I’m trying to find a reliable breakdown of who gets lost where when hiking. Day trippers stepping out to pee? More experienced hikers who decide to forge into rougher territory?
Mountainous area hikers? Established trail hikers?
I’m poking and finding bits here and there. Anyone who is involved in the outdoors hiking community aware of where I can find good data? Doesn’t have to be any more recent than a few years ago.
Many thanks in advance !!
According to this article, some 80% of people in survival situations are amateur day hikers who underestimated the danger of setting off into the wild.
What happens is, they decide to go for a short walk in the woods and think that as long as they are close to their homes or civilization, it will be easy to find their way back. They also assume that because they are going for a short walk, they will not require any additional gear and do not pack appropriate clothing, water, fire sources, etc. Next thing you know, they get lost in the woods or trapped by the weather, and they don’t have the resources to deal with it.
Loads of data here for the UK mountain rescue:
Breaks down type of activity, type of incident, injuries etc.
It doesn’t answer your query of ‘who’, but there are a lot of individual case studies on their web pages that would give you some insight into type of person if you wanted to poke around.
The one’s that make the news tend to bifurcate between the totally clueless and very experienced. e.g. School teacher takes 39 girls, wearing skirts and trainers, up 2500 ft mountain, versus the avalanche and fall deaths that happen each year in the Scottish mountains to experienced people in winter conditions.
Was your reference to ‘day trippers stepping out to pee’ a reference to the woman who died on the Appalacian trail in Maine? That was in the news here recently, I think because her remains were discovered after a couple of years. V. sad story.
Here in Cape Town, it’s almost inevitably what Chihuahua describes - day hikers woefully unprepared for what Table Mountain can unleash on them in a very short space of time. It’s so easy to get up the mountain from the city or suburbs. people die on it every year. So 80% is completely believable.
Indeed I was referencing exactly that story.
Two cases I was tangentially (friend of a friend of a friend) connected to in the last year:
[ol]
[li]Inexperienced day tripper drifts from his group, gets lost, spends an unexpected night outside.[/li][li]Experience hiker sets out grossly unprepared for the conditions, dies.[/li][/ol]
While I haven’t found any concrete statistics on your inquiry(yet) , after a few quick Google searches the vast majority of cases of lost hikers seems to be people who make serious errors and/or omissions in their preparations that experienced hikers would not.
This is not to say that experienced hikers do not get lost. The difference is that they better prepared to handle the situation, survive, and facilitate their rescue.
Not prepared at all for any change of situation:
[ul]
[li]Change of weather[/li][li]Change of clothes[/li][li]No food[/li][li]No map or guide book[/li][li]No compass[/li][li]No matches[/li][li]No Water[/li][li]They forget the sun sets every day[/li][/ul]
but ………they always bring a cell phone.
In the Northeast US, at least, add:
[ul]
[li]Don’t realize that “the all” in “getting way from it all” includes “cell towers”.[/li][/ul]
Anybody can get lost in the woods, even very experienced hikers. Those who become “very experienced hikers” are those who survive the first few times they get lost by managing the panic and not making a cascading series of ever greater errors.
Except in very remote areas, you’ll eventually reach a road or a town simply by following stream courses downhill. (This can be difficult to actually do in rough terrain, but it would be the first course to try.) Experienced hikers know this, while those who are inexperienced may just wander aimlessly or hole up some place where it would be difficult to find them.
Yeah. My husband had conniptions that the people in The Blair Witch Project didn’t follow the river (or creek, whatever it was).
Well, the people in the Blair Witch Project were being kept there by the witch.
Best idea is stay in a* good place,* close to where you got lost. Sure, near water. Following a stream is OK if you MUST move.
Of course some streams go underground or there’s a waterfall or the going is dangerous.
*"If you are lost in a natural area, there are two basic ways to safety; either a search and rescue team finds you, or you rescue yourself by walking out to civilization. The search and rescue team will look where you are supposed to be - this is why the one of the most important basic things for wilderness adventuring is to tell someone where you’re planning on going and when you’re planning on getting back. The wilderness can be big, and you are small, but despite this, most people are found in the first 72 hours or so of going missing. This is the best way out; they’re trained and equipped to help you.
