The woman’s call came around 9:45 on a Friday night.
Her son, a 33-year-old New York City man, had gone hiking in the Adirondack Mountains that March morning. He sent her a text message from the top of Mount Marcy at 12:45 p.m. but had not checked in since. Now, with up to 19 inches of snow forecast overnight and into the morning, she was worried. She called for help.
Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger for 25 years, was at home when a dispatcher reached her. Many hikers who are late to return are not lost or in danger. The same woman had called three weeks earlier because her son was late, and it turned out he was fine.
But this time he was not, and the call set off a search in treacherous terrain, a life-or-death mission that hinged on footprints rapidly vanishing in the steady-falling snow.
Cellphones with GPS service have lowered the number of people who truly get lost in the woods. Even when hikers do not know where they are, cell tower pings can pinpoint their phones. On the flip side, the number of frivolous emergency calls has increased. Ranger Peter Evans said one man called last summer seeking water. He was specific: two bottles of Fiji.
“Sir,” Ranger Evans recalled saying. “We’re the rangers, not DoorDash.”
There were no calls on this night, and no helpful pings. The lost hiker’s phone was old and had little battery life, so he mostly kept it turned off.
He had started out at around 8 a.m., following an 18-mile loop that would take him to the summits of Mount Marcy, Mount Skylight and Gray Peak on a quest to become a 46er, someone who has climbed to the top of every Adirondack High Peak.
But coming down from Mount Marcy, he decided he could not see his plan through and made a turn. Soon, though, he lost the trail and began bushwhacking downhill along a stream bed. That took him back to the trail, but he quickly lost it again, this time for good. His clothes were adequate for the season, and he had an emergency blanket. But he had on trail shoes, not boots, and he had not packed dry clothes.
He came to a brook and followed that uphill. The ice was thin, and he broke through up to his waist more than once. There were spots where he might have drowned. He tried walking along the side of the brook, but the banks were steep and he kept tumbling down.
At around 7 p.m., he found a hole between a rock and a tree trunk with no snow inside. He dug the ground out some more and stopped there. While he huddled against the freezing night, his mother made her call.
After being contacted by the dispatcher, Ranger Mecus began to assemble her gear: snowshoes; a medical kit; a radio and battery; warming blankets; food and a stove to melt snow into water; dry clothes for her and the hiker. Thirty pounds in a pack. Heavy but essential.
By 10:45 p.m., she had found the man’s car near the trailhead and mapped out a plan: Two rangers would follow the trail the man had taken up Mount Marcy. Ranger Mecus would head in another way, on his most likely route out.
It was about 1 a.m. when she began the six-mile hike to the Lake Colden outpost, a solar-powered ranger station that is a base for backcountry rescues. She met up there with Chrissy Raudonis, the caretaker, who had gotten her own gear together.
As part of her job, Ms. Raudonis had skied out about 36 hours earlier in the direction she and Ranger Mecus were now going and had not seen any tracks. So when the two came upon footprints near a fork in the trail, they had a good idea whose they were.
They could see that the man had veered into what Ranger Mecus called “a place where no one ever goes.” Snow was filling the tracks quickly. Three or four hours more, and the footprints might have been gone.
By now, some 25 searchers were scouring the area.
Ranger Mecus and Ms. Raudonis followed the footprints to the brook and then went uphill as he had, continuing for about a mile and a half. It took them three and a half hours, crawling at times. They called out the man’s name as they went.
Suddenly, they heard a voice calling back from about 100 yards away. It was 10:30 Saturday morning.
The man was standing and alert, but his clothes were frozen to his body, and his shoes were frozen to his feet. He had hypothermia and frostbite. His body had all but shut down.
Getting to the nearest trail required traversing deep snow. Ranger Mecus made a trench with her snowshoes, walking 100 yards ahead at a time and back again to tamp down the path.
They made their way to another ranger outpost three miles away. The man, whose name state officials did not release, was taken to a hospital in Saranac Lake and then to a Level 1 trauma center in Burlington, Vt. He left after a couple of days.
New York state rangers perform hundreds of search-and-rescue operations a year. Only a fraction are considered life or death.
“It’s hard to say with certainty I saved somebody’s life today,” Ranger Mecus said. “It’s hard to say if that person would not have gotten out on their own.”
Then she added: “This person would not have.”
