The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)
otherhand.org
otherhand.org
Unfortunately, I have heard more about this article because of the antagonistic rhetoric used while telling his tale and to sum up his personal beef with law enforcement personnel - and the "sorry, not sorry" follow-up message to attempt to make that rhetoric ok. To clean-up his rhetoric - he attempts to make clear that he respects any SAR team and his beef with with the Sheriff's Office. He also makes it convenient to add that SAR teams operate under the Sheriff's Office. I have known quite a few who have been offended by the author's statements. These are folks who volunteer and who give a significant amount of their personal time to respond, to put themselves in sometimes very risky/challenging situations to save lives and provide closure.
I have personally been on a number of very challenging searches and rescues in the vicinity of this incident - some of the toughest things I've faced in my life. This is my choice, I am a volunteer and am passionate about going into the mountains to help others as I would hope to be helped. I have known a number of truly good human beings who are passionate about giving of their personal time to help others get out of a difficult space and to help provide closure. In the end, none do it for anyone else's approval. That said, being painted with antagonism when you have done nothing but give can feel like a punch to the gut.
I hope that you will take the fruits from this narrative and leave behind the saltiness. First responders, whether full-time professionals or part-time volunteers, have their quirks. But there are many good humans out there and we have to believe in that -- otherwise, life would be way too salty.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Can you tell us what made your searches so challenging. I suspect the team is well prepared, has adequate resources, and knowledge of the area. Was it mostly the unbearable heat and conditions?
Conditions are often challenging (weather, terrain (ranging from Mt. Whitney to Death Valley), and carrying 'rescue' loads, which are much more cumbersome than a recreational load) -- but that is sometimes the fun part of the work.
There are also very long days sometimes. For instance, helicopter resources are not always guaranteed due to availability from other agencies, limited weather windows, and caps on pilot flight hours. You might get flown-in and dropped miles in the back-country in challenging terrain and have to hike out with heavy gear and a litter after an extensive, physical mission - but that is sometimes a part of the adventure.
The biggest challenge is often the mental/emotional side of things - seeing how the person, their friends and family are affected; thinking that you could have done something differently; or wondering how you've gotten so lucky yourself. There have been some heart-breakers in my short time, for sure.
SAR varies a lot depending on the team, agency, and coordinator. I think it's reasonable to remind people that these are largely volunteer efforts, but it's also reasonable to call out and criticize problems with SAR when they arise. These can be due to poor training, insufficient funding, an inexperienced or unenthusiastic coordinator, or a corrupt sheriff's office. (They exist.)
It's been a while since I last read through Tom's stuff, but as I recall, his main gripe was with the Inyo County Sheriff's Office (and, in the Ewasko case, NPS).
And he's right: because SAR operations, in the US, usually fall under the management of law enforcement agencies, you get as side effects the usual problems associated with law enforcement -- poor information management, big egos, paranoia, credit-seeking, and an emphasis on security over getting the job done, among other problems. This is especially problematic on big incidents where multiple agencies are involved.
CalOES exists in part to get all the kids to play along in the same sandbox, but that sometimes doesn't happen until the operation gets enough attention for a CalOES bigwig to appear in person, and then suddenly the various sheriffs involved start acting like adults.
(Purely for background: I've been in SAR for several years, currently on a hiatus but was extremely active and responded to numerous incidents across the state. I was trained and certified in incident management, was a team leader, and an instructor for several different skillsets. I've butted heads with sheriffs a couple times and had my wrists slapped a time or two. Sometimes they were in the right, sometimes I was.)
If they need a specific tool or capability only the police or the firefighters have, they ask them for help. That being said those alpine units are closer to an ambulance than to law enforcement, because that makes more sense
We do have an independent Mountain Rescue Association here that can certify teams for specialized technical rescues, and those teams are generally among the best in the country. Maybe not skilled to alpine mountaineering standards, but they can search for and retrieve people from extremely challenging terrain at 14,000 ft.
