A planned helicopter rescue collapsed when dense fog closed back in over San Francisco's Lands End on Friday night, forcing firefighters to send a stranded hiker down the face of Dead Man's Point in a controlled slide — a seven-hour operation that left one SFFD rescue swimmer hospitalized.

The rescue at one of the city's most treacherous stretches of coastline shows what first responders face in a part of San Francisco where dramatic scenery and summer fog combine into genuine danger. A hiker stranded overnight on a crumbling cliff perch survived with minor injuries — but so did a firefighter who waded into heavy surf to bring them in. It is the second cliff rescue at the Lands End cliffs in three weeks, at a site with a documented history of fatal falls.

Just after 5 a.m. Saturday, the San Francisco Fire Department announced on social media that crews had completed a seven-hour technical rescue at Dead Man's Point, in the Lands End area west of the Presidio, after an adult became stranded on a cliff and could not get down. The call had come in after 9 p.m. Friday — a 911 report from an injured person clinging to the cliff off the Lands End Trail.

The first problem was simply finding them in the dark. Crews used cell phone triangulation, along with information relayed by dispatchers who stayed on the line with the caller, to pin down the location, the department said in its report. Once they reached the area, rescuers had to set up a rope system through dense fog and steep, brushy terrain.

By around 2 a.m., the situation was deteriorating. "The rock face is becoming unstable and the perch where the victim is located is deteriorating," the department posted on social media. "There is increased risk of the victim falling if the perch gives way."

The plan had been to lift the hiker out by air. But by the time a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter arrived on scene, the fog had closed back in — thick enough to make an aerial approach unsafe, according to the fire department. That happens here: Lands End sits on a coastal shelf where summer fog can lift in the afternoon and return hard after dark, leaving little warning and less visibility.

With the helicopter scrubbed and the perch giving way, SFFD rescue technicians settled on a third strategy. They had the victim descend the cliff face in what the department called a "controlled slide," guided down to the rocky shoreline below rather than waiting for conditions that might never improve.

The slide worked. The hiker reached the water's edge with minor injuries — and into the next problem. SFFD rescue swimmers had pre-positioned in the surf beneath Dead Man's Point. "Rescue swimmers were staged in the water and immediately assisted the adult victim through heavy surf to a waiting SFFD rescue boat," the agency reported around 5 a.m. Paramedics evaluated the hiker on site before transporting them to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

One of the rescue swimmers was hurt too, sustaining minor injuries during the water portion and being taken to the emergency room. The department said the firefighter is expected to make a full recovery.

The fire department described conditions throughout the night as brutal: steep and unstable terrain, dense fog, limited visibility, heavy brush, and surf that made the water component as hazardous as the cliff work above. Beyond SFFD and the Coast Guard, the U.S. Park Police and the San Francisco police department's drone unit assisted in the operation.

The Lands End cliffs, west of the Presidio, are a recurring scene for this kind of work. On Memorial Day, a young adult fell 100 feet off a cliff near Sutro Baths and was lifted to safety by a California Highway Patrol helicopter, the Press Democrat reported. The site's danger is older and graver than that: fatal falls there include Jeffrey Rash, 42, in 2019; Victoria La Rocca, 17, in 2017; and Randi Salmon, 26, in 2014. La Rocca, a student at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, had climbed a fence near a sign warning of dangerous terrain before falling from a cliff above Mile Rock Beach.

The hiker's name was not released, and it is not yet clear how the person came to be stranded on the cliff overnight or whether they had ventured off the established trail.