How 1,600 People Went Missing from U.S. Public Lands
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
I've been hunting for 7 years and my first thoughts are that:
-Found without clothing and footwear can indicate hypothermia
-Improbable distances and terrain is not a surprise. I've felt mild panic set in when I wasn't where I was suppose to be in terms of meetup spots and felt the need to rush uphill or avoid using common sense in the moment. I've also scaled some scary terrain (I'm no rock climber or mountain goat) and I've heard stories from guys I hunt with who have done some stupid scary stuff when it comes to terrain
-The other comments read like a bad movie that tries to scare us into believing the forest is the most dangerous place in the world other than your own sidewalk, where a stranger will kidnap your kids at the most opportune moment. Most of my coworkers throughout the years all think I'm crazy when I tell them I go hiking and hunting in the forest, as they believe I'll be eaten by bears. By the way, I saw a baby black bear about 15 yards from me last season, cutest thing in the world, and so was his mother as I was walking away :)
People who live their entire lives in urban or suburban areas have no concept of just how far two miles through dense woods really is when you're on foot.
Don't ever take nature lightly, it's been killing us for a long time.
My brother volunteers for Search and Rescue (Search and Recover most of the time). If someone dies in the desert, because of the sage brush and other grasses, you can easily walk right past a body and not know it (assuming there is no smell)
I've put down my bag while looking for discs before, walked 20 feet, turned around to go back to my bag and not been able to find it. I've seen where discs have fallen, immediately run over to the spot, and not been able to find them despite looking for nearly an hour.
You can be standing with someone, point out something on the ground to them, and they won't be able to see it until to are basically touching it.
I've done Search and Rescue training as well. What I've taken from both is that you do not want to be lost, and if you are lost you do not want to be far from where people are expecting you to be. This is in part because you want to narrow the search area, but also because people have an incredible ability to overlook things that aren't expecting.
One thing I didn't realize before I did all of this was how useless looking for a given shape is. Unless it is extremely flat, you are probably just looking for splashes of color. You would not believe the amount of color there is in the middle of a forest, or a field, etc, until you start looking for a particular color. Flowers, garbage, mottled sun, you can basically get any color you imagine out there.
I think we like to imagine we've reached a point where we can know everything we want to about our planet, and the only limiting factor is what we can focus our attention on. That's not true though. Even with effectively limitless resources, it took over a year to find Steve Fossett's body. The world is an incredibly vast place, and we are incredibly small.
I like to think the key's not complete thoughtlessness, but rather an appreciation of the vastness the field without caring too much about any one part of it. Which is a bit wishy-washy, but forms a good basis.
Very interesting. I've heard Morels are TOUGH to spot. I want to go next season, since I live in NJ and it's supposed to be a good area to find them.
The expectation that you will or will not see them definitely messes with your head.
It's definitely a hard thing to describe, but I think you are doing a pretty good job of articulating it. It's kind of like meditation, in the sense that you need to approach it in a very structured way with an open/empty mind.
It's why Bayesian methods are so effective for searching. You first imagine all of the possibilities, and then you search for evidence that either supports or refutes them. If you are in an area and you have searched everywhere and you are convinced it is in that area, you need to consider the fact that it isn't in that area and to move on.
I can't tell you how many times I've been looking for a disc at a certain distance, thinking "it couldn't be any farther up, I can't throw that far" (or vice versa), only to walk 25 feet farther up and find my disc. Preconceived notions are the enemy of a successful search.
>One thing I didn't realize before I did all of this was how useless looking for a given shape is. Unless it is extremely flat, you are probably just looking for splashes of color. You would not believe the amount of color there is in the middle of a forest, or a field, etc, until you start looking for a particular color. Flowers, garbage, mottled sun, you can basically get any color you imagine out there.
Very true. This is the same sort of basic issue that a lot of optical illusions and magic tricks are based on. Human brains (and to some extent probably many animals in general) tend to out of necessity be a lot more sensitive to change vs static imagery and use a lot of processing shortcuts. There is so much data constantly coming in that processing all of it would be paralyzing, so a lot of the work really is throwing most of it out.
