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After six hikers were rescued from Sacajawea Peak Sunday morning by a search conducted by Gallatin County Search and Rescue, it made us wonder - who pays for these rescues and how much it costs?

We spoke with the Gallatin County sheriff about how this complicated public service works.

"Throughout the year, what we do is we look at how many trips we made, we figure out the costs and on an average it costs right around $250 an event," said Sheriff Brian Gootkin.

There are a number of fixed costs associated with having a search and rescue right here in Gallatin County, whether there's one or 100 rescues each year, the SAR facility, vehicles, education, prevention and equipment all need to be paid for, which costs about $200,000 of taxpayer money each year.

"That's our baseline budget for search and rescue, so all additional costs we try to get back into that fund to reimburse us," said Gootkin.

The age-old question asks why the person or group who was rescued doesn't pay. Gootkin says it would be like spending $2 to save $1.

"How many hours of our support staff's time are we going to spend to try track to costs to bill the person, to try and collect the money, and then when you do collect the money it's abysmal, you're not going to collect the entire amount, and when you are only looking at recovering about $250 it is not worth it," said Gootkin.

According to Gootkin, a lot of people automatically assume because we live in a tourist destination, that most of the people rescued are from out of state, but in fact it's the opposite. "Two-thirds of the people that we go and we help are local citizens and their families."

Helicopters are often used as a means to rescue stranded or injured people. Even though one may think helicopters cost a lot more money than rescuing people using other means, Gootkin says that isn't always the case.

"We spend a certain amount of dollars for a two-hour event where we can send a helicopter up with two people, get that person, get them out of there safer, more efficient, and in a lot of ways you actually save money. You have to count how much time it takes to reach them by foot and how many volunteers are giving up their time to help with the search," he said.

The county could not come up with exact numbers on how much helicopter services cost because they only average the cost of rescues at the end of the year and the helicopter is only one portion of that cost.

We also made calls to a local air ambulance and the U.S. Air Force base in Great Falls to see how much operating one of their helicopters costs, but both said the costs depend on a number of things, so we got no firm numbers. To give you an idea of how costly operating a helicopter is, our news station rented a helicopter less than a year ago and ended up paying $600 per hour for service.

Gootkin says people live in this area because they want to be active in the outdoors and having a search and rescue team here is part of that.

"That's why we live here, to be active. We are going to help people when they need help, period. We will worry about the other stuff after the fact."

There ended up being about 100 search and rescue calls in 2011, up more than 15% from 2010. Thirty eight percent of calls are searches and 62% of calls are rescue calls. About half of the calls come from Gallatin Valley, a fourth of the calls come from Gallatin Canyon, and the rest are from West Yellowstone.