There is also a national search and rescue organization (NASAR), but they are a joke, speaking candidly. They have almost no presence in the west and we can't figure out what they're actually doing with the membership dues from the few suckers that decide to join in exchange for a sticker. They offer some certifications in some regions, but they're optional and many teams just develop their own programs.
But, nobody gets to deploy until a sheriff says-so, teams usually need a sworn (law enforcement) member escort on any operation, they are funded by their local sheriff's office (and whatever grants or community donations they can get), and the sheriff can decide when it's time to go home. That makes SAR across the US a patchwork quilt of solid teams and ragtag posses, with a broad variety of attitudes and standards.
There is a mutual aid system that allows counties to develop agreements (MOA/MOU) to render aid if requested, and is often used to dispatch higher-qualified resources to difficult operations in poorer counties.
But it's still, always, a law enforcement operation.
Even then it was clearly a bit of a grudge and certainly passive aggresive (oh, if you can't even tell me this, I bet you can't organise a SAR operation). But it's an understandable reaction - that final multi day grueling trip could have been avoided if they'd just been told about the children's remains beforehand. Maybe you'd also be annoyed if you went on a trip like that because someone withheld information from you.
It's extra frustrating that he was never properly told the location even afterwards, so after all that effort he (and we) can't know what really happened to them.
I completely understand it how you view this piece as you are out there putting your life at risk. However, for me it came across as nothing more as some minor annoyances that seemed justified from his point of view in the grand scheme of things. We have to remember, he was also out there putting his life at risk too.
In fact, I felt he gave the search and rescue a lot of praise and as a reader I left with a very positive view of the Search and Rescue effort and the people involved, and his annoyances seemed to be with the sharing of information in the years after.
The author sometimes seems a bit unaware that despite being aligned with Riverside Mountain RU, he's not really credentialed to be mixing and gaining access to the ear or information of all the other involved agencies. After he was essentially the source of a leak (the bank card) and had moved evidence, folks might have been justifiably hesitant to enlist him and/or engage him fully. Plus he accomplished something they weren't able to. Annoying! It's a premise for a great story that he inserted himself in this puzzle, and he got to see a whole heck of a lot of puzzle pieces, but does he deserve to place the last few pieces? And might he be a little bit bitter that he wasn't "better recognized" for his work? People are just people. Once we find them rotting in the desert we maybe realize that none of the little stuff matters.
I thank you endlessly for your service.
[1] Another haunting one is the Chretiens in 2011 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/seven-...
Also some of the best night sky in the country, and some areas are eerily still and quiet.
> In the stretch of highway between Fallon and Delta, Utah, a span of 409 miles (658 km), there are three small towns: Austin, Eureka, and Ely. This span is roughly the same distance as Boston, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, or Paris, France, to Zürich, Switzerland.
Also known as the "Loneliest Road in America".
Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman in Western Australia for 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across the Nullarbor Plain to Ceduna, South Australia.
It then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula as it continues eastwards for 470 kilometres (290 mi), before reaching Port Augusta.
The Kolyma Highway (aka Road of Bones) runs through over 2000 km of basically nothing, including the coldest place on Earth outside Antarctica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
And they're building another 2300 km:
A) East of the Appalachian Mtns
B) Appalachians to Mississippi River
C) Mississippi to Rockies
D) Rockies to Pacific
Of those, (C) is one or two orders of magnitude more remote than the others.
On the east coast, it's hard to be more than 30 minutes from a Starbucks. In South Dakota, it's easy to be 2.5 hours from the nearest one.
Broadly speaking, you have the Northeast Corridor, which is more or less a continuous conurbation from DC to Boston.
Outside of that, the Eastern US generally follows European models of density, with clear densely-populated urban regions (Chicago being the largest city, but more minor cities like Indianapolis or Dayton correspond well to minor urban centers in European countries, population wise), in a field of rural areas where there's basically a quantum of civilization anywhere the land is flat enough to actually support it. There's kind of omnipresent human presence in the rural areas of, say, Ohio (not unlike rural Netherlands, say), while the mountainous regions like West Virginia sees strips of small towns nestled in every river valley while the ridgelines are largely empty (like a lot of the Alps).