That's also why active signaling is so valuable in emergency situations. Even without touching on any sort of networked devices, tools like colored smoke flares, LED lamps/torches with a strobe feature, highly reflective metallized boPET (aka Mylar and other brands) flags or streamers light enough to have significant motion even in very minimal breeze, alarms, etc are all quite valuable because their dynamic and artificial nature makes them stand out more clearly from farther away. The problem comes with them needing at least some level of consciousness and ability to take action to deploy.
I do think there's more room still for innovation in safety equipment when it comes to automated emergency signal systems that can be linked to biomonitoring and thus respond automatically to signs of distress if the user doesn't cancel it after a given timeout. There are some products on the market right now, but the ones I'm aware of are purely electronic and depend on S&R having a receiver of the right type and/or on availability of network coverage. Satellite-based emergency signals don't seem to be practical or economic enough yet for ubiquitous usage. They both can still be incredibly valuable, but in addition it might be nice in some situations if automated deployment could be linked to non-electronic signals. For example, a compact self-contained system attachable to the top of a backpack with mylar balloon (possibly with a small strobing LED lamp), enough helium for auto-inflation, and a 100-200 ft tether that could be triggered automatically or manually. Standard mylar balloons can remain taut for a good 5 days and float for a couple weeks before losing too much lift, and the weight and cost of the basic components should be reasonable. While of limited use in certain environments like dense forest, in many areas it'd have no trouble reaching full extension. A floating bobbing reflective object (or at night lit by even a minimal LED) should be visible from a significant distance vs something on the ground but be safer and easier to deploy then trying to climb something to achieve vertical. Effective signal lifetime vs other consumables seems like it might be favorable as well. Or maybe there is something like this already?
Honestly I think the biggest barrier to the effective use of technology in these situations is that is another thing to carry. Carrying more than you have to sucks, and I know a lot of athletes/etc who carry the bare minimum possible with them. I know people who run without their IDs, because they find them overly encumbering.
A lot of it is complacency. How much trouble can you get as an experienced person in an area you are familiar with?
The answer is obviously a lot, but there are stories of people who are otherwise extremely experienced dying in situations that should have otherwise been routine. Technology allows us to get closer to the limit, and in turn encourages risky behavior. Once we feel comfortable on that edge, we tend to take fewer precautions. (I forget the term for this, I believe it is something like risk displacement.)
A simple personal example -- I once locked myself on the roof of a high-rise in Chicago by accident. We were a few floors from the top of the building, and I wanted a breath of fresh air. The cinder block I used to hold the door open rotated and let the door close, and I had left my cellphone charging at my desk. My adrenaline spiked. I walked around the roof. I could see people at street level and in the atrium 14 stories below, but we were right next to the L, and there was no way to yell loud enough to get anyone's attention. It was a bit chilly, and I wondered if I would die of hypothermia if I was stuck on the roof overnight.
Once my adrenaline subsided a bit, I took a look at the door and realized I could jimmy it open if I had a piece of metal. Luckily I managed to find a bit of wire buried in the gravel of the built-up roof, and I was able to shim the door open.
I went back to my office a bit rattled. None of my coworkers even noticed I had been gone, though one noticed that I looked a bit cold and shaky. I have no idea how long I could have been stuck up there if I hadn't managed to shim the door.
Since then I've always made sure to keep my cellphone (which I find to be an encumbrance) on my person, and let somebody know where I'm going if at all possible. It was amazing how helpless I felt despite being literally surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people.
It's not as much a tech or time problem as it is a physics problem. Getting a signal from many Earth transmitters to a satellite receiver takes a lot of power on the transmitter side. More power by a lot than for one satellite transmitter to a bunch of Earth receivers!
These caveats are caused by the physics. They're mostly batteries and antennas due to power constraints, and operating the receivers is expensive even with the tradeoffs they make.
They're getting a lot closer. Certainly not ubiquitous, but I'm seriously thinking at this point that something like a Garmin inReach would make sense the next time I do a solo backpacking trip of more than a couple days.
And this is coming from someone who has tended to be opposed to having to constantly be in touch.
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/01/29/maine-hiker-missing-2-...
