US hiker 'lost for 26 days before dying'

She was set up near a stream. And it sounds like maybe she tried to start a fire but was unable to.

One article[1] at least suggests that she wasn't able to start a fire.

  She had also tried to make fires using the matches and 
  lighters she kept in her backpack. There was a stream 
  near her camp, but it's unclear whether she was able to 
  find any food.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/2...

Since at least the 40s, the advice of the US Forest Service has been to travel downhill, remaining in place if injured or there's nowhere further downhill to go: http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb543526...

This is a fantastic idea, although they'd need to have several carriers to make it feasible (what if someone uses t-mobile instead of verizon?

This won't work really the towers have to be fixed making a call while moving shifts the phase of your signal and for a good while this was a big problem for early phones (calls out cut out while driving or in a train because of the speed not the "reception").

Movement is not the only thing that can cause a Doppler shift, echos, and multi-path propagation are also a pain to deal with but for the movement part phones pretty damn early started having accelerometers (way before they were used for cool stuff) in them as well as much better Doppler estimation processing at both the towers and in your phone.

At 150knots (relative speed, this will depend on the altitude and heading of the aircraft in relation to the cellphone) a 1.9ghz signal will have a Doppler shift of about 500hz which is more than enough to induce blocking of pretty much any cell network. Radiophones that allow air to ground communication to exist but they are designed for this purpose and implement quite aggressive Doppler correction which is also usually only possible when they have the flight data and they know more or less the altitude, heading, and speed of the aircraft based on the flight plan and real time flight data and can adjust the Doppler correction in real time, as without it it won't work.

P.S. Blimps would probably work.

You can also rent a PLB/sat communicator for relatively reasonable prices (<$40/week) if you only hike occasionally and owning one and paying monthly wouldn't make sense.

My DeLorme inReach can send a message with coordinates and then doesn't need to remain online and continue transmitting. (Of course, you want to keep it online so you can continue to communicate with SAR, but if the battery were to die they would still find you as long as you don't move from your transmitted location in your emergency call.) So a solar charger, etc. wouldn't even really be necessary, and it will stay online for quite a long time between recharges.

Many long distance backpackers will carry high capacity USB battery packs to recharge devices off rather than a solar charger, as they weigh less and involve less hassle and can generally last between town stops every 5 to 10 days (depending on what trail, of course).

I'm not familiar with all PLBs/satellite communicators but my inReach works internationally.

It's not dangerous if you have navigational skills. Most people, however, do not, or haven't developed theirs very effectively. I see it myself sometimes with other hikers at the front of a group—they take a wrong turn and suddenly have no idea where they are and start freaking out rather than just backtracking. Fortunately they're in a group, generally of people who can navigate and do know where they are, but when someone with poor navigational skills gets into that situation it usually leads to panic and bad decisions.

It's not at all extraordinary that a hiker of her age decided to go backpacking alone (which in this case she didn't—she was with someone else who left). It's a very common thing for people to solo hike and backpack. Carrying a small amount of gear is not a problem either—it's the norm. But navigational tools of some sort, even just a micro compass and a map, are generally considered an essential.

As someone who's spent a fair amount of time hiking, it really depends on the maintenance of the trails. There's also often false trails even on maintained ones. Humans tend to be far more confident about their directionality than they are, and factor in weather or a dark mostly moonless night and its easy to hike in circles. Once lost and without easy landmarks, finding your way back is difficult as even if you locate the trail you're looking for, its uncertain if you're actually on it without glaringly obvious geographic markings to match to a paper map. We humans easily overestimate our ability to navigate.

I do agree though, not packing a GPS unit with a charging mechanism was a bad move. The one time when I really needed it was the one time I was hiking in white out conditions on a very remote mountain in Cascades and my buddy had an GPS (mind you in the early 2000s, thus archaic by today's standards), Setting a way point at the trailhead made my night a lot more pleasant rather than shuffling down a mountain in a blizzard, and hoping to end up near where we started. I wasn't unprepared and had a paper map and compass, and knew eventually we'd hit a forest service road but it could have made for a very long night in the cold as we marched back to our vehicle.

I think she must have gotten lost and disoriented while very close to the trail and then spent a lot of time walking in the wrong direction without paying enough attention to be able to retrace her route even back to that first place where she realized she was lost. At some point she realized that moving was getting her more lost and she stopped. But at that point she was too far away from the trail for the searchers to find her.

In fact, I wonder if at the end, once she'd set up a permanent camp, if she stayed put because she was flat out afraid she'd get lost again if she left the camp even to go a few yards. This might have been a legitimate fear, but there is a way to handle it -- you leave "blaze" marks on the trees as you pass them so you can retrace your route. But maybe she wasn't familiar with this technique.

Please don't do this. I see people doing it, even going so far as to leave flagging tape on obvious, maintained trails so they don't "lose their way". And usually people don't remove it after. It makes an area trashy, especially when done unnecessarily—and saying you should do it whenever you go off-trail is very unnecessary.

If your navigational skills are poor enough that you can't trust yourself to walk off-trail without getting lost, use a passive system like running a GPS receiver during your hike so you can backtrack along its track until you find your trail.

I wonder if a "road pressure" map would be useful to encourage people to know what they are doing. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in Michigan where there are developed roads all over the place. When there's (even moderately trafficked) roads 1/2 mile away in 3 directions, you aren't very lost, so I've never felt the need to be incredibly well prepared. When it's 5 miles in one direction the thought process needs to be a little different.