I've actually been reading about that. And I'm going hiking this weekend. But I will just hold it as I'll only be out two nights.
Great. Then I'll have to post the news coverage "Pennsylvania Researchers Report On Unusual Case Of Pun-Induced Kidney Failure."
But, you know, you have a GPS rather than just relying on your phone, I assume?
I read about it too (although not that exact article, I will in a second) and I just could not understand how she had managed to get so far off the trail. I know Maine is a bit desolate, but it really surprised me. (Especially since she was almost done! Very experienced!)
You aren't supposed to rely on GPS (though I have one). You're supposed to rely on a map and compass, which I have also. I'm bringing the instructions to the compass.
I guess I could just shit right on the trail, but I gather that's bad form.
She was just a 10-minute walk from a dirt trail that turns into a road.
This is one of those details that does create hyperventilation. This was a much better article in regards to explaining how it happened than the one I read. Good thing I now currently live in a place where it is pretty much impossible to get lost. (I don't mean all of Great Britain, obviously. Just my bit.)
I know nothing about any of this. Trees without little fences around them baffle and confuse me.
(Actually, I sort of like hiking, in the 'walking in the woods' sense. But I have no outdoor skills other than those half-remembered from survival manuals I read as a kid. Rabbit starvation, follow running water downstream to civilization, don't build your fire under a snow-covered pine tree or your husky will give up on you as useless and leave you to die, that kind of thing.)
No fence will hold back a tree if it really wants to get you, especially not a little once.
Nytimes article had some different info. A senior prone to anxiety and a poor sense of direction is perhaps not a person who should be in that country by herself.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/missing-hiker-geraldine-largay-appalachian-trail-maine.html
Yeah, that sounds as if she probably should have turned back when her hiking partner had to quit.
Yes. I wonder about her actual level of experience. She was hiking with a friend until New Hampshire. What if the friend was doing all the planning? And there are supposed to be lots of people around on the trail. It's possible that when she got lost, she only ever been alone rarely and briefly.
I saw this story as well. It does seem especially strange that it could happen to an experienced hiker. I guess there's the old saying that it's always the best swimmers who drown, but I'm not sure that applies here. It doesn't sound like she was doing anything especially risky.
I still wonder if she didn't have a small stroke.
But for someone afraid of being alone, I'm pretty impressed at how long she survived. That's not bad.
I know a lot of people through my parents of roughly that age and inclination (and who would do things like that) so I think it hits close to home for me.
I was thinking of sending this in as a guest post, but I'm very lazy. The hiking community has a cities-under-the-sea crowd that tried to convince people she was killed by the Navy when somebody snapped during a training exercise that was too real.
It's difficult to understand as well - but then, I don't know what the Appalachian Trail actually looks like. Is it a recognisable trail - as in a wide path? Or is it just a footpath that could be mistaken for an animal track?
Because, you know, it's a linear feature - it should be really difficult to miss! She knew she was north of the trail - why didn't she just walk south again?
This article has a map - and here's another
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@44.9795272,-70.4031738,3425m/data=!3m1!1e3
Looks like she was on that knoll due east of the little water feature (Redington Pond). If she had simply gone down off her hill in any direction except north she would have struck either a trail or a watercourse within 500m of walking. Then following any of the watercourses downstream would have got her to a trail.
Baffling. You hear about this sort of thing happening in jungles, but generally not to experienced or well-equipped people...
But I have no outdoor skills other than those half-remembered from survival manuals I read as a kid. Rabbit starvation, follow running water downstream to civilization
You see? Even LB knows!
I've not been on it in that section of Maine, but the trail is very recognizable; far more so than any so-called trail I've been on in England. (Ok, that's not true, the Ridgeway is pretty darn obvious.) I thought the same thing about the waterways and wondered at it, but it does sound like she just didn't have a good sense of direction at all. And if she had had a small stroke or the like, she may have been too confused to act on any knowledge she did have.