Also, make every phone a receiver/decoder of this peer-to-peer protocol (no cell tower required), so that searchers would become a swarm antenna using only the personal phones everyone already had.
You would have to have your phone, but lots of hikers and runners do, and you would have to be conscious and able to turn on the distress mode if you got in trouble, but in most cases people are, at least part of the time. There would also have to be a cost to using the system, so people wouldn't constantly do it as a prank.
This upgrade to the tech we already have could prove useful in so many ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cospas-Sarsat_Pr....
[1] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons?r=c&ir=catego....
I know, this is normal, and one shouldn't get upset. It just feels like $50M is enough resources to accomplish quite a lot, if it were properly allocated. It feels like people should be in prison for this.
If this topic interests you, I highly recommend that you listen to her experiences working to fix government technology creation by bringing in modern development practices.
The general problem is the people building the system don't have authority to force others to use it. Think herding cats at night.
I have built and deployed systems that lots of users used for their jobs, which were quite a bit more involved than a simple reporting CRUD, and which handled far more than a few hundred transactions a year.
> The Department of the Interior knows how many wolves and grizzly bears roam its wilds—can’t it keep track of visitors who disappear?
The problem is that the grizzly bears are tracked with stoichastic methods. You have 14% reported? Great if you're tracking bear populations - multiply the total tracked by 100/14, and there's your total! But for humans, you need to track 100% of them, which is a much harder problem.
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...
My neighbor's wife decided to go on a walk in the middle of the night. She has dementia. Last year, coldest night of the year (-20f).
Once called in, there were helicopters using infra-red imaging and dozens of people looking for her. There were dogs, there were police, there were friends, and there were firefighters.
She was found four hours later in the back of a car. She climbed into someone's car and fell asleep. The car was about 1000 or so feet away from their house, but down a driveway and out-of-sight for the most part.
She was okay, other than being very cold. She's still doing okay, but it shows that it's not super easy to find someone.
I can imagine that a spur of the moment search like that would be chaotic at the outset.
Seems like a great space for a smartphone app that could define a grid direct searchers and use GPS to track their movements.
Assuming a flat trail and traveling in a straight line, that would be nearly 40 minutes at a comfortable walk.
Then it would take 100,000 seconds to search a km². Rounding down by 15% or so, that's a full 24 hours.
A 1.7 mile radius circle has an area of 20 km² (again rounding down). So, by this extremely simple model, searching that circle would take two man-months at eight hours of searching a day, seven days a week. At ten times that speed, it still would take a week or so. Most people would get bored and move farther out before that week was over.
So, is that 10m² per person-second a good guess? I won't know, but looking around my living room, I doubt I could do double that rate there, so I (very, very tentatively) conclude it isn't completely bollocks.
There will be places where searching can be done much faster, but also ones where it is much slower, if only because navigating there is slow.
They had 200 people that first week plus it's really an arc of a circle in the direction they set out and on one side of the river only.
>Most people would get bored and move farther out before that week was over.
That could be the problem there, that and people not searching in a systematic way. The referenced stories all seem to point to people all being found relatively close to where they set out. Maybe that needs to be pointed out to searchers. Also a grid kept of what has been searched and what not so the same ground isn't revisited over and over.
Also as was pointed out, the local sheriff was in charge and had basically no expertise in this.
In populated areas you can skid off the road into a pond and not get found for years, if ever. When you hike even heavily travelled trails, all kinds of wildlife is just outside your range of perception along the trail. It's easy to stumble upon a bear's den, for example. Missing skiers can be 10 meters into the woods, off a marked trail, in a hole at the base of a tree.
Searching for a cold corpse in a fairly wild area is a low-odds roll of the dice, not a determination that a body isn't there. Unless you have something like a mobile phone or body heat that can be sensed at a distance, you have, at best, a well-trained dog's nose at ground level, limited by where the dog and handler can reach. Human senses have much lower odds of success.
Of course, that search took place when their car was found months after they disappeared. No one searched for them at the time because all that was known was they hadn't returned their car and had missed their flight.
