A Connecticut hiker who had been missing for a week was found severely dehydrated with a broken leg just before the search for him was to end, authorities said.

A state worker found Richard Roncarti, 50, around 12:30 p.m. Thursday in the Beacon Falls section of the Naugatuck State Forest.  

He was rescued just minutes before the search was going to be called off, officials said. 

Read the original report on NBCConnecticut.com

Crews said Roncarti was stranded in the Naugatuck State Forest with severe injuries after falling 100 feet and having no food or water for seven days. The area is a few miles south of Waterbury.

Emergency crews said he was lucky to be alive.

“He looked like he had been in the weather a few days. He was beat up pretty good,” Chief Michael Pratt, of the Beacon Falls Fire Department, said. 

Pratt said the hiker from Watertown had no idea he was stranded in the Naugatuck State Forest for so long.

Roncarti’s family reported him missing last Thursday night. His vehicle was found over the weekend, parked in the parking lot of the state forest, but there was no sign of him until yesterday.

“He said, 'I’ve been out here seven days.' After seven days you don’t think positive. You don’t think you're going to find someone alive,” Pratt admitted.

Roncarti was taken to Waterbury Hospital on Thursday and is being treated for non-life threatening injuries. He is expected to be released in the next few days.

Firefighters said he had a broken leg, possibly a broken hip, and he was severely dehydrated.

“Yes it could have been a lot worse ... it could have been fatal,” said Pratt.

Emergency crews said Roncarti was nearly impossible to find because he didn’t have a cell phone. 

They want all hikers to make sure they were prepared for a worst-case scenario when they hit the trails this summer. 

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A 13-year-old boy rescued from a rock atop a 265-foot waterfall in Washington state says he is alive thanks to luck, brave rescuers and a lesson from a fantasy character.

“The worst waiting game ever," William Hickman of Burien joked to NBC station KING of Seattle after the ordeal. "I'm sitting there freezing cold, on rocks for eight hours straight. I was scared they were going to have to chop off my toes from hypothermia or something!"

Hickman was hiking Saturday with his father, 9-year-old brother and friends above Wallace Middle Falls, near the town of Gold Bar about 45 miles northeast of Seattle. He wanted to cool off.

"I wanted to go in ... just to wade a little bit," Hickman said at a Monday news conference, where he was joined by the people who staged a dramatic, middle-of the night operation.

But he slipped and the whitewater swept him over a 10-foot drop into a deep pool above the waterfall.

In the water, the teen quickly thought of advice from a fantasy-novel character Bobby Pendragon of the Pendragon Adventure books by D.J. MacHale: "Go feet first, stay to the sides and kick off the rocks," the Seattle Times reported.

He managed to scramble onto a narrow rock shelf just before the main falls.

He stayed there, cold and wet, for the next eight and a half hours, Hickman and rescuers said. His father shouted encouragement, telling him he was going to be OK. Rescue crews later tossed him blankets, energy bars and fruit snacks.

KING-TV

William Hickman, 13, almost went over a 265-foot waterfall Sunday.

"He was in a very, very dangerous spot," Snohomish County sheriff's Sgt. Danny Wickstrom, who oversees the agency's search-and-rescue operations, said at the news conference, the Times reported. Almost all rescue operations that close to Wallace Falls involved a fatality, he said.

"I feel lucky I got through it all," Hickman said. "I think the rescuers should feel like heroes; they saved me. I'm lucky to be alive."

Hickman said that once he finished coughing up the water he had swallowed, he realized how precarious his situation was.

"I wasn't really scared until after I got on top of the rock," the boy said. "I was shocked that I landed there, that I was not going to go down and die."

A video shot by a volunteer rescuer shows Hickman huddled on a narrow, sloping rock shelf with his back to the water just above the popular hiking attraction.

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Rescuers first tried to reach Hickman by helicopter, but an overhanging rock shelf prevented them from dropping straight down. Instead, a helicopter crew dropped two rescuers 200 yards below him.

