MISSING HIKER IN ARKANSAS

Thank you for helping with the search.

+1,

Thank you Luke

https://kawx.org/kawx-news/444907

Hiker named but still not found

Found

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/missing-hiker-found-alive-after-6-days-in-woods/ar-AACA3mB?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=HPDHP

Great news. Must be a thrill for the SAR folks when you get such a good outcome.

But you do have to despair about people who go into the backwoods so unprepared. This is a a park that’s only about 10 miles x 4 miles, with plenty of paths and navigation features and surrounded by roads. And he had a phone with him too. How in the name of goodness could anyone get lost here for a full 6 days??

It just shows that if it’s hilly and forested, someone unprepared and without good navigational skills can get into serious trouble even in what appears with an overview to be a fairly small area.   If you lose the trail and get disoriented, and you can’t see very far, and the terrain is difficult….   even one mile can be a long way.

I’m glad to hear a happy ending to the story!

Did you read about this one?      Lost for 17 days!

The south and west borders of the wooded areas were @ 2 miles away. West and SW and NW and north are downhill. The Ocean is @ 6 miles downhill north.  I’ve been in that forest and it’s some rough terrain and  can be intense vegetation but still it’s hard to believe. Now if you went east and uphill they might never even find a trace but why would anyone go uphill since you would KNOW that’s the wrong way. Amazing story.

I am glad it ended well; people make mistakes and if panic sets in we are all more likely to make bad choices.

@obx hiker

According to the lady herself in the Hawaii incident:

“I wanted to go back the way I’d come, but my gut was leading me another way — and I have a very strong gut instinct”

At that point she was a few feet from the trail (she had stepped off for a rest). Instead of casting around  for the path like any normal person, she set off through the undergrowth in the wrong direction based on her “very strong gut instinct”.

In the case of the Arkansas hiker, a very simple compass could have easily saved the day. Like the one in the pic for example. Weighs only 4 grams. I don’t go on ANY hike without it. All the AR hiker would have needed to do (in the relatively small area he was in) was just follow one direction on the compass and he’d soon have come to a road or waterway.

Of course panic often takes away any rational thinking in such situations. If water is available and temps aren’t too cold, you can last for weeks, even without  food.

People laugh at survivalists, but when you hear stories about people missing in remote areas, it doesn’t seem so crazy after all.

I was told long ago by a SAR guy that many lost people tend to walk in circles.  The interesting part is that right handed people tend to walk counterclockwise and left handed walk in a clockwise direction.  The theory is that the dominant leg is stronger and has a longer stride when one is very fatigued.   Who knows if there is any facts there, but interesting.

I wonder how many miles of hiking it takes on average to compete the circle.

It also seems like it would be pretty hard to walk in circles on a mountain or hills or creek/stream/etc.

Arthur: “The interesting part is that right handed people tend to walk counterclockwise and left handed walk in a clockwise direction.”

I was hiking a few weeks ago with a small group on Cedar Mesa in Utah and we actually intentionally checked that theory. We were trying to hit a way-pointed entry/access point to drop into a canyon and didn’t have the usual horizon orientation markers like distant peaks which is a little unusual. We were all right-handed and we found we were consistently sliding off to the right of the line. It seemed that the problem was more that when we encountered an obstacle or impediment we tended to take the rightward way around.  Returning to the parked vehicle we tried again and in this case as a group made  conscious and agreed upon adjustments to the left whenever we avoided an obstacle to the right and also consciously tried to take a leftward approach to obstacles. This time we missed the car to the left but not by much. The tendency to slide off line to the right was pretty interesting and consistent; but it really seemed it was the tendency to go to the right around the problem. Maybe the instinct is to keep your right hand free and use the left to ward off brush… or just to keep the right hand, right side free to move/react almost by instinct. So……Maybe lost people are over-compensating?

So anyway naturally I googled it: why we walk in circles

A few months ago I was on an evening wander in one of the most remote and featureless areas of Dartmoor when I was caught in a real pea-souper at dusk. The fog was so thick I could barely see my feet. There was no moon and no wind and no way to get orientated.

So I reached for my map and compass only to realise that I’d been reorganising my pack after the winter and forgotten to repack them (I’m walking pretty much every day and guess I’d just got sloppy).

I knew the area well and decided to continue my intended route as a navigation exercise, thinking I could dead-reckon my way back. There were gathering features on both sides so I was in no real danger, but they were a mile off my route and I didn’t expect to hit them. I was sighting ahead to a clump or a boulder as I went and pretty confident I was walking straight as I headed for a tor a couple of miles away.

So I was a bit dismayed to hit a stream and realise that I’d veered 90 degrees off route. The stream was a handrail home so it wasn’t an issue, but I was surprised how I’d lost my bearings so quickly. Quite sobering.

