Rope rescuers save four climbers on Bear Mountain

06/09/2007

STONY POINT - A teacher and three 16-year-old yeshiva students wandered off a Bear Mountain climbing trail and had to be plucked early Friday from a 200-foot-high ledge by rappelling rescuers while hovering police helicopters lit the face of the cliff.

The climbers "felt they couldn't go up safely and they couldn't go down safely once they realized where they were," Lt. David Herrick of the New York State Park Police said on Friday. "Basically they froze and didn't want to move."

They were stuck on the rocky outcropping for more than five hours on Thursday night and early Friday.

A tactical rope rescue unit, comprising specially trained members of various volunteer fire departments, rappelled the 400-foot cliff to the rocky ledge, put each of the four hikers into harnesses, then lowered them to the bottom, Herrick said.

Because darkness had fallen, choppers from the state police and Westchester County police were called in to light the scene, he said.

The mountain climb was part of an excursion to Bear Mountain by a Jewish high school in Brooklyn identified by Herrick as the Ha Mesivta yeshiva. There was no such telephone listing and calls to schools with similar names did not find the yeshiva involved.

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-Jim