He wasn’t in a zoo. Okay, I’ve been trying hard to keep it out of the discussion, but it looks like I’m being forced by all of you to post a link to Bear Grylls drinking the water from some wild elephant dung. Here it is - I hope you all find whatever you were looking for by watching it…
Most people are notoriously bad at estimating distances.
However, given his lack of navigation skills at being able to go what was probably single digit # of miles to either a beach or a road I question his survival skills of being able to eat &/or drink anything in a place where even tap water isn’t safe for the ‘Gringos’ for almost three weeks.
I call BS on this story; I get it’s his story & he’s sticking to it but something doesn’t add up.
Wow, good to know for a survival situation. People end up walking in circles with a diameter of 66 feet when blindfolded? That is insane.
That article does say if you can see the sun or the moon, you can walk in a fairly straight line.
In 1993 the entire island was pitch black at night except for a big, brightly lit all night tourist port due west. Most of the island had no electricity at all but the port of Cozumel and Playa Del Carmen across the sea were already big brightly lit cities.
From any situation on the entire island other than being underground there is just no way he wouldn’t have been able to see enough of the night sky to notice the unmistakable glow of civilization. It’s visible for 100 miles today on a clear night and there’s a lot more competing light than there was back then.
Under jungle canopy and with an overcast sky, it might therefore be possible to wander in circles.
What we’re calling jungle is really subtropical rain forest. Lots of dense scrubby plants and rocks and some big but not huge trees. The canopy was higher then because there have been some major hurricanes in the past 25 years but it was never so dense you couldn’t see the moonlight or city lights in the sky.
Right. It rarely stays overcast all day long in a tropical forest. Average daily hours of sunlight on Cozumel range from 7 hours a day in January to 11 hours a day in May. Even in a multi-layer tropical rain forest with a 150 foot canopy (where I have a lot of experience bushwhacking) you can often glimpse the sun through gaps in the canopy. And as said before, the canopy on Cozumel is only around 20 feet and so shouldn’t block the sun that much, and Wilson mentions finding clearings.
(Some articles mention Wilson having to endure “100 degree temperatures” but the weather chart indicates the daily high in the warmest month to be 90 degrees, dropping to a comfortable 68-73 degrees at night. So there’s a generous dollop of bullshit there as well.)
The highest temperature month per your link - August - is right in the middle of the rainy season, which looks to run from July through to October. So it could potentially have been overcast a lot.
The man’s story does sound rather fantastical, but I’m not sure its veracity can be ruled out completely, particularly when one potential factor is human stupidity.
Rain in the tropics generally occurs in the form of heavy but brief thunderstorms that may last an hour or two tops. The rest of the day, especially the morning, is partly cloudy to sunny. Even in August there is an average of 10 hours of sunlight per day on Cozumel. Given tropical weather conditions I’m certain that over a period of several days there would have been ample sunlight for a competent person to travel in a consistent direction.
I’m not disputing that he might have been lost for 19 days. I’m just saying that it takes an extraordinary level of incompetence for that to happen. There have been other similar stories where people have been lost in relatively small areas because they were clueless.
Like those two women who were “adrift” in the Pacific for several months, what initially appears to be an inspiring story of survival turns out to be a gobsmacking example of idiocy.
He apparently wandered off from a tour group in broad daylight and managed to get himself so lost so fast that simply yelling for help wasn’t possible so he’s clearly not the most skilled navigator ever to explore the Yucatan.
Assuming he was in the typical tourist garb of shorts and flip flops, once he got himself lost however he did it, unless he happened to have a machete it was definitely not easy to travel off the beaten path. I could believe he knew which way he needed to go but just couldn’t get there due to injury or fatigue a lot more easily than that he didn’t even know which way to go.
As you surely know, higher-canopy tropical forest (the type that grows where there’s only a short dry season, or none) is EASIER to walk through — not much undergrowth (shaded out). It’s the low-canopy scrub forest (in parts of areas where there’s a long dry season, like Cozumel) that can be really slow going — one dense, thorny shrub in your way after another.
Still, that guy was pretty incompetent. 
Aren’t most people who are lost told to sit and wait for someone to find him? I’d always hear you’re supposed to “Hug a tree”. He may have spent the first few days trying to be found, rather than trying to find his way back.
StG
I do think that some of you are underestimating just how far a mile is.
It’s a very short distance in a car. It’s not so long a distance on foot on a road.
