earlier this month, already tie the previous record.
The costly rescues come as the county’s fiscal struggles continue because of gaps left by lost timber revenues and promised federal dollars that have not materialized.
Sheriff Summer Scheyer has drafted an ordinance that would institute fines for people deemed to be reckless or negligent who require rescue.
Scheyer said she knows accidents happen and will always rescue anyone who needs it. But she’s frustrated seeing scarce resources sunk into situations where people attempted dangerous things with little preparation, she said. She hopes the potential ordinance will claw back some of the costs.
“Reckless is ‘you did know,’ and negligent is ‘you should have known,’ ” she said.
Deadly pattern
Winter had always been Skamania County’s respite from hikers, swimmers, fishers and other recreationists. But by the end of February this year, Scheyer had started to notice something had changed.
“I’m a facts-not-feelings kind of gal, and so I started scanning our numbers,” she said.
She found that by the end of March, there had already been 13 rescues — a 550% increase over the previous year.
And as 2025 continued, the numbers didn’t get better.
“April was a 200% increase,” she said. “May — 400% increase. June — 550% increase. July — 200% increase. August was a 33% increase.”
Even into the fall, September saw two rescues. October has seen three so far.
That has pushed the year to 67 rescues — a tie with the previous record, reached in 2021 and 2022 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic outdoor recreation boom.
But there’s still more than two months left, including the area’s mushroom picking season.
So far, Scheyer said, there have been at least three deaths this year.
More with less
All but one of those 67 rescues have been of people from outside of the county, she said. Previous years were about the same.
“I started here in 2002, and it seems as if we just don’t get a reprieve anymore,” she said. “People are just not hanging up their hiking boots once the fall or the winter hits.”
While the number of tourists has consistently risen, the money the county has to save them has fallen, said Asa Leckie, the chair of the county’s board of commissioners.
“A lot of the mechanisms to provide revenue to the county are completely broken,” he said. “And as the search and rescues increase, it’s just going to cost us more.”
Nearly 80 percent of the county’s land is owned by the federal government, and another 10 percent is state-owned forest. That means, Leckie said, even if they raise property taxes 1 percent, it only generates an extra $26,000 in revenue.
Historically, the county has depended on logging for revenue. But increasingly large patches of the county’s 1 million plus acres are unable to be logged because of environmental protections.
Skamania — which Leckie said has a $16 million yearly budget nowadays — has come to depend on a federal program that compensates counties that can no longer log land now held by the federal government. It’s known as the Secure Rural Schools program.
But that promised money hasn’t come in two years, Leckie said. That’s left Skamania County without about $3 million it has come to rely on in logging’s absence, Scheyer said.
That loss has led to school closures, as well as three layoffs at the sheriff’s office, Scheyer and Leckie said.
It has also left the sheriff’s office with even less money to run search and rescue operations.
Last year, Scheyer asked for about $50,000 to $55,000 to pay for the overtime wages that deputies rack up while running the operations on federal land, where about 70 percent of their rescues are conducted.
Pushed to the limits
“My fear is that when we’re calling for search and rescue coordinators, that nobody answers the phone at some point,” Scheyer said. “What do we do?”
It’s not just the sheriff’s office that’s being pushed to the limit.
“Our EMS district manager is awesome at juggling this,” Leckie said. “But at the same time, it’s going to come to a head.”
When ambulances and other emergency responders are called to the far reaches of the county for rescues, that leaves county residents in a bind, losing out on services they fund to people just passing through.
The ever-increasing number of rescues also puts pressure on the 39-member volunteer Skamania County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue Team.
Volunteer Serge Newberry said he recently took a call at 12:30 a.m.
“I think I was up 32 hours on that mission,” said Newberry, a recently retired nursing home operator from La Center.
The rescue — which was successful — is not unusual for the Search and Rescue team. Lately, Newberry has been going out on three to four rescues a month with the team.
Volunteers like him work in shifts, each relieving the last. The group is always looking for more donations and volunteers, Newberry said. The team is aiming for 50 members and is looking for volunteers with drone skills in particular.
“On one hand, it’s exciting that a lot of people are enjoying the outdoors,” Newberry said. “On the other hand, it’s concerning because there’s a lot of people who are just not prepared — a lot of the stories that we hear are the same.”
Call no matter what
Even with all the volunteer labor, Scheyer said she wonders if tourism is costing the county more than it generates. But she would always prefer people call 911 if they need help.
“It’s kind of a catch-22,” she said. “I sit here and complain about it, but at the same time, we don’t want human lives to be lost.”
She and Newberry also begged recreationists to bring the 10 essentials with them: navigation, headlamp, sun protection, first aid, knife, fire starter, shelter, extra food, extra water and extra clothes.
But in the meantime, the county will continue to save people without hesitation, judgment or — at least for now — fines.