The boundary between rural-but-populated and rural-but-unpopulated in the US is not so much the Mississippi River, but the 100°W longitude line, the High Plains (or roughly a line running from Oklahoma City through Wichita and Omaha up to Winnipeg along I-29 and I-35). From here, there's basically nothing until you hit the Front Range and the beginning of the mountains.
Once you hit the Front Range and you look west, you're in a kind of combination of the previous two zones. There's again large urban centers. In some of the big valleys--Columbia, Snake, Central, and Willamette--you see basically a small slice of European-style omnipresent human presence in rural areas. But outside of these areas, the area is largely thoroughly unpopulated, more so than even the High Plains, due to either being a desert, mountainous, or both.
It really is a feat of engineering when you think about it that highways were built and maintained over such vast distances and through some really inhospitable terrain. When driving that road I sometimes ponder what it was like building it.
Highlights included going down the Tanami Track in a rental van during the wet season, taking nothing but a case of beer onto the 2000km 4wd-only Canning Stock Route[0] and getting bogged then rescued by a passing convoy, and walking down a seriously remote track for six hours with nothing but a day pack and a change of clothes then asking where "the next kiosk" was.
We were from a more built up area of Australia, so we had a good idea of what it was like in the really remote parts and prepared: two spare tires, spare bits and pieces like timing belts and radiator hoses, HF radio and an epirb, redundant water containers, checked in with the local police station to let them know our expected arrival dates, all the good stuff. It was still very strange being in a part of the world where people would stop if they saw you pulled over but not waving or signalling to them, because you might be in trouble and they knew there'd only be one or two cars a day. We were from an area of Australia where if you had a compass and followed any direction for a day or two on foot you'd eventually come to a road, but out there you could drive for a day and not see anything.
[0] The longest stock route in the world, and probably one of the worst roads in Australia, insofar as you can call it a road.
"Where are you from" I respond with something mid-western. "How far from New York or LA is that?" "I can drive a day in any direction and still be in the middle of nowhere".
It was cute to see the confused looks on everyones faces. I get it though, you drive a couple hours in any direction in Europe and you are likely to be in another country or a body of water.
Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city.
I'm sure you can have an even more surreal experience of the sort in any former USSR state or China, given their size.
Mongolia is great for this, travelers can basically camp wherever they want and the nomadic locals are so friendly. They often invite travelers to stay in their yurts, be fed, and experience what their lives are like. It's so incredibly welcome after days of isolated tent camping, an experience that transcends language barriers.
I don't think many people think we're running out of physical space to house humans... but rather whether we're running out of productive land with ample resources.
It doesn’t even directly have anything to do with resources or productive land, as when you really look at it, those are not usually limited either in any real sense (though might be more expensive than preferred due to relative economic competitiveness!).
For what purpose?
Why is 8 billion 'better' than 2.5 billion, and how many people is too many (or not enough).
There is land left for us to cover over Trantor style, but there is little left in the way of prime habitat, the river mouths and edges have been largely urbanised at the expense of wet marsh filters that keep our petri dish of a planet clean.
Are you volunteering to help reduce the population? If so, how exactly?
Total fertility rate (TFR) is lower with longer average education for females, higher GDP per capita, higher contraceptive prevalence rate, and stronger family planning programs.
It’s very convenient!
Why is it that you lack a stance on whether this is a good thing | bad thing?
Serious question.
I sometimes hike out there and often don't see another person all day. Rarely do I see a drop of water, though, even though I'm only there in the "wetter" time.
I don't think people literally mean there isn't enough land for more humans to stand on. It's about the resources required by Homo Sapiens.
Or... don't? There's something sublime about being outside, away from civilization, truly on your own. It's part of what draws me to wild places.
