are tech toys spoiling the wilderness experience?

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

And on the subject of SOS devices… Here’s what I came up with:

I lost my hiking partner on day 3 of a 10 day trip. I waited many hours and several different junctions and asked everyone I saw if they had seen her. When I saw three arrows in the sand pointing up our next trail, I thought they were from her so I hurried to catch up, but I was delayed by getting lost in some brush for a while and then by a thunderstorm.

I couldn’t tell if I was ahead of her or behind her after all that so just in case, I kept going forward.

I used the trail grapevine, asking people I saw if they had seen her. One person was doing a loop opposite direction from me and the first time I saw that person she said she had not seen my friend, and a few days later, the second time I saw her, she said she HAD seen my friend later that same day. So now I thought she was for sure behind me. Then a ranger told me that another ranger had seen her somewhere else ahead of me so I decided she could be either doing her own thing in a smaller loop than mine or behind me, and either way if I went a little further and then slowed down, I would find her.

Meanwhile, she used her intuition to find me. She figured, when I never returned to where we had been going when we lost each other, I would probably stick to my original itinerary. She calculated how long it would probably take me to reach Forester Pass. The day she thought I might be there she climbed the pass. When I climbed the pass, day 7, there she was at the top.

Of course, this relied on the trail being populated. But a lot of places people go are populated. I used the trail grapevine, she used intuition, I left notes for her just in case, she actually retrieved one of them.

This wasn’t an actual SOS situation, but to some people it could have been. We solved it as best as we could after making our mistakes, without technology and without overreacting.

[Author]

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