Or is it just a footpath that could be mistaken for an animal track?
Variable, but the parts of it I've seen are certainly things that I could miss if I were crossing it. When I've hiked little bits of it in NY, I've been following from blaze to blaze, rather than trusting that the path would be obvious.
I am less outdoorsy than Parenthetical. Or, really, than almost anyone.
People who had hiked with her reported that she had a terrible sense of direction. She would head off back the way she came after a stop, for example. It's easy to get lost even on a marked trail, and once you go off-trail it's even easier. Not everyone Daniel Boone.
The problem with depending on GPS is that a lot of the AT in NH and ME has very few landmarks visible on standard GPS (Google Maps, for example). What you want to have is the topo maps in digital form ($$) on your phone (which will of course eventually run out of juice), or in paper form ($$) and use the GPS to get lat/lon and correlate with the maps. Not easy. Map and compass are great if you know more or less where you are and are trained to use them. Few are.
The terrain up there is pretty bad, really, with a lot of undergrowth, snags, downed trees, and other obstacles, so unless the "10-minute walk" happens on a trail and you already know that the "dirt trail" is there, you are doing 10 minutes of random bushwhacking and getting even more lost and tired. One of the searchers sent out to look for her said IIRC that it took them 3 hours to go one mile.
As one of the articles I read pointed out, she did exactly what you are supposed to do: stay in place and wait to be found.
I've never seen it except for where it crosses over the interstate in Maryland.
I've been following from blaze to blaze
I've mainly only hiked on it in North Carolina, where I think it's very popular and thus very well established. That would make more sense than my visual picture of the trail for the story.
I am less outdoorsy than Parenthetical. Or, really, than almost anyone.
Heh, not so much anymore. But I really shouldn't try to carry my experiences from the southern end to the north, the terrain and vegetation is extremely different and we only did day hikes, anyway.
so unless the "10-minute walk" happens on a trail and you already know that the "dirt trail" is there, you are doing 10 minutes of random bushwhacking and getting even more lost and tired
Oh, I know, but it just is one of those details!
The other problem with GPS is it is basically impossible to walk to a straight line with GPS in a dense forest. Unless it also has a magnetic compass, you don't really know which direction you are heading until you can see the sky and you don't really have any good way to know you can "see" the sky. The GPS will try to avoiding saying it doesn't know which direction it is pointing in by going off the last heading it was able to get.
Last night, a raccoon (I'm assuming because I've seen it before) ate my trash. I'm hoping that means I've gotten my animal problems out of the way for the weekend. I have great doubts as to how effective hanging food from a tree is at protecting it.
Have I mentioned the time in Samoa when I got lost overnight (with two friends and a dog) in a patch of jungle that was literally maybe a mile and a half by less than a mile wide (defined by a road, a stream, the beach, and where the stream came within sight of the clearing for the school where we taught? Too thick to walk in a straight line at all, we got disoriented, and it got dark.
We slept out overnight, and woke up to find that we were only a few hundred yards from the rugby field.
The great thing was that the students, who would normally have mocked us relentlessly for being morons, were literally unable to believe that anyone could have been incompetent enough to be genuinely lost there, and instead suspected us of some darkly sinister intentional weird foreigner behavior.
I've been on it in the NH region with all the huts and it's totally impossible to miss it, but that's one of the most popular and heavily traveled sections.
I have great doubts as to how effective hanging food from a tree is at protecting it.
Ooh, more hapless LB-outdoor stories. Pick a tree too big for a bear to break by leaning on it. I know I've mentioned the time with Buck when we hung our food from a maybe 3"-4" diameter sapling. And woke up to find that a mother bear had pushed the tree over, and her adorable cubs were pulling the chocolate babka we'd brought for breakfast out of the bag. We left hurriedly (without pursuit), gave them an hour or two to finish up and leave, and came back to recover our stuff and go find a diner to have breakfast in.