There's still a lot of places where cell service doesn't reach and unless you have a specialized unit, they will be worthless in situations like this.
Satellite connection in the new iPhone should work anywhere in the US for emergencies IIRC.
Basically, it could be helpful in the event that you've got the maps available to you and you're already somewhat familiar with how to use a GPS and what their limitations are. Also, keep in mind how often your navigation app tells you to take an exit off the highway when you're actually on the frontage road. It's a tool, but it's not magic. Someone linked the Chretiens' story. They had a GPS unit, but not the understanding of its limitations. Relying on it was what went wrong in their situation.
I fall back to a road atlas when I need to navigate outside of town if I'm not on the interstate. It just works. Topo maps for hiking and a compass. If you know how to use them, it takes 99% of the guesswork out of the equation.
And, especially for driving purposes, knowing things like the number of satellites locked on and how many feet of precision you have isn't very relevant.
I agree that in general backup topo maps and a compass are useful in any case.
But even maps are not magic. The knowledge that a "road" on a map may not be something navigable by a normal vehicle and driver or that a military base won't have a perimeter regularly patrolled by soldiers requires knowledge that a map won't give you.
A proper GPS unit will give you a lat/long reading as well as additional information that can help you determine how accurate those numbers are. This can be referenced on a topo map and to help determine your location in addition to landscape features. The accuracy of the GPS location is quite important as the difference between thinking you should make a slight turn onto a road that turns into a minimum maintenance quagmire and knowing you should stay on the visually identical main road can easily be measured in meters.
As far as whether cell phone navigation features could help people in these situations, they would have to already be prepared and familiar with its use. In many or most cases like this, the affected individuals were unfamiliar enough with what they were getting into that they would not have had the maps downloaded before finding themselves out of reach of cell signal. Without the maps downloaded, they'd be pretty much out of luck.
Even if they had the maps downloaded, there will be no real-time updates on road conditions as there is no cell signal. Most of the maps I've downloaded in the past didn't come with information such as roads only being passable at certain times of year. I know there are maps out there with that level of detail, but you'd have to have planned properly and made sure the maps were up to date and had the relevant details. At which point you probably wouldn't find yourself in the situation in the first place.
I've left this point alone so far, but your battery will not last for long trying to use it while outside of cell range. You can turn off all your data, wifi, etc, if your phone can decouple that from GPS availability, but it's still a lot of screen time and battery use. At some point, you're out of juice. It's more of a time constraint than a functional constraint, but it's something to keep in mind should you find yourself in this situation.
Basically, if folks are prepared for the situation, the cell phone navigation would probably help. The majority of people who wind up lost down a back road were not prepared and the cell phone nav wouldn't help.
Yes, you need to know how to use your phone and download the appropriate app(s) and maps while connected to the Internet. And you should probably have an external battery pack.
And many people won't prepare before setting out. But I'm not sure how different that is from a dedicated GPS unit or even map/compass. The only thing I use my ancient dedicated waterproof Garmin GPS for is sea kayaking so I don't risk my phone.
No judgment of anyone else who wants to carry one, of course! We all have to balance risks and rewards in whatever way makes sense for our own lives.
To their credit they had two cases of bottled water in their car so they weren’t entirely stupid.
It wasn't until I was an adult I realized I was assuming this was universal and sadly it's definitely not.
I hear stories like this more often than I'd like and all I can do is shake my head. It's just sad and tragic and unnecessary.
There is next to no way to be outside of civilization and basic infrastructure for more than 30min of walking. Ok, maybe it is hyperbole and it is really 1-2 hours of walking in any direction but you're honestly going to have a tough time to not run into people and infrastructure anywhere in the country.
Western Europe is really dense when it comes to distance between urban areas in a way that has to feel foreign/weird for Americans. The distance between everything feels really different in the US versus Germany which either side will never fully understand or grasp until they're exposed to it in real life.
