Hiking Accident – Learning from my Mistakes

Sounds like you handled the situation well. All in all I’d say, sometimes injuries happen. Glad you’re mostly healed.

Thanks for sharing.

You had cell reception??? I don’t even have it at home.  Good thing you were able to call for help.

Yes, I had excellent cell reception which was fortunate. It would have taken my wife many hours to realize I was missing, and many hours after that for them to find me if I hadn’t had cell reception.

Perhaps the only recommendation I would make for future such hikes is to also carry one of those emergency bivies or blankets. Would allow you to survive longer is such conditions, and give some protection from rain.

A Spot or an InReach or an EPIRB would have sent Lat-Long coordinates to someone who knew how to use them (the central SAR dispatch center) who then, hopefully, could have conveyed that to your local responders in a useable-by-them form.

It surprises me that in this day and age, especially among SAR, that they couldn’t dial your GPS co-ordiantes right in and then translate that to whatever road/trail map they needed.

What were you sitting on?  A foam pad, perhaps scavenged from your pack’s construction makes a HUGE difference on cold ground.  Or, often better yet, just sit on the entire empty pack.  If you did have a piece of foam, you could roll it into a megaphone for more reach as you called out to SAR.

Something else you did right was having enough charge on your cell phone.  GPS and those calls to 911 take power and can go on longer than you’d think (as you found out).  It seems like fully half of rescues now involve, “Then the victim’s cell-phone lost power. . . “.

So something else you did right was NOT calling all your friends and posting about your predicament on Facebook – that’s now the norm in such situations.  Use only one point of contact: let them deal with the outside world while you manage your situation and conserve your phone batteries.

@idester, good point about the mylar blanket / bivy. I will bring one on all future day hikes.

@davidinkenai, I did have the presence of mind to sit on the entire empty backpack which had a minimal foam so that was another thing I did right. Regarding phone battery, I did turn off BlueTooth immediately, and the 911 dispatcher reminded me to turn on “low power settings” on the iPhone, which I did.

I do think I’ll get an inReach.

This was in a fairly rural area of WV with volunteer fire departments, but I was surprised that my exact GPS coordinates didn’t help them. I had given fairly precise directions (on a road 1 mile from a scenic overlook / parking lot) which turned out to be totally accurate but they still took quite a while to find me The rescuers had fanned out and were covering 50′ on each side of the road in abundance of caution, so it may have just taken them a while to get to me. But there was a lot of back-and-forth between me and the dispatcher about where I was. I am not criticizing them because they were wonderful and saved my bacon, but I was surprised about this.

What format were the GPS coordinates? That might’ve been the source of confusion regarding position.

If using lat/lon the easiest format is dd.dddd    I don’t know what the standard is for SAR but that would be my choice.

Glad it turned out OK. It’s fairly easy to hurt an ankle on the trail. Here’s my dumb accident:

Out for a weekend in the SNP which I do at least 6 times a year. I stopped on the trail to take a leak and have a snack. I had set my pack standing up in the trail. Just as I was bending over to pick it up, the wind blew just hard enough to topple my pack. The mountain sloped steeply off trail and my pack did one flip down hill- and then another and another. In my panic I started after my pack catching the toe of my right foot on a root and I fell off the trail, cartwheeling down the mountain, passing my pack. I somersaulted about 50 ft before landing on my side in a brush pile with a big “crack” sound.

I lay there for a minute thinking the crack was my ribs as I had pain in my rib cage. I tried spitting and no blood came up- i thought that’s good. I got up and crawled back up to the trail retrieving my pack on the way. No protruding ribs, but scrapes and a little bleeding here and there. I continued my hike and took two naproxins that night and still barely slept from the pain in my ribs. Hiked out 15 miles the next day and went home. Finally got X-rayed two weeks later and no fractures showed up.

Lesson learned: always lay your pack down in a spot so that it cannot roll over and if it does, let it come to a rest and then calmly go after it.

@rsrogers4:

Thanks much for posting this – as already pointed you kept your cool and made several goo d decisions.

@bobmny10562:
“What format were the GPS coordinates? That might’ve been the source of confusion regarding position.”

From a long time SAR volunteer here in the south SF Bay Area, his SAR team uses the UTM grid (WGS84) on all their devices and searches. I don’t know if they also use UTM coordinates to communicate with dispatchers and others.

LatLong-to-UTM conversion calculators are easily found with a google search.  While there might be issues with data sets, the result should get them closer than guessing.

Regarding sternum strap emergency whistles – While better than nothing, the ones I’ve tested operate at the upper end of the auditory frequencies and do not carry very far.  Do some testing the next time you are out with someone.

Interesting discussion. I have always wondered about the SARS use of GPS. The ability to use GPS coordinates seems to vary widely with the various authorities performing the rescue.  It seems UTM is becoming the preferred format since it is the least ambiguous.  EPIRBs only use 14 bits for Lat and 15 bits for Long, so they can only report minutes to 2 places.  That only narrows the search area to 1.1 km. Better than nothing, but if they would have added just on bit it could have been 10x as accurate.  The international and US standard for GPS reporting is the format 45 35.25N 101 15.16W.    When giving gps information verbally, this is the standard.   “Three nine degrees, three six decimal zero six minutes North by seven six degrees, five one decimal four two minutes West.”  Look up CGSIC for the specs.  Now, whether an individual local SARS group adhere to this, I would love to hear feedback from someone who knows. So, any SARS members out there who could enlighten us on how to report our position?

