Over the years I’ve been backpacking I have run into a lot of people lost out there — when I was a SAR volunteer the way some of the folks we looked for handled things astounded me. Some people develop mental maps and stick to them, even believing the compass to be broken rather than to change their belief. People rely on cell phones and find that even if there is a shred of a signal they cannot get out to anyone. In all the time I was in SAR we never once used a GPS coordinate pulled from a cell phone pinging a tower — I suspect that while this is possible it was just never done, because we had such a good record for finding people within the first day or so, as we trained for and often did deploy at night when people tend to stop walking. (I don’t believe that anyone but the Fresno team does this — the park teams definitely don’t.)
Leaving an itinerary (reconn.org can help you organize the information — a very well informed form) and doing some preventative “stay found” efforts is still very much needed. Don’t put yourself in a situation when the electronics, whatever you have, is your last resort. For all the “reliability” of the two way devices, I have seen them fail utterly, and been part of the effort to find a person who relied solely on them. One of the first callouts I was called for (I couldn’t go) was a party who knew well enough what the weather would be, went out for five days, found that the system blew in a few days early and then they were stuck in a whiteout at high elevation — they tried to use the GPS in a whiteout and were picked off a ledge two days later when the weather cleared and the chopper could find them. It was a stellar example of someone who believed so much they knew how to use a GPS, and yet…
Water bars all over Yosemite have little use trails that wander off into the woods. Instead of stepping over them, people walk along them and out into the trees. We lost a woman on a switchback going up to Ten Lakes one time — she didn’t stop walking when the use trail from a water bar on the end of a switchback petered out. She ended up being found by a cross country backpacker coming down from Grant Lakes, who returned her to the trail about twenty minutes after we noticed her missing. I shudder to think how far she would have gone if he hadn’t found her.
There are bears in Sequoia NP that steal backpacks, so the rangers will tell you not to leave them sitting anywhere. We were on the High Sierra trail when a companion decided to stop to pee — she and another hiker were ahead of me, out of sight, when they did this. He came back down and continued to the junction of a connector trail that ascends toward Wolverton, and when I caught up to him she wasn’t there, and he was confused. He remember her going a ways off to be separate from him and pee, but she didn’t return. As it turned out she had come down the hill at a different angle, hit the connector trail instead of the main trail without realizing it was not the main trail, as she had not gotten to the junction yet, and continued uphill knowing we would be going up before getting to Crescent Meadow. We waited at Panther Creek eating lunch and waiting — waited and waited, and then figured, we would find her at Wolverton when we went back on the shuttle to get a car, or at Crescent Meadow, or she had perhaps fallen down the steep hill in which case we would need rangers anyway — she caught up to us. Out of breath, upset because we “didn’t wait for me” — she had run into another backpacker and gotten a correction. She had a map. She even had a fair idea of the lay of the land. What she didn’t do was return to the trail the same way she had gone out, and missed a junction. Assumed that since the HST is running along that hill, traversing, she would hit it again. If not for the bears she would have left her pack on the trail and then returned to it — and nothing would have gone wrong.
Largay did as a lot of people do, say “I’ll just stay on the trail” — I know that doesn’t work as well as people like to think, for the reasons that are obvious in her story. It just isn’t that simple. Thousands of people get out there and come back, some with stories of unintended adventures that for some can be a wake-up call — then there are the ones who almost make a religion out of pushing their luck. You can make the same choice repeatedly and be fine, until that one day that that choice ends with a bad situation and more bad choices, and unfortunately, once you’re caught in that situation you can’t go back and undo the initial mistake….
What stands out to me most, as the most common thing in those who get into a lot of trouble, is complacency — I’ve done this a hundred times, I won’t have problems. I’ve gone pee a thousand times, I’ve gone without emergency kit hundreds of times, I’ve gone without a tent a hundred times…. I have all these trainings, I won’t get lost.
I’ve trained people in map and compass — and I still tell people signing up for things on my meetup group that while I am a fairly confident navigator, I am not immune to poor judgment and people who come with me are better off having those skills as well, on any trip involving off trail segments. Because it’s true. No one is immune — I may never have gotten lost, and I may have a good sense of how to get up a steep route, but that doesn’t mean my number won’t be up next time I try, and I really don’t want a group of people relying exclusively on me. What if I get to the middle of the Tablelands and fall down, lapse into unconsciousness? Who’s going to get back to Pear Lake for the ranger then?