I appreciated it truly for the first time when I nearly ran out of gas on Route 66 back when I was a tourist before moving to the US. The needle was at 0, I had sweaty palms like never before. In contrast, a 2 hour drive anywhere in Germany feels really long and annoying, you will certainly pass multiple major urban areas.
A 7h commute in the US vs. a 8.5h commute in Germany: https://imgur.com/a/OSuzrF8
The story that was shared by news outlets said she was searching for the briefcase full of cash that appeared in the movie Fargo by the Coen Brothers.
The reality was very different. [1] [2]
[1] https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/12/04/the-true-story-of-th...
I've been on a few extended searches and there's a lot of thought and research that goes into getting into people's heads to try to figure out where they went.
2020, 75 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582417
2019, 38 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263057
2016, 61 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582417 - June 2020 (75 comments)
Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263057 - Feb 2019 (38 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567 - July 2016 (61 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723065 - June 2015 (1 comment)
As of a week ago, they may have stopped now, teams have been searching the local mountains for a missing hiker. They're already 2 weeks into the search.
We take these institutions for granted, but I'm grateful to the team members and volunteers that work these cases.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1FdGZI6DDRPe3Y9-dtpLG...
I have a question about this. But before I proceed, let me be clear: I am not questioning the expense - in my view, it's well spent.
My question: when my local government nit-picks over the cost of a fixing a pot-hole on a main boulevard, how do costs like this get justified at the government level? Especially given the time frame: the vehicle had clearly been there a while and they had evidence that the Germans were there possibly as early as July and the search was October. Not to be grim, but the odds of a survival case were low. Not questioning the expense (well spent), but I'm curious to know more about how these sorts of expenses get justified and approved at the bureaucratic level? This is not a criticism, just a question.
But think about the police departments in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago. They quietly pay settlements of tens of millions of dollars per year for police misconduct of all kinds. Somehow these costs are buried in opaque sections of the budget that no one is willing to disclose. It never appears as a line item. It would take multiple annual freedom of information act applications to start to get to the bottom of what’s happening there.
https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/glade_sun/enjoying...
Edit: Found some info here - https://www.reddit.com/r/Missing411/comments/spn0uw/bill_ewa...
And more here, including comments from someone who found the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/sox6v4...
I don't know if the advantage was enough, but basically the conclusion was that they found the car first. And this type of story keeps on happening (like the car in Washington state a few years ago where the only person who died wandered away from their car), to the extent there's a real lesson to stay still.
Considering they went missing in June/July, and the car wasn't found until October, I think that's unlikely.
As a general rule, absolutely, but in this case it wouldn't have been enough on its own.
Its easy (well easier) with motorcycles, as you can readily get fuel out of the tank, assuming you have some fire source. But for a car? Not sure.
Mind, for this specific case, you have to appreciate that these folks were rather far from the beaten path. They were certainly far away from the local ranger stations and what not. Ideally someone may have seen it and reported it, but I wouldn't necessarily guarantee it. They were in a pretty large valley where this happened.
And, as an anecdote, my friends and I were stuck near there for 3 days one year. But it was in the mud, in the nearby dry ("dry") lake, and we were near a road. Never in any danger. But it was a fun extraction.
Heck, forget the foreign country part. I'd be a lot more prepared for somewhere like Death Valley if I drove there from the East than if I flew there and rented a car.
Just what I would try, not really sure if you could get it hot enough. Maybe a lithium battery would add enough oomph?
I thought about using the upholstery or plastic panels from the dash etc. but that's probably all flame retardant on any modern car.
You, you might get lucky when the ranger says "hey, wasn't that same car there 3 months ago? Let's check it out!" and recovers your desiccated body.
I would consider a signal mirror a last resort as using one means you can't take shelter and will cook all the much faster. Smoke is more of an option but I would much prefer to save my gasoline for running the AC than for burning a tire. If I had some other fuel source fine, but it's such a low probability scenario it's not something I'm going to prepare for. My safety standards out there is never to be farther from asphalt than I can hoof it back if need be.