As one of the articles I read pointed out, she did exactly what you are supposed to do: stay in place and wait to be found.
Well, up to a point. There's no use staying where you are and waiting to be found if no one can see you, and if there's no reason for people to be looking there (e.g. it's where your crashed vehicle is).
The NY Times article is interesting - thanks gswift.
26 is true and sensible. GPS is a map-and-compass aid, not a substitute.
15
I've read the nutcase take on it, too. It's bullshit, and it's one of the cases where one should actually read the comments and in this case, find a bunch of total takedowns of his idiot theories.
The AT in NH and ME is considered the most difficult part of the whole trail. The width and appearance of the trail varies considerably; I've never hiked the part she was on but it can be anything from near-highway-width to a narrow track that you are not always sure is "the trail." The more important point is that if you are 10 yards off of it, or even less, you often will have no idea it's there. It's mostly regrowth forest and underbrush that isn't cleared and maintained off the trail (by design: it's not a "walk in the park").
17
Following running water can work if there is a stream nearby, but it can also mean really tough bushwhacking and stream crossings and end up at a kettle pond in a valley. Trails often follow streams though, so in some places it's a good strategy. If you have a map and compass...
32: I've actually gone the wrong way because of it.
30: Is chocolate poisonous for bears? I know it is for dogs and bears seem more to less just bigger versions of a dog.
And come to think, I've got an idiotic getting-lost-while-peeing story as well.
Also Samoa, hiking with two different friends to and up a nearby volcano with an impressive crater. We slept out on a lava field, which was sort of grossly flattish, but had rolling ups and downs of sort of 3' to 5'. I woke up in the middle of the night, and walked a short distance from where we were sleeping to pee discreetly, got turned around, and couldn't see our campsite (which was in enough of a low spot to be not visible from where I was standing.)
Wandered for a bit, in the hopes of finding it without looking like an idiot, and then decided to embrace my inner idiot and just yelled until Matt and Greg woke up and I could follow their voices (literally, less than 50 yards). Having no dignity is how I get out of most difficult situations.
I'd bet that obsidian is really bad at soaking up urine.
Pahoehoe, on the other hand, is very porous. Sucks for hiking, though -- it breaks underfoot constantly.
Looking back at the above, I have a really high ratio of idiotic outdoor stories to time actually spent in the outdoors. This probably means I should continue to stay away from unconfined trees.
Also, I got a hat. If I tuck away the string, it's only a little bit ridiculous.
As long as no one asks you what color it is.
I feel like I learned the "follow the water downstream to civilization" thing from movies, but now I can't remember which one. Not Deliverance, clearly. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Don't they end up in not-at-all-racist-heart-eating temple by trying to follow rivers back down to civilization?
Fortunately, the rivers where I am hiking are color coded for easy identification. One is stained black by natural processes having to do with leaves or something and the other is red because of good old fashioned pollution.
trees without little fences around them baffle and confuse me.
Trees must be so embarrassed that other trees had to die to make little skirts for them.
45 is an excellent article, especially the bit about the emergency locator beacon.
Yes, it is. Also this bit:
He said that when someone is hiking alone and gets lost, they often switch their focus solely to survival and not enough on helping themselves be found, as Largay apparently did when she set up her camp and waited for a rescue.
Guay said when people get lost, they should find an open area and try to "catch an eye" from the air by making a fire or spell the word "help" with fir boughs. The report documented attempts that Largay made to start a fire at her campsite.
"All of those things are critical. Unfortunately, if you're not moving and you're not trying to help yourself be found, (rescuers) would have to come right onto you to find you," Guay said.
It is really difficult to find people through thick canopy forest.
LB is making me feel so much better. I have such a bad sense of direction that I almost never hike by myself because I'd get lost. I will go on short hikes in National Parks on big trails with lots of people around, but that's not really the same at all. I would totally be this poor lady.
