Frozen Alive | Hacker News Reader

Frozen Alive

outsideonline.com

72 pointsbootload23 comments

We rescued a group (mother, son, three of his friends) a three weeks ago on California's highway 4. It was at night after all the ski traffic was gone; they didn't understand their car well enough to know why it had failed (they'd even noticed the transmission fluid leaking out before they set off), no shovel, no cold gear beyond ski parkas, not even water. The were also astonished that there was no phone service (in fact none for another 20 miles).

On one hand I'm glad technology has developed such that people can drive around without knowing to check fluids, how to build a shelter, etc. On the other hand I see people at the edges of the wilderness who plainly haven't the faintest idea what is going on (and in some cases how much danger they are in).

Typically I don't butt in. In this case when we stopped to see if they needed help they said "no" but my GF insisted on getting out and finding out that yes, they wanted help but didn't want to impose. (they day before she stopped to make sure we found the owner of a stray dog in the street, that turned out to have been lost. She's a good influence on me).

> In fact, many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In “rewarming shock,” the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure.

Interesting, it's like your body is made of independent organs and systems that don't orchestrate very well. Each part trying to survive on its own make the worst for the whole. Come to think about it, seems that some health problems are caused because some part of your body don't send or receive the proper signals, hormones and so on.

Distributed systems are hard, especially with poorly documented inter-system protocols for coordination!

What documentation? The only info they've got is transferred in the transport payload.

Just read the code.

Ok, yeah, but we still don't completely understand all the features of the equally undocumented compiler, standard library, and OS kernel.

Tell that to my spleen.

When I originally heard of this it was explained as restricting capillaries costs energy, and when the energy runs out the capillaries cant help but relax - meaning they simply get tired and give up.

This is at least a few years old, I remember reading it when the family was stuck in the snow in the southern Oregon mountains.

Rule #1. Don't ever leave the car and setoff overland.

I thought that too, but the metadata has:

Maybe they made the audio form of the story?

I remember reading this in Wired magazine several years ago. Afterwards, I put together a little survival pack in each of my car's trunks including a space blanket, hand-crank phone charger, and other items.

when the family was stuck in the snow in the southern Oregon

James Kim. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim#Snowbound

It looks like it was collected in a published book in 2001:

http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random045/2001037553.ht...

https://lccn.loc.gov/2001037553

I remember reading it a few years ago as well, so perhaps it's been republished multiple times since then.

It's an absolutely great bit of writing, and a good warning to anybody who lives in places that can get excessively cold.

(In my case, it serves as literary tourism: I live in central Scotland, which hasn't seen more than a few inches of snow a year since 2013.)

"Rule #1. Don't ever leave the car and setoff overland."

Rule #1 applies equally to desert conditions as well. Shade, potential water and source of things to burn to signal for help.

As someone who grew up and lives in Manitoba, some of this rings false. The temperature was described as -35F (-34C). People that wander away from their cars inadequately dressed for that sort of condition only technically die of hypothermia. They mostly die of the complications of having their extremities frozen. They don't tend to have enough time to go though the stages of hypothermia. There would be no time to drift off to crazy land, they would know things were going wrong right away.

In the same vein, if they don't have a scarf or other face protection (which for some reason was the case for the skier in the article) and there was any wind they will immediately freeze their face. This can take less than a minute. This is incredibly painful and could be expected to cause pretty much anyone to get back in the car.

I always keep a a pair of sleeping bags and a shovel in the car when driving in the winter.

If you can't dig yourself out, i think it's safer to say warm in your car.

Also a candle burning in the car (crack open a window, extinguish before falling asleep!) can raise the temps inside the car.

The candle idea is dubious at best and dangerous at worst.

Cars are very poor insulators, being made of single layer glass, steel and aluminum.

Any temperature rise you'll get out of a candle (in reality almost negligible over the T. rise from your body heat) will be gone within minutes of you extinguishing it.

If your car is stuck in a blizzard it will eventually be covered in snow.

Snow is a fantastic insulator.

https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/3389/how-much-h...

Thanks. I haven't gone through all the answers, but it looks like most of them confirm my original post, that it isn't worth it.

Snow, on the other hand, is a _wonderful_ insulator. If there was suitable snow to dig a snowcave, that's what I'd do. You can sleep toasty warm in a snowcave in ridiculously cold windy weather in a 3 season sleeping bag.

Is this based on a true story?

It reads like a pastiche of many true stories. One of the first things that hypothermia does is impair your ability to think rationally.

Basically, a person makes two marginally unwise decisions in a row, the situation snowballs from there, and the person winds up dead or on the brink of death. Occasionally, the victim has a stupid idea that actually warms them back up a bit, and can claw their way back from there.

In this particular story, the first unwise decision was to leave home at all, and the second was to leave the car. Everything that follows is cold brain no thinky good; unsmart.

This is why government spokespeople have to tell everyone to stay home before every predictable winter storm. Cold people are even stupider than normal, and stupid people are a burden on local emergency services.

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