Back when flying the orange machines, had a similar situation landing on some poor grazing land in light fog on a moonless night. We were following a beacon from a light airplane crash.
I defy any pilot over rural and rocky land (such as N. California) to determine from the air the slope of any wee bit of terrain + / - 10º for those points where the landing gear will contact the surface at night, in fog. $99 must go a long way for a GPS in any part of the world that will spit out that kind of data.
The terrain in our case was dusty hardpan, and it was a volcanic island, so it tended to be higher in the middle than on the edges. We could see the crashed airplane, and we concluded (rightly, as it turned out) that they had flown into the upsloping terrain. We had no Doppler, so the landing was visual and on NVGs. Flew a no-hover approach to a spot the crew agreed looked "pretty flat" and monitored the attitude until the collective was full down. We were lucky, as it all came in below 10º, though if memory serves, not much below, and we didn't shut down.
We had a plan to pull pitch and do the approach again had it turned out to be steeper than we hoped (based upon what the attitude was as we lowered the collective), as hovering around in scrub & hardpan in dark, dusty fog on an island on NVGs is as good a way to crash a helicopter as any other I've heard.
At least during my USCG days, it was considered appallingly poor form to criticize the actions of a crew when that crew wasn't handy to defend those actions.
Did we do ours correctly? No idea, and there was some lively and beery debate in the wardroom about it (and in which we joined in), but in the end we got one fellow to a proper trauma unit (the other fellow died on impact or shortly thereafter) and didn't bend the airframe so I lose no sleep about it either way.
Oh, and why did the airplane crash occur in the first place? CFII and student out on a night IFR training flight. Planned an approach to a private airport that was closed at night, so couldn't do the approach. We assume (but do not know) that they lost situational awareness while figuring out what to do next and flew into terrain. The fellow who died was the student. So far as I know, the CFII chose to take up another line of work.