I have a friend whose sister is an incredible outdoorswoman. She was polite, but her comments were that it could happen to anyone (her included) with bad luck but that this woman's contingency planning was poor.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Don't they end up in not-at-all-racist-heart-eating temple by trying to follow rivers back down to civilization?
I believe they went there deliberately, since he was trying recover the magic whatever stones. The lesson I took away from Temple of Doom is that if you're lost in a cave underground, just get on the Disneyland style train thingy and ride it to the exit. But watch out for the hungry crocodiles.
I feel like I learned the "follow the water downstream to civilization" thing from movies, but now I can't remember which one.
"Do the opposite of Fitzcarraldo"
"Do the opposite of Fitzcarraldo"
Words to live by in any situation.
The problem with national parks is nobody (except rangers) can shoot bears in most of them. I'm going to a state park where hopefully the bears have some respect for people because of all the rednecks with the guns.
48: I am, kind of, having a failure of empathy for the hiker. Inexperienced in the woods, so didn't realize what the dangers were, I get. Experienced and competent, but there are things that could happen to you even if you're prepared, I also get. Major deficiencies in her skills and equipment that she was experienced enough that she should have been able to identify, and that put her at risk, but she still went ahead alone? It's not that I don't feel bad for her, but putting yourself in that position is alien to me.
ISTR mentioning the Incident Pit before in the context of scuba diving, but this is an absolutely classic example. Something minor goes wrong, and that makes it more likely that something more serious will go wrong, and so on.
It's also a good example of the "swiss cheese" model of disaster; all the holes in the different layers had to line up. She had to have her partner go home early AND go too far off the trail AND not bring a compass AND forget her GPS AND not have a SARBE AND have a bad sense of direction AND be out of mobile phone coverage AND be unable to find a clearing AND decide to stay put, in order to die. If any of those conditions hadn't applied, she'd have lived.
...putting yourself in that position is alien to me.
Something something Dunning-Kruger. She obviously thought she could handle the situation but evaluated either the situation or her skills badly.
I'm kind of a chicken in the wild so I would turn back at the least sign of trouble, but I can sort of see persisting despite not having 100% of everything under control.
Yeah, the swiss cheese is what's getting to me. So many of the holes were foreseeable.
52: alternatively you could just buy a ranger hat. It would double up as a Halloween costume if you wanted to dress as Sexy US Marine Corps Recruit Depot Senior Drill Instructor.
I'm kind of a chicken in the wild so I would turn back at the least sign of trouble, but I can sort of see persisting despite not having 100% of everything under control.
Except she apparently had 0% under control.
I know that hiking alone is a thing, but seems like a questionable idea in general (I mean serious backwoods hiking, not nature trails). Any accident like a bad fall/broken leg moves from "unfortunate incident" when there's another person with you to "potentially lethal" when you're by yourself.
Off to go hiking alone. I forgot my outdoorsy belt so I'm wearing a leather belt with a monogrammed silver buckle.
Incident Pit
Is this really an example of that? It seems more like, "I'll give you three guesses what happens when an inexperienced, unprepared, late-middle-aged hiker decides to tackle a challenging trail alone."
That said, it seems she met her end with equanimity, and it's a touching story.
With "inexperienced" meant to cover things like having a terrible sense of direction.
Well, she wasn't inexperienced -- I mean, she'd made it over a thousand miles fine. While it does look like an exercise in poor judgment, she did need some things to go wrong to get herself into trouble -- it's not like it was absolutely predictable disaster like heading into the desert without enough water.
Off to go hiking alone. I forgot my outdoorsy belt so I'm wearing a leather belt with a monogrammed silver buckle.
Good thinking. It makes it so much easier to identify the body if they don't find you for a while.
This seems like one of those cases where it really could happen to anyone out there if they had a stroke of really bad luck, which the experienced hikers talking about it know and feel uncomfortable about, but also one where the person went out of her way to create as many possible opportunities for bad luck as possible, to an almost amazing degree.