Self-rescue sounds more heroic, but it’s a lot more risky if being found by search and rescue is a possibility - if you get in trouble at point A and need to get to point C to be found, if you break your leg or lose your supplies or whatever at point B in the middle, no one’s going to be looking for you there and you’re screwed. There’s also the additional challenges associated with travelling through the wilderness rather than staying put - if you stay in one place, you can develop a shelter and improve it over days rather than sleeping on the ground every night, for instance. But there exist circumstances where self-rescue may be your only choice; if no one knows where you are and you left no evidence to this fact; if search and rescue isn’t possible for some reason; if it’s been a week and the search is likely abandoned.
Assuming you’re rescuing yourself, the best answer is to go to somewhere to be rescued using a map and compass or GPS. But if you’re lost, unprepared and/or in unfamiliar terrain that doesn’t help. Routefinding through the wilderness is tough, especially if you’re a city folk. People naturally tend to walk in a circle when lost if there are no external waypoints. And obviously that isn’t going to help you. So following a river is one way of making sure you travel in a continuous direction downhill. It also ensures you have a water supply, which is important"
This was what I told him.
They, and the witch, were being kept there by the screenwriter. That’s good to keep in mind when you are tempted to yell at the boneheads on the screen. It’s not their fault.
I agree that you should stay in the vicinity of where you first realized you were lost for at least several days to give people time to find you, assuming that they know approximately where to look (that you left word, and didn’t change your planned route, or you left a vehicle or sign at a trailhead). But you can enhance your probability of being found by staying on the routes that searchers will most likely take, such as along streams or on ridges.
Don’t blame the poor screenwriter, he’s obliged to maintain dramatic tension for the sake of the viewers. So, as a member of the audience who chose to view a horror movie, it’s your fault that all those people died stupidly and horribly when they could have just walked downstream. You’re yelling at yourself.
Hey, that’s me! LOL. I’m a pretty experienced hiker, having done almost half of the Appalachian Trail (in segments) and numerous other east coast backpacking hikes.
I got really lost once when I made a couple of seriously bad decisions that piled up on each other. First mistake is when I tried to push too far in one day. I decided to hike past a shelter and try to make it to the next one before dark. Just got too full of myself, and pushed too far trying to be all gonzo or something. Then I got tired, and made my second bad decision. I took a “shortcut”, which is almost always a bad idea. I looked at my map, and saw that I could cut across a switchback and cut about two miles off my hike. The terrain looked not so bad, so I went for it. In retrospect, a choice I likely would not have made if I had not been so tired.
Long story short, the terrain was far more rugged than I expected, and I kept having to do detours around water or around dense brush. Before I knew it, I was waaaay off the trail, and my judgement was really not working for me. I knew I should stop, sit down, and really focus on my compass and map. But, no, I did not do that.
It wasn’t until it started to get dark that I forced myself to just stop. I set up camp where I was, ate some dinner and bedded down. The next morning I was able to approach it with a clear head, and plotted a course to get me back on course. I was then 4 miles plus off the trail.
I can easily see how a hiker with less experience could have made the same choices I did, but keep going out of desperation, and wind up even further off the trail.
It’s atypical terrain, but there is an excellent book Over The Edge: Death In Grand Canyon that documents every known death below the rim, and many non-fatal incidents, including many hikers.
Yes, it’s almost always a bad idea to attempt to shortcut established trails, especially when in difficulty. They usually go the way they go for good reason. Dozens of people have died the Grand Canyon when they have gotten into water trouble and attempted to find a shortcut to the Colorado. The river may be visible not far below, but most side canyons lead sooner or later to impassable pouroffs and don’t grant access to the river without technical climbing. The most horrific scenario is to slide down a difficult slick pouroff, find a completely impossible pouroff further below, and then be trapped - unable either to descend further* or* climb back up.