The rescuers climbed above the rock overhang, and then worked as a team — one rappelling down, the other belaying. Their goal was just to reach the boy and place him in a harness that would keep him safe until others arrived, said Deputy Bill Quistorf, chief pilot for the Snohomish County sheriff's air support unit.

But the rescue nearly met with disaster. A rope a rescuer was using to rappel down the overhanging rope snapped, and he plunged into the whitewater. Only his secondary rope saved him from going over the big falls, and he made it to shore with minor injuries.

Ten rescuers eventually camped with Hickman overnight, and a sheriff's office helicopter flew them down off the mountain at 6 a.m. Sunday. There was no place for the helicopter to land to pick them up, so the boy and the rescuers rode on a platform hanging from a cable 80 feet below the helicopter.

The teen's mother, Heather Hickman, got a phone call from the teen’s dad Sunday morning.

"Their dad said, 'I got something to tell you about last night, we almost lost William.' I told him he will never take my sons to a river again," Heather Hickman said. "He could've died. We could be having a totally different conversation right now."

This story includes reporting by The Associated Press.

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A hiker who returned to the trail where she took a survival course 40 years ago almost didn't make it out alive. Victoria Grover, 59, nearly died of hypothermia in the high desert of southern Utah over the weekend.

Grover told reporters from her hospital bed on Sunday that while she didn't have food she did have water, and figured that could keep her going for days. "The thing I was worried about was hypothermia -- that that was going to kill me," she said.

A physician's assistant from Wade, Maine, Grover had gone to the trail in Dixie National Forest where she took a survival course at Brigham Young University 40 years ago.

What was supposed to be a six-mile day hike turned into a four-day, three-night ordeal that began when it got too dark for Grover to find her way back.

The next day she broke her leg after jumping a four-foot ledge.

"I really wasn't scared until I stopped shivering," she said, "because that was the point where I thought, 'If somebody doesn't find me pretty soon I'm going to die of hypothermia.'"

The lodge where she was staying alerted the local sheriff when she didn't check out as planned, and a search team found her two days later -- suffering from hypothermia.

So what went through her mind during those cold nights where the temperature dipped into the low 30s and the only warmth she had came from a light poncho?

Besides praying, she also "was dreaming of oranges, which is one of my favorite foods," the Associated Press quoted her as saying. "But there are people who can go for weeks and weeks without food in this world. We have it easy in America."

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For years, hikers across the country have had to pay a fee to park at U.S. Forest Service sites and trail heads. A federal court last month called into question parts of the fee structure, but the service on Thursday emphasized that while the program has been under review the fees remain in place -- at least for now.

"Visitors to national forests should continue expect to pay the established recreation fees that are currently in place," the Forest Service said in a statement. "The U.S. Forest Service has charged user fees since 1965 and, since the mid-1990s, more than 90 percent of those fees have been used for improvements to the areas where the fees have been collected."

A federal court last month concluded that parking fees in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona were improper and ordered a lower court to review its ruling. 

The fees are $5 for a daily vehicle pass or $30 for an annual one.

Some hikers have accepted the fees as a way to maintain trails, while others complain that the federal government should fund those services as it had in the past. The debate has gone on for years at online forums like nwhikers.net.

The Forest Service said it is reviewing the court order but that in the meantime would continue to collect fees as well as continue a review that began two years ago.

That review last January led to preliminary proposals whereby "26 national forest areas will still require visitor fees, down from the current 90 areas nationwide," the service stated.

The Los Angeles Times reported that proposed changes include charging for use only at some busy sites that have six specific amenities that require maintenance -- among them toilets, interpretive signs, trash cans and picnic tables.

Service spokesman Larry Chambers told msnbc.com that the proposals would limit fees to a "much smaller area ... essentially just around the specific site where the amenities are offered."

The service said it expects to have a final decision after this fall and that public comment will be sought during that time.

Some $60 million in fees were collected across the national forest system last year. The service says most of the revenues are kept by the forests where they are raised in order to provide maintenance and improvements.

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