61.last, yes, especially when you take this into account: The report also said that Largay had a poor sense of direction, got flustered easily, and was scared of the dark and of being alone.
...AND not have a SARBE AND have... a sabre would have come in handy if she were attacked by a bear (though I'd rather have a gun), but there's no evidence of that.
60: That will help us to identify your corpse.
Good luck!
64: pwned! We are a cruel bunch, aren't we?
I'm not sure whether she's inexperienced, but she didn't seem to be unprepared, given what she had with her, and the fact that she had what looks like a good plan -- hike three days, meet up with her husband to resupply -- someone knew her route, how long she expected to be, and she survived for a month on what she brought with her.
But she didn't know how to navigate. There's a world of difference between hiking with someone who knows what they're doing, and all you have to do is walk, and hiking alone and keeping yourself oriented. It doesn't sound like she was experienced or prepared in the latter sense.
"I'll give you three guesses what happens when an inexperienced, unprepared, late-middle-aged hiker decides to tackle a challenging trail alone."
But it wasn't inevitable, or even close. If you took a hundred people with her experience level and equipment and set them off on that trail, probably about ninety of them would be fine and the other ten would twist an ankle or get bad blisters or something and have to turn back. Her plan was fine until something specific went wrong and then it wasn't. But most people wouldn't have something go wrong.
Inexperienced is the wrong thing to say. Again, she'd made it over a thousand miles on the trail -- that alone is more hiking than some people who think of themselves as hikers do in a lifetime. She was well-equipped and skilled for some parts of surviving outdoors, but unskilled and underequipped for navigating.
What makes this story remarkable too is that she wasn't found; according to the article Moby linked lost hikers are found quickly most of the time.
Is it weird that his thread makes me want to go hiking more?
To confess something unflattering, I think it's partly feeling smug about my excellent sense of direction. Which would be fatal, of course. Good thing I won't actually do it.
Which suggests that there was something really special about the spot where she got lost.
74, 76: Well the article doesn't focus on the point, but a big part of it seems to have been the bad tip about a sighting that led to really intense searching in the wrong place. No guarantee they'd have searched intensely where she was without that tip, but a lot of effort was expended where she wasn't.
Or that a few million people hike least some of the AT every year and unlikely things will statistically happen - and poor preparation pushing up that likelihood.
74: she'd managed to get about 1000m away from the trail she was walking on and they had no idea where she had left the trail - so nowhere obvious for trackers to start looking for her. So she could have left the trail anywhere between the shelter where she was last seen and the point she was supposed to reach two days later. If you search a mile each side of the trail between those two points, that's going to be about sixty square miles of dense forest, with visibility of, what, ten yards or so? Which you have to search at a foot speed of one mile an hour? And she'd climbed up a hill and camped under heavy tree cover.
So she wasn't going to be tracked; she wasn't going to be seen from the air; it would have taken a tremendous effort to search the whole area on foot; they weren't going to find her by looking in obvious places like valleys near water; and it doesn't sound like there are many other people walking off-trail in that area who might find her by accident, except for surveyors and Navy SERE school students.
The fact that she survived for a month is part of what inclines me a bit towards "this woman was very much not prepared for this and shouldn't have been left alone out there on the trail". I mean, it's impressive that she did (I assume she found water somewhere?). But dying of exposure or dehydration after a week when lost out in the wilderness is one thing - she had a full, let's say, three weeks or so to come up with a plan that didn't amount to "hide in the forest", and eventually you'd think that doing something to make her easier to locate by plane should have occurred to her as something to do to pass the time.
But I think 71 is right: it wasn't just that something went wrong, it was that the one specific thing that could have led to a problem for her went wrong that caused the trouble, and then a bunch of bad luck got added onto that thing to boot. She was definitely (practically*) maximizing her chances of something going horribly wrong, but even at their maximum they were vanishingly low.