(This all led to a surreal moment when I was wading through knee-deep bog in fog so thick I couldn’t see my feet, with hundreds of little frogs croaking all around me…)

I’m right footed and left handed, and had veered to the left, for what it’s worth.

Note to self – don’t wander into the middle of featureless moorland at night without any means of navigation…

Interestingly, I’m the opposite of Geoff being right handed and left footed. Probably would have been left handed as well, but a left hand injury at 5 may have nipped that in the bud.

I’ve used my “gut instinct” to successfully find my way before. Perhaps the difference being is that I’ve been meditating since age 13 and now am almost in my 40’s. I’ve trained self to listen to that small, still voice within, so to speak.  I’ve taken part in about a handful of remote viewing experiments over the years, and in the majority of them (when the rules were adhered to, in one case it wasn’t by the person helping), have gotten definite, above chance hits about a target that I had no conscious knowledge of. All I had for a reference point, was a random set of numbers, symbolically representing/connecting to the target.

Many here may scoff at that, but the US military had remote viewing programs going every year continuously for some almost 18 years in a row. Each year, the program would get reviewed and refunded. Towards the very end, the CIA got involved right around the time that Clinton’s Freedom of Information act was being drafted, which would allow for non high/super sensitive national security information to be released to the public after 25 years (though in actual  practice, often highly redacted or the like).  When the CIA became involved in the program, they poo pooed on the program, saying the results were inconclusive and at least publicly dismantled it (it could have went black ops or privatized for all we know).  Funny timing around that whole thing though, if you think a little more deeply and critically about it.

I can picture the CIA around this time scrambling, “Oh crap, the public will likely find out about these programs in 25 years. We got to try to play it down, minimize and smear it, and say it didn’t really work.”

Now, these programs came to be a joint venture by the DIA and the army, and as mentioned, they got reviewed every year for funding for a rather long time. If they were not producing results far above what chance would allow, it never would have gone on THAT long. This was a collective of people involved, and military people tend to be fairly practical/pragmatic in orientation.

Many of the former military people that were trained and involved and actually partook in these programs, as the remote viewers, have come out since then and have said, yeah, it worked more often than not.

Give it a rest, Justin.  You do what you wish if you get lost, but a recommendation to use magic to rescue yourself does not belong in serious threads about navigation.

Give what a rest?  Having different experiences, perceptions, and knowns than yourself?  And then having the “audacity” to not give a shite what others think about same or me, even though I know it’s rather different than the majority?

I suggest you focus a little more on the facts of the DIA and US Army collaborating for almost 18 years and running remote viewing programs the entire, continuous time, going up for review every year and getting refunded every year.   Now, if one gets their “factual info” about things like this from movies (cough, Maaahhahahhahahahah), then good luck getting to the real truth.

But in case it wasn’t clear, I am not recommending this to others. A good compass and map should be something one is carrying around and knows how to use if they are in such areas.  However, if one still gets lost despite all “good practices” or the like, then nice to know that such potential exists if you train, practice, and hone same (as I believe almost all can do, if there is just a little open mindedness to try and practice).

So until you explain in a fully logical, internally consistent way, why the DIA and Army would run and re-fund such programs for nearly 18 years continuously, if it was nothing but “magic” and delusion, then I will not stop talking about such facts.

Deal?

Did you report my reply Ralph?

Did your previous reply really get reported Justin?

In a forum where people are repeatedly told to leave extra insulation or extra food at home let alone a knife or their phone… 😂

It appears that way Kattt.

Wait, I just looked out my window, and behold, a Christmas miracle in June!  I’m seeing tiny, delicate little snowflakes falling… NOOOOO!!!!!!  Now those beautiful snowflakes are melting before they reach the ground. Sigh…so beautiful until they melted into oblivion…

Who needs bear spray, when one has wit?

Well, it’s been mysteriously unreported.  A higher power hath smiled down uponeth mineself, verily.

I’m not gong to name names, but an uber-experienced BPLer, with serious long-distance and off-trail cred and 80 pounds of caribou meat on his back started humping that load back to the trailhead, dead-reckoning over a grassy volcano in the Aleutians, only to find himself, an hour later, back in the camp he started from.  Low clouds, no perceptible direction of sunlight, and everything was grass and lava.

It’s a place that’s taught me to always keep a wristband button compass on my watchband AND LOOK AT IT FREQUENTLY.

Kattt, the project Stargate Justin was referring to was heavily influenced by Scientology , it  proved to be a total waste of time and money.

BTW, can I remind you that the only time Justin tried to give a demonstration of his powers he failed ?