A long time ago -- before cell phones -- I was a member of a wilderness search and rescue team. Based on the description of where this person was found, I can tell you it's one of the last places we would have gone. Finding lost people is a game of profiling and math -- certain types of people (e.g. injured, despondent, young, experienced hiker) are more likely to do certain things, but AFAIK going to high ground and setting up camp isn't on anyone's list. I don't know if that's changed as a result of cell phones.
One article[1] at least suggests that she wasn't able to start a fire.
She had also tried to make fires using the matches and
lighters she kept in her backpack. There was a stream
near her camp, but it's unclear whether she was able to
find any food.
Interesting, I've always heard you're supposed to stay in one place to make it easier to be found. (So you don't wander off to a place that was already searched.)
My entire life I have heard the advice to simply stay put if lost. Moving anymore just puts you farther off track. Even reading the linked article, I think I'd still just stay put.
This works if you know you're lost, know that someone will be looking for you and aren't too hard to find. Most people who are lost don't meet these criteria. Because she was an experienced hiker, I'm guessing they thought she was immobile (injury, heart attack, etc.) and this would mean she'd be in a place she would have gone if she wasn't lost.
I wonder why people aren't more aware of personal locator beacons that use satellites to work in areas without cell reception. For the cost of a smartphone, this could have saved her life :(
This won't work really the towers have to be fixed making a call while moving shifts the phase of your signal and for a good while this was a big problem for early phones (calls out cut out while driving or in a train because of the speed not the "reception").
Movement is not the only thing that can cause a Doppler shift, echos, and multi-path propagation are also a pain to deal with but for the movement part phones pretty damn early started having accelerometers (way before they were used for cool stuff) in them as well as much better Doppler estimation processing at both the towers and in your phone.
At 150knots (relative speed, this will depend on the altitude and heading of the aircraft in relation to the cellphone) a 1.9ghz signal will have a Doppler shift of about 500hz which is more than enough to induce blocking of pretty much any cell network.
Radiophones that allow air to ground communication to exist but they are designed for this purpose and implement quite aggressive Doppler correction which is also usually only possible when they have the flight data and they know more or less the altitude, heading, and speed of the aircraft based on the flight plan and real time flight data and can adjust the Doppler correction in real time, as without it it won't work.
Meanwhile the FBI is supposedly flying over cities sniffing cell phones. It might not be easy to establish a voice connection, it seems pretty likely that it will be possible to detect the phone if it is broadcasting at all.
Yes because it's using a military grade sigint platform.
Capturing signals and reconstructing them isn't hard when you fly special mission aircraft.
But you can't just strap a picocell to a SAR aircraft and expect it to work.
Also cellphones don't have that much of a battery life if a hicker has one its most likely going to be either off due to them being out of coverage or dead due to battery drain by the time anyone figures out they are missing.
Considering the cost of such platform and the little to no use it will bring the money is probably better invested in high resolution FLIR cameras and more aircraft since anything that could ping a phone and get its location would cost more than a civilian SAR aircraft.
I'm not aware of a similar thing in the US. And depending on the remoteness of your location, you may get an indication of a good signal (3+ bars) but still be unable to transmit or receive a text. It's common in the mountains where I hike and backpack to get "ghost bars" like that which suggest you should be able to send and receive messages but only a tiny percentage ever get through, if any.
The US has actually several emergency networks, a cellphone even without a valid sim card can still be used to dial 911 this is part of every cellular standard.
But in more common cases when you are outside of the coverage of your carrier and with roaming disabled/no roaming partners you will still see Emergency/SOS displayed on your phone.
Besides 911 there are probably a few other emergency numbers in the US which are open on all cellphones, as well as the emergency broadcast system which will display push notifications on every modern cellphone in such cases as natural disasters.
They're growing in popularity, but they're expensive and some of the popular ones (not PLBs specifically, but satellite trackers & communicators) like SPOT and DeLorme inReach have monthly subscription fees as well. Someone who isn't out alone all the time may not feel they can justify the cost.
I carry an inReach and find it fantastic. I've never used it for an emergency (though an emergency leading to a late-night Air Force helicopter rescue of someone in my hiking group several years ago prompted me to purchase it) but it's fantastically useful for text communication with friends and family in areas with zero cell reception, as well as (very recently added) weather forecast downloads for your precise location. And in the event of an emergency, being able to communicate details about your situation is very useful sometimes.
You can also rent a PLB/sat communicator for relatively reasonable prices (<$40/week) if you only hike occasionally and owning one and paying monthly wouldn't make sense.
I've done a bit of backpacking (with a 3 week trip planned this August), and I would certainly take one of those if I were hiking alone. It sounds like this woman started with a partner and ended up continuing alone after the partner had to abort.
Would be great to be able to pair this with a small solar charger.
Also, do these work internationally? I went scuba diving in Indonesia in a place with strong currents. Saw amazing creatures, but there was a story overhanging everything about some divers that had been swept away by currents, landed on an island inhabited with Komodo dragons & had to fend the lizards off by swinging their weight belts at them. They were found a couple days later, but badly sunburned and exhausted. Amazing!
My DeLorme inReach can send a message with coordinates and then doesn't need to remain online and continue transmitting. (Of course, you want to keep it online so you can continue to communicate with SAR, but if the battery were to die they would still find you as long as you don't move from your transmitted location in your emergency call.) So a solar charger, etc. wouldn't even really be necessary, and it will stay online for quite a long time between recharges.
Many long distance backpackers will carry high capacity USB battery packs to recharge devices off rather than a solar charger, as they weigh less and involve less hassle and can generally last between town stops every 5 to 10 days (depending on what trail, of course).
I'm not familiar with all PLBs/satellite communicators but my inReach works internationally.
On the initial missing persons report that was filed, Largay’s husband itemized a number of items that he knew she’d been wearing or carrying. Under the category labeled “GPS, PLB, Compass” — the acronyms referring to Global Positioning System, Personal Locator Beacon– the responding warden wrote: “SPOT. Left at motel.” SPOT is a company that makes, among other things, satellite-based devices that allow hikers in remote areas to communicate their whereabouts to others without the benefit of a cellular signal.
So apparently she had a beacon, but for some reason she did not take it with her on that leg of the trail.
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time hiking, it really depends on the maintenance of the trails. There's also often false trails even on maintained ones. Humans tend to be far more confident about their directionality than they are, and factor in weather or a dark mostly moonless night and its easy to hike in circles. Once lost and without easy landmarks, finding your way back is difficult as even if you locate the trail you're looking for, its uncertain if you're actually on it without glaringly obvious geographic markings to match to a paper map. We humans easily overestimate our ability to navigate.
I do agree though, not packing a GPS unit with a charging mechanism was a bad move. The one time when I really needed it was the one time I was hiking in white out conditions on a very remote mountain in Cascades and my buddy had an GPS (mind you in the early 2000s, thus archaic by today's standards), Setting a way point at the trailhead made my night a lot more pleasant rather than shuffling down a mountain in a