Making Law for the Lost-and-Found Department

The wages of sin--less taxes, of course--is death, or so we’ve heard.

The price tag of foolhardiness? That, we may find out on Friday, when a Glendale judge metes out a sentence to two snowboarders convicted of straying from ski resort boundaries in search of deeper powder, then getting lost and thus drawing some 40 people and one helicopter into a very pricey mission to rescue their cold, wet butts.

For violating misdemeanor 602q, skiing out of bounds out of a ski area, the two men--and they are grown men, not kids--could be sent to jail for six months. But what would that accomplish? No, the prosecutor wants something else. If time is money, then the hours of searching by 40 people and a helicopter are worth . . . well, we’ll know on Friday.

Not a winter passes, not a summer goes by, without some huge and heroic rescue in the forests or the deserts, in the snow or the heat, by squadrons of people and their elaborate gear.

Sometimes they seek a little kid who wandered from a campsite. Sometimes it’s a scout who lagged behind the troop and vanished. Sometimes it’s a doofus who went hiking with rubber thongs and a bellyful of Budweiser to match the logo on his T-shirt, and wound up breaking a leg.

And sometimes they set out to save a nitwit whose derring-do turned into derring-don’t.

In a nation that lives by the arid, vicarious thrill of TV, there’s something laudable about craving a real experience. But what price endorphins?

The National Park Service has billed mountain climbers who must be saved from their own bravado. The island of Hawaii ponied up $100,000 to rescue a movie-company helicopter crew from Mt. Kilauea volcano. A search for a missing hiker on Oahu killed three rescuers when their helicopter crashed. In the hunt for our two convicted snowboarders, so high was the avalanche danger that two ski patrol experts were sent back.

And a certain English prince took his group skiing out of bounds in Switzerland a few years back. An avalanche caught them. An aide was killed, a friend was badly injured, and a few feet more one way or the other and there would be no King Charles III.

As one man in this case remarked last winter, “We’re not criminals. We made a bad decision.”

How bad? Maybe they should have held onto that $5 bill they used to light a fire in the cave where they huddled overnight. The prosecutor has asked for the cost of their rescue--$23,000.

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The bulls are running again in the streets of Pamplona this week. One man has been gored and others trampled. What bull-runners like American Derek Hoffman say by way of explanation could go for almost any adrenaline-surge sport: “I’m really scared. The bulls have got pretty big horns, But I’m here for the rush.”

Some back-country adventurers want to keep the rush, the “wild,” in wilderness, convinced that SWAT-style rescues lend a false sense of security to an outdoor greenhorn, that no matter how reckless or ill-prepared he may be, the cavalry will always whisk him to safety in the last reel.

Some rescuers have been known to employ a wicked little acronym for such missions--INS, interfering with natural selection; some people are just destined not to swim in the gene pool, and who are we to thwart nature’s grand plan?

The Angeles National Forest, which Angelenos treat like a vertical back yard, has been called lax in posting warning signs. The Forest Service counters that if it put up a sign at every arguably hazardous point, “we’d have more signs than brush.”

So dispense with the oblique and polite notices. Lay it on the line:

“Caveat recreator. You are NOT entering Disneyland. St. Bernards will not bound up bearing brandy casks and cell phones. Uniformed park attendants will not show up when your sorry butt is in a sling. It’s your ticket to punch.”

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The deputy district attorney in this case, Lonnie Felker, has skied snow and water for 35 years. Now he is schussing that most American of terrain, the slippery slope of the law.

“I wish you would make this very clear: A lot of people have criticized me for asking for the cost of rescue. I’m not asking for the cost of rescue every time it happens, because people honestly and truly get lost. . . . [But] it’s not right to endanger other people’s lives just so you can have a good time. You put other people’s lives at risk because you want to ride down some powder? It’s unacceptable.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com