When Kane announced his plans to extend the expedition for a second winter even though the group's food and fuel were severely depleted, Hayes and seven other team members opted to head south for what they thought would be safety.

After arriving in Greenland, he encouraged several indigenous people to join his 20-man party as hunters to ensure that his crew would not be forced to endure the hunger and starvation experienced by previous expeditions.

Hayes and his men then set out for Baffin Bay, Smith Sound and Ellesmere Island en route to the Open Polar Sea but, like others before him, was eventually forced by the terrain, harsh climate and dwindling food supplies to turn back.

His journal entries did not match the position he had written down in the frigid cold, however, leading subsequent researchers to conclude that he had overestimated his reach by more than 100 miles (160 km), and to speculate that Hayes may have mistakenly noted that his sextant observations of the sun had been taken at noon when they hadn't or that he had inverted the second digit of the group's farthest lone lower limb to read 56°52′ instead of the true observation 59°52′.

[11] Rendering care to as many as 50,000 sick and wounded during the time this hospital was open, the physicians and nurses under Hayes lost only 260 patients between the time of the hospital's opening and closure, a significant achievement when considering the challenges they faced in treating not only the sheer volume of patients they were required to process, but in doing so while employing relatively rudimentary medical care procedures and sanitation practices.

[12][13] After the war, Hayes penned a book about his expedition days, The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner United States.

Thomas J. Alvord of Onondaga, in proposing an amendment to the New York State Constitution on February 27, 1878, to abolish canal tolls as a way of facilitating business growth and general prosperity in the region.

[19] On Friday evening, December 18, 1881, while still a sitting member of the State Assembly, the 49-year-old Hayes suffered a heart attack at his home in New York City.