*"I just love the way these bear pheromones smell! I'll use them as a heavy perfume!"; "Screw the trail! Trails are for losers!"; etc.
I mean, it's impressive that she did (I assume she found water somewhere?).
They found a full waterbottle with her at her campsite, so clearly she was getting water from somewhere (and didn't die of dehydration). I guess there must have been a spring or something nearby? She wasn't walking down to the nearest watercourse, because a) that was about 500m away and b) the trail was beside it!
This seems like one of those cases where it really could happen to anyone out there if they had a stroke of really bad luck, which the experienced hikers talking about it know and feel uncomfortable about, but also one where the person went out of her way to create as many possible opportunities for bad luck as possible, to an almost amazing degree.
Every person has their own level of acceptable risk.
If you have a heart attack or stroke, how long will it be before someone finds you? In your office on a weekend? At home? Hiking?
I dont like to take lots of risks about most things, but I swim alone in the river all the time. Sure, it is better to have someone with me, but that isn't always possible. And if I die? Then I die.
On the other hand, you aren't getting me too high up and close to the ledge. More risk than I want.
If you have a heart attack or stroke, how long will it be before someone finds you? In your office on a weekend? At home?
Not too long, if you define "my cat" as "someone" and "eating" as "finding".
I've told the story of getting lost and running out of water hiking in the mountains in Death Valley, right? Luckily, "lost" wasn't about direction, just about how many ridges were between point A and point B, so that a night hike through the desert, in a late spring ice-storm, worked out.
I linked a recent full length film about hiking the Pacific Northwest Trail at the other place a few weeks back. I can send it to anyone interested: suffice to say that people who are easily flustered or lack a sense of direction really should not be on certain parts of the PNT.
(To cross threads, my big weekend plan is to review applications: we're hiring a new executive director for the trail association.)
That said, it seems she met her end with equanimity, and it's a touching story.
Heartwarming, even.
Here's the full film (on youtube) and here's the trailer.
Her plan was fine until something specific went wrong and then it wasn't.
Sure, but the first really bad thing (getting lost) played directly into her lack of a sense of direction and tendency to get easily flustered. Because she had no GPS and couldn't use a compass (/headdesk) she could only correct that via sheer luck. Maybe she didn't know she had a bad sense of direction, etc., but it seems to me that hiking alone with those deficiencies is beyond "not advisable."
I'm torn about the advice people are giving for her to move. Moving can be a positive if you have a decent idea where you are, or a negative if you are scared and thus more likely to do something panicky. If her campsite wasn't visible from the air, though, I would revise my original suggestion to stay put. Doubly if she really had found a stream nearby. The article I read said she camped on a "knoll" which made me think there was some decent visibility around it.
Never Go Outside: Chapter 1 Million.
The whole story just reminds me of this tweak to one of those painfully sappy inspirational posters.
The inside! We made it for a reason!
87: As revealed many times in the thread above, I don't have any idea what I'm talking about in terms of the outdoors (barring that pine tree thing). But I have to think that the utility of staying put would be exhausted after four or five days, at which point she should still have been strong enough to do some walking. Old, but had to have been very physically fit, and had some food.
I'd think that after initially waiting a couple of days for rescue, she would have improved her odds by even walking around aimlessly.
That seems right to me as well: the value of staying put is that it makes it easier to find you (because you're still only lost within a specific area, and if you move you're probably increasing the size of it unpredictably). But after a while if they haven't found you you're probably staying put in a bad area, or just not the one they're searching.
Yeah, staying put for a month over-applies the "wait to be found" thing. By then they will call off the search.
"she would have improved her odds by even walking around aimlessly purposefully."