In dense undergrowth, though, a mile is a long way. Someone said that they should be able to make 1mph. That seems optimistic for uneven ground and dense underbrush with someone who is probably exhausted.
People get lost in red river gorge all the time, enen though it’s hard to go even a few thousand feet around there without running into a road. Admittedly, not for 19 days, but that is because they are quickly found by the park rangers and staff. If left to their own devices, it may take a bit longer.
Someone mentioned the lights of the city at night. Well, that may help him get his bearings at night, but it is still too dark to travel toward that light, so he would have to try to remember and hold that direction once the sun came up.
I think I would have fared much better, but I have some level of knowledge of orienteering and such. My father OTOH, it would take him more than 19 days to find a way out of a paper bag.
The key piece of missing data here is how much Animal Planet paid this fella to say these things … it only takes my mother five hours to realize she’s driving the wrong direction on the freeway …
I’ve spent a lot of time bushwhacking through scrub and low forest on small tropical islands. Yes, the going can be tough, and it might be slower than 1 mph in the worst cases, but I’ve never seen any place where I couldn’t have covered several miles in a day if I had to. (And the guy said he was resting during the heat of the day so he shouldn’t have been exhausted.)
Walking towards the sun every morning and away from it in the afternoons (or vice versa) should have gotten him to the coast in a couple of days. It’s really not hard to determine that.
Fromthis article
But if the going was actually as tough as has been claimed, he couldn’t have gotten very far.
If he stayed anywhere near where he had gotten lost he should have been found within a few days at most.
Except that the details being discussed here were published in newspapers in 1993.
Here’s what the jungle looks like. You should certainly be able to see the sun through the canopy. You will be hard-pressed to move 1 mph through that, but you can cover multiple miles in a day if you move in one direction.
It’s very easy to get turned around in underbrush like this because you are constantly dodging trees and bushes to find the easiest path. You can correct for this if you pick a navigation aid like the sun, but if you’re a clueless idiot, I can completely understand wandering in circles.
If anyone is qualified to talk about walking with no sun, it’s you.
Here is the (horribly OCRed) text from a different newspaper article from 1993:
If you have a subscription to Newspapers.com (or are willing to sign up for the free trial) you would be able to see the full scanned page. (Google search term "Ken Wilson Cozumel 1993)
Is that with proper gear? A machete, boots to protect your feet, long shirt sleeves and long thick pants to prevent getting torn up by thorns and even twigs?
My impression of this guy is short sleeved t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers.
And even with rest, you still get exhausted, especially when you don’t have access to water and food.
Just a light forest is enough to throw off your direction of the sun by quite a bit. When the sun is lower in the sky, it is blocked by more trees, and you will only have a very general idea of where it is. The only time you would be able to get a good bearing on the sun is when it is high enough in the sky that it would be hard to get a good direction from it. You may catch it from time to time to adjust your bearsing, but if you are also following a path of least resistance through the undergrowth, your line will deviate very quickly.
Note to anyone in this situation, BTW, it is much easier to get your bearings by looking at the shadows the sun is casting, rather than the sun itself.
Also, a bit less relevant to this guy, but more important if you are further north, especially in the winter, is that the sun doesn’t go east to west, it goes southeast to south to southwest. So, if you are walking away from it in the morning, and towards in the evening, then you are actually doing more north-south traversal than east-west.
That is when he was fresh. I can run and leap across areas that are a trudge to walk through. I can’t do that for very long though.
If I thought I was separated from the group, and thought I knew which way to go, I could make pretty good time trying to catch up.
Once I realized that it wasn’t going to be just a short sprint, then I’d be much, much slower.
It wouldn’t be that hard for him to cover a good portion of a mile trying to catch up and find the group.
I’m not saying that this guy should win any orientering awards, he obviously has no business by himself in the wilderness. I am not sure, but I get the feeling that there are those who are actually questioning his story. I’m curious as to what nefarious motives are being imagined.
When I met my gf 12 or so years ago, I went for a walk after work in the woods around her home. I now know the area like the back of my hand, but back then I got lost. Her land adjoins other peoples woods and I was running out of light. I thought I knew what direction to head, but a valley I got “forced” into soon became impenetrable. I had to backtrack and find a way around that valley.
I was relieved to eventually see her house. It was spring and although the weather was great when I first started walking, the temperature dropped once the sun set.