But for me, the upside to this story is knowing that it is still fully possible to disappear in these places, which makes me all the more convinced these lands are worth protecting. For many, the subconscious draw of truly wild places is often that how they stand in sure counterpoint to the modality our society has adopted (i.e., so many people go the wilderness to "get away" or keep their mind off things.) Not every square inch of this world needs to be made friendly to humans, though, but I don't think everyone wants to fully accept that even if they normally pay lip service to conservation principles and the important of our national parks and wildlife refuges. So excuse me if I come across as callous, but if people don't bring their phones or come in the least prepared for their "walk in the woods," I'm not sure I quite see a problem that society needs to bend over backwards to solve.
I fell while downclimbing a cliff off-trail in remote federal lands in Colorado, but landed mostly on my backpack. That fall, the night I spent finding the trail again, and walking out the next morning are some of my best memories. This wasn't a tragic death.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cospas-Sarsat_Pr...
[1] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons?r=c&ir=catego...
The occurrence of "sisters" geographical names is a common pattern.
This week starts the spring break danger period. Invincible college newbies post nearly impossible trip plans. And I roll my eyes.
Some say that it's because what we call "reality" is, to a significant degree, conjured into being by our collective attention. So the edge of the collective (civilization or whatever) is the edge of reality.
Quite a few years ago, before smartphones and handheld GPSs, I went to take a walk from where I was staying to a relatively nearby lighthouse on the coast. I didn't take a compass with me and, as soon as I walked into some woods, I very quickly realized that I had gotten disoriented and wasn't sure which direction I had come from.
I did find my way out really quickly but it was really a "well, that was dumb" moment and a realization that if you step off a trail into the woods you could end up getting very lost very easily.
When I'm backcountry I always have a GPS and good maps. You can lose a trail walking 100 yards off it to check something out.
Which often isn't straightforward, especially in uneven terrain. "Walking in circles" may be a cliche but it definitely happen when you don't have a distant point to lock onto.
Forget the big things like War, Hunger, and Torture - even just the personal independence (from family / society) or freedom (ability to do what you want, when you want) aspects of our nation are a strange notion to history.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3iex1h/im_a_search...
Here's a map, just for reference. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CS1dchOHf79iGj4GHdlqWHkvpx...
In fact, a just a few days after Joe (now I know is name) went missing, I was up in that general area on a solo camping trip of my own (Kerr Lake, on the map). I also spend time in the La Jara Reservoir area (in an area known as Jacob's Hill on the map). I remember how rainy that summer was and how much time I spent in my tent that long weekend. During one of the breaks in the rain, I went wandering around and was struck by how remote everything was. I was used to the remoteness of the La Jara Reservoir wilderness area, but this was on a totally different level. I've linked to a few pictures from my aforementioned trip. One is of my poor dog trapped in a tent with me at Kerr Lake. The other two are from the Conejos River, a few miles south of the Platoro Reservoir. In one you can see some of Platoro's buildings. Admittedly, this is probably about 15-20 miles north of Rainbow Trout Ranch, but the pictures were taken on my drive down the same road on which Joe and Collin were running and I would have driven past that area (2015-07-29).
The terrain, as described in this article, is imposing but tranquil. There's a fun rock formation in the area that locals call "Monkey Face" because it looks like a monkey's face from the road. Unfortunately, years of weather have eroded it so that the features are not as prominent. Unfortunately, I don't recall noticing any S&R activity. I've ridden through the canyon with my dad many times, but this was my first time driving it (37 years old) and I remember remarking to myself about how beautiful it is and how I wish that my family had retained their property in the area.
Conejos County is extremely poor. Their taxpayer base couldn't sustain a significant S&R budget even if a law enacted it. There would absolutely need to be significant federal support. As the article mentioned, the amount of wilderness in this area, both in the plains of the San Luis Valley and in the remote San Juan forest lands, would be a rough place to get lost in general. That there's simply no real budget for organized S&R exacerbates the problem. It is a nice escape, but it is no place I would want to be stranded or lost.
My heart breaks for Joe's family. I can't imagine losing my only son. How traumatic. I have further thoughts on this, but I believe reverence for their loss is a higher priority than pressing into those thoughts.