That said, since it seems there wasn't much investigation until the car sighting in October, it's unlikely even that would have been enough.
If you're simply stuck in an otherwise functioning vehicle, in something easily digged like sand... just get unstuck and go back from where you came. You can use the carpets/floor mats from within the vehicle if needed to get yourself out of sand in a pinch. It's just a matter of getting dirty and manual labor. I get stuck in desert sand pretty regularly, and only abandon the vehicle that got me into the isolated mess as a last resort, i.e. if it's irreparably broken or totally out of fuel.
An automobile can very easily deliver its occupants to fatal-as-pedestrian situations. As a former mechanic and gearhead, I'd strongly recommend becoming mechanically inclined and able to improvise repairs on your vehicle if you intend to do such things. And select the vehicle such as to maximize success on that front.
Standard operating procedure is to intentionally deflate tires for sandy terrain... fully inflated all-seasons tend to just spin.
I own a desert cabin on an unpaved road, and once drove the ~12 miles from town with a flat by deliberately keeping the flat side in the soft sandy shoulder for the entire pavement portion (~11 miles) of the trip. There was very little drama, and the wheel with the flat only got its paint scuffed up by the sand. Of course I drove slow to not beat up the bodywork with tire carcass, but it was perfectly mobile despite being a drive wheel on an open diff.
But WRT to ze Germans, they presumably got flats after making the idiotic choice to drive off-road in a rugged desert terrain in an unprepared minivan. Don't do that.
The more fundamental problem I suspect is that they may not have been thinking clearly given all of the empty alcohol bottles that were found. In the van, there was an empty bottle of beer and an an empty bottle of Bourbon. There was another beer bottle 2 miles from the car. Near their remains were found, there was an empty 2 liter bottle of wine and another empty bottle of beer.
I recently got a BMW 128i quite stuck in some sand at a sandy beach parking lot. I didn't have any reasonable tools and my tool-less efforts to get unstuck got me even more stuck.
Were I stuck in the desert with the BMW, limited water, no shade an no tools, it probably would have been a pretty serious problem. Things can go from manageable to unmanageable quite quickly sometimes.
The advantage of sand is you can easily shuffle it around even with bare hands. It takes time and labor, you'll get filthy and sweaty, but just keep making little mounds under the tires like four ramps with the floor mats under the tires. Use the jack one corner at a time to make these mounds under them. It'll gradually make progress in the direction you desire, gravity assisting.
I often help tourists out of washes near my desert cabin, being surrounded by airbnbs, it's a comically regular occurrence around there.
They tend to get frustrated and give up very quickly, after what efforts they made only worsened things by fixating on digging out the tires (?!?!?), neglecting to realize the underbody is completely beached on the ground. But it requires actually getting down on the ground and filthy to even see the real problem at the underside, sometimes requiring substantial digging just to get at that.
One thing that is genuinely problematic though; VW/Audi likes to use a weird half-scissor jack that's basically useless in sand/gravel/dirt, anything loose. It just scoops the ground like a shovel instead of lifting the car. The ubiquitous Japanese compact scissor jacks are far superior.
It would have been about a 4 mile walk with an elevation gain of about 1000 feet. Admittedly not easy with little kids, but they ultimately did make it 8 miles in the other direction.
I can only guess they had absolutely no idea where they actually were - but perhaps thought they knew where they were. That is the only explanation for continuing forwards on foot rather than turning back. If you're looking at the wrong place on a map, especially an inadequate map, it's easy to think you're going the right way when they are 'dead' wrong.
Though they were in a bad situation in any case, with hindsight, they should have headed back down to West Side Road--not that there would be much traffic at that time of year. And even tried to cross the basin to Badwater if possible.
The Geologist's cabin is about 4500 feet higher than the valley, so you'd expect the high temp to be about 100, but in the shade with adequate water (which there is at the Geologist's cabin), it's probably not life threatening.