I took my kids hiking on a few years ago (when they were 4 and 6? Possibly 5 and 7), and we somehow took a wrong turn and got off trail, and then couldn't find the trail again anywhere. I knew the right general direction and we walked that way (off-trail) for a long time, but to get back to the trail eventually we found ourselves scaling up a rock cliff face, probably 30-40 ft., kids above me with me hovering underneath praying they wouldn't fall, positioning myself to catch them if they fell and wondering how the hell I would even do that without falling myself in the process. I was thoroughly terrified, and my kids still talk about what a great adventure it was.
The part that stood out for me was that she had "tried" to start a fire. Did she not have a lighter, or matches or a fire starter of any kind? How could even the most naive AT hiker miss that obvious piece of advice, from every hiking/survival/ camping book since time immemorial?
There were scorch marks on trees, so presumably she had some way of making fire; she just wasn't very good at it.
Maybe this was suicide by trail. Someone write the novel.
95: yeah, that would seem to be the case. It just flabbergasts me that "can't start a fire to save your life" (literally) wouldn't be something that would immediately disqualify you (in your own mind) from hiking the AT.
I think perhaps all the stuff to make a fire *out* of was too damp.
Well, actually, as someone who has lived in the woods in Maine, I can attest that even in a downpour, there's going to be plenty of dry kindling under any conifer, and even around deciduous trees, you'll find plenty of fires worth of fuel given 30 minutes of looking.
Ok "as someone who has lived in the woods in Maine," we know you are Sasquatch and we're sick of it.
I mean sick of your Sasquatch like activities. That came across as needlessly insulting.
I thought needlessly insulting was sort of your thing.
Say what you will about the tenets of halfordismo, at least it's an ethos.
98,99
She disappeared in July and died in August. I don't recall the weather in the north country that year, but the National Weather Service says they were wetter than normal in Maine, but also some sunny pleasant days. (Looking at Rangeley, ME; Caribou was wet as hell, apparently.)
97:
As a backpacker who's had to use map and compass to save my life a lot, but never had to start a fire (other than the ones on my camping stove), I think not being able to use a compass is a much bigger disqualification. That being said, I can understand psychologically why it would be tempting to finish the last stretch alone after her friend left. It would be wrenching to give up with so few miles (relatively speaking) left to do.
She's described as an experienced hiker, but I wonder how experienced a backpacker she was. It's hard for me to believe that there are experienced backpackers who can't use compasses, have terrible senses of direction, and can't start fires. However, the AT is very different from day hiking, so maybe the fact that she made it as far as Maine indicates that she was an experienced backpacker as well as hiker.
If you don't know anything else about using a compass, it seems like you should at least know how to use it to keep yourself walking in straight lines while looking for the trail. There's a real danger in veering just enough one way or another without ever intersecting the trail. Plus, even if you can read a topographic map you might not be in a place where you can identify enough features to locate yourself.
Yes, if you can't locate on terrain based on a paucity of features, you need to climb a hill. Or a tree.
What was supposed to be a short and easy hike ended in tragedy Thursday morning when a young man died after being stung more than 1,000 times by bees in an Arizona park.
A horrific way to die no doubt, but at least free from post-mortem judginess.
A plague has descended on the American Southwest and you don't think that's judgy?
I'm fine with any manner of death involving collective judgement across a large group that I am a member of*; it's any hint of personal incompetence playing a role in my demise that would really depress me.
*Although I will not that the guy was from Louisiana.
I think "did they have it coming / would it happen to me" is practically automatic when someone dies prematurely. Good taste says you shouldn't say those things out loud, which is why I don't blame her for not climbing a tree.
Sure, and everything else being equal I actually would prefer not be stung to death by bees in front of strangers under a broiling Arizona sun.
Yeah but we live in the real world not your ceteris paribus econoland, Stormcrow. Getting stung to death may be reality.
Also I hope all these fuckers who are like wahhhh colony collapse yayyyyy urban beekeping take a lesson from this. Fuck bees, bees are the enemy.
On topic: Not dead. About half way through.
Still not dead. The belt may be. But the buckle is fine.