Why didn't you compensate for my stupidity sooner?

Here's something interesting from our neighbors to the north: a guy is suing a volunteer Search and Rescue organization and the police for negligence. He was out skiing with his fiance. They got lost. It took them nine days to be rescued, and the woman died. He's suing them because they didn't start a rescue attempt sooner.

Now, from the earliest article on it, it's extremely hard to see how the SAR organization has any culpability whatsoever:

In B. C., volunteer search-and-rescue crews do not have the authority to start their missions and must be ordered to do so by a provincial authority, like the RCMP. Golden and District Search and Rescue, one of the busiest in the province, responds to 70 to 120 calls a year.

"We don't self-dispatch. We get hundreds of calls a year. What we have to tell them directly is to contact the RCMP. If they do that, we can head on out," Mr. Foss said.

So if they can't initiate their own missions and need to be 'deployed' by someone else, and that someone else was for whatever reason slow to do so, it's hard to see where the SAR team was negligent. Once they were authorized to do so, they sought him out and rescued him, which makes me think that they in fact did their job rather well.

Now, here's my real thing: they were at a ski resort. The ski resort did not report them as missing, which doesn't strike me as negligent either, unless they have a standing policy to do a headcount when they close the slopes every night or something. I doubt they do because that seems like it would be horribly impractical, but I grant it's possible.

But in this article the guy is painted as having some survival skills, though no matches on him that day, and as an avid skier. And he admits that going off the marked slope was his fault. If you're a practiced skier and you know the slightest thing about wilderness survival, and you're dressed for a day of skiing at a resort and not, say, a cross-country trek, you know what you don't do?

You don't leave the bounded, safe area. Just like if you're out for a nice day hike in a big, say, state forest, and you're not terribly familiar with the area and don't have a map or matches or anything like that, you stay on the damn trail.

If you decide to go wandering off into the wilderness, you're stupid. If you get lost, that sucks, yes. If you get found? Fantastic. You're incredibly lucky, and lots of people put a huge amount of time, money, and effort into rescuing you. If you don't get found? Well, maybe you should have stayed on the trail, hmmm?