I think when people ask this question, what they actually mean is, "what would be a smart thing to do if I were in this situation?" In the interests of answering that question with the best advice currently available:
- Tell someone where you're going, how you're planning to get there, and when you should be back. It should be someone whose judgement you trust. I know, this is a chore, it's more fun to just take off on a whim for a weekend. But really, this is the number one thing that can get you found.
- Today we have really cool Garmin InReach devices that work (nearly) everywhere in (nearly) all conditions. They aren't terribly expensive. You can push a button for an SOS and a nearby agency may receive your coordinates. I'm using some qualifiers here because heavy cloud cover or snow can interfere with the devices, they can run out of battery, there can be miscommunications for your coordinates (I've personally seen this happen), and the team dispatched to your location may not be terribly motivated for any number of reasons. InReach devices are not well-loved by SAR teams because of their tendency to get activated accidentally or because a hiker "got too tired to keep going" (neither of which is a good enough reason not to respond to any new InReach alert as a potentially life-threatening emergency).
- Learn you some wilderness first aid if you can, it's probably the single best tool in your box for getting you out of bad situations. You'll get better at recognizing some common ailments and potentials for injury and you'll have a better sense of what to carry. I did not like the REI/NOLS WFA class, but it's better than nothing and is available in many popular outdoor areas.
- Recognize when you're in the shit, stop, and reassess as calmly as possible. This has got to be the most frequently recurring pattern I see in accident reports and debriefings. So many people, even ones that should know better (maybe especially ones that should know better) get tunnel vision as things start to get progressively worse. Different sports have different phrases for it, in mountaineering it's called summit fever. The road is muddy, the sky is gray, and your car is starting to bog down? STOP. Take a few beats. Eat a candy bar. Get out, stretch your legs if appropriate. Whatever, the point is to do something different for a minute so you have time to reflect on your situation. Reassess: have things been getting worse for the last few minutes? What happens if they continue to worsen? Why do you think they'll get better if you keep going forward? Then, make a decision.
- When lost, the current advice from NASAR and most organizations is to stop moving and stay put, but this can be really situational. Some situations may call for continuing to move towards something that looks like civilization, but there are also lots of areas where trying to do this ends up getting you into serious trouble. Once you deviate very far from your intended plan, the chances of finding you fall off a cliff (heh... little black humor there). Generally, your best chances of being found are on a trail, in a clearing.
Yep, Admiral Cloudberg's analysis of plane crashes has this as a recurring theme, practically every time there isn't a mechanical failure, the crash is "controlled flight into terrain".
Another thing to mention is have GPS and maps. It is good to have backups whether hiking GPS and/or paper maps and compass. If using phone, keep it charged and have battery charger.
Finally, be prepared for the conditions. Carry the essentials while hiking. Carry lots of water in desert. Carry water in car. The Germans would have been in much better shape with lots of water in car.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-sov...
Sana Obruent — Dyatlov (2017): https://youtu.be/2tNVZqbR1YA
If that were not an option I would wait for nightfall, keep all lights and navigation, space blankets, sun umbrella and the jerry can of water, abandon everything else and try to hoof it. I would consider success unlikely. Given the supplies they had I would consider survival impossible.
Is there a name for this?
https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/wildflower-seasons.htm
"HEAT WARNING. Hiking is not recommended."
This is despite the park recommending the hike on their map/brochure and at the visitor centre...
Obviously it gets hot there and being close to Vegas means people show up in jeans and with poor wayfinding skills. But I do wonder if the sign dissuades no one but desensitises others. Bit of a balancing act trying to adequately warn people who pay little attention, but keep it as the wild experience people want to have.
I guess they should not scrimp on signage and put more explicit descriptions, such as "if you can't run half a marathon under X hours or don't have Y liters of water per person you will likely die".
I like the per-trail signage idea. Broader things like 4L/day recommendations aren't going to seem realistic for many people. Or education around over-provisioning water: added weight makes for more exercise, and means you're not miserly rationing water and hating the hike.