My thoughts are similar to Greg’s on the whistle.  If they couldn’t here you yelling they probably wouldn’t have heard your whistle.  Whistles are good for producing noise long after your voice would have gone horse.

In terms of frequency, I will say higher pitchers carry better outside and lower pitches carry better indoors.  I’m an engineer and should be able to tell you why, but I haven’t the foggiest.  My knowledge comes from refereeing.  I referee kids hockey and soccer games and in soccer (outside) I used a higher pitched whistle than hockey (inside).  I have tried switching whistles both ways and they each have noticeably less carry for the other sport.

Good points about the whistle not carrying much further than me yelling, that makes sense.

I had given them coordinates in LatLong in format dd.dddd. The 911 dispatcher didn’t seem to use the coordinates for anything but maybe he did and I just didn’t realize it. He was relaying messages between me via my cell and the SAR folks via (I think) radio. Again, not criticizing the response at all – they were awesome and highly professional, and even though I felt terribly guilty about needing to call for help they were incredibly gracious about it.

@jimmyjam, that sounds frightening. Glad your ribs were okay. It is pretty amazing how fast things can go sideways.

SINCE you had cell phone coverage (and knew you would) a GPS to SMS app might have really helped. It sends a link to your position on Google Maps as well as your longitude and latitude.  Here’s an example of what it sends:

Cheaper than a Spot, but ONLY if you have cell phone coverage.  I didn’t know such an app existed until someone posted it here a year or so ago.

The fun thing about standards is that there are so many of them.  I would expect most SAR teams in the US to be using UTM.  The official standard (FEMA, US NSARC, USCG, etc.) for ground operations is USNG, which is close enough to UTM and effectively identical to MGRS.  (Aircraft use degrees and decimal minutes.)

IIRC EMS dispatchers will see coordinates in decimal degrees.  Asking them to pass on grid coordinates could reduce the chances of dispatchers mangling the lat/lon format.

One skill that has served me well since I was a kid is being able to whistle loudly with my fingers.  I’m not advocating leaving your real whistle at home, but it’s easy to learn and comes in handy if you lose your real whistle.

Thanks for the reminder that even simple hikes can go wrong. You were well prepared. The only suggestion I might have is to start a fire with enough green saplings to create some smoke.

@kbabione, thanks I will download that app even if I get an InReach. For $0.99, seems worth it.

@cameronm, starting a fire with saplings for smoke hadn’t occurred to me. That’s a good one. Thanks.

Thanks Rick for a valuable reminder.

I am curious to ask: next time youre in an identical situation, would you consider turning around when you hit the snowline, rather than deal with the inherent added complexities, like not knowing exact depth with each step? I have waded many river miles while fishing in water too murky to know the substrate, and it can be very taxing/exhausting. The downside is a mere soaking though, when I fall in, much less dangerous than your story.

@b14, that’s a very good question and one that I’ve been pondering. The snow wasn’t that deep – less than ankle deep most of the time, with a few random 1-2 foot drifts that I could mostly avoid. But you are right that it introduced uncertainty and risk.

To be totally honest, I think two things worked against me: 1) hubris, in the sense that I have more book learning in backpacking techniques than practical experience and I think I was overconfident in my skills; and 2) it was gradually getting more dangerous so by the time I thought about turning back I was so close to my destination (the gravel road at the parking lot) that I pushed on despite the increasing danger. If I am totally honest with myself, I had a sense of foreboding that I pushed aside.

Not that this was anywhere near the gravity of the situation but these are the exact same dynamics in “Into Thin Air” by Jon Kraukhauer and I’m embarrassed to admit that having read the book in a masters degree course on how to make better decisions I still fell into the trap.

When I hit the snow line the snow was just a dusting but it was getting worse as I was going along. I was considering turning around just as the accident happened; I think more experience would have told me to turn around earlier. As it turns out, the first time I fell in dicey conditions I broke my ankle. If I had fallen before [like on a past hike] without breaking my ankle, I would have been more cautious.

I think now that I’ve had that experience (and trust me, having a broken ankle is a pain in the a$$), I wouldn’t have ventured into the snow line past the snow dusting level without spikes, and maybe not at all because it wasn’t worth it. The SAR folks were very kind and professional but I could tell they were puzzled by me being on a snowy ridge by myself in what they considered to be tennis shoes (Lone Peaks).

“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” – Vernon Law

It’s not so much about how far the sound of a whistle can travel but about how much the sound is “not natural”, especially when repeated in some sort of pattern.  We also intuitively know that the sound of a whistle is meant to broadcast an alert and/or draw attention.  That is, when you hear yelling, the human voice, from a distance you might not know if it is a call for help or if it is just someone communicating to others farther down the trail.  You hear a whistle, you know something is going on.

speaking of reading material, you might enjoy the book Deep Survival.

I would have been wearing boots, but there is no way I would have turned around in those conditions.  And I’m sure I have less experience than you.  Then again, maybe I’ll be writing the next accident trip report.

It is my belief that most injuries occur when one tries to not fall.  I fully subscribed to going with the fall instead of trying to fight it.

I personally believe that a good whistle will carry farther than even my loud mouth.  But I’ve never had to test that theory.

I think you were fairly well prepared and it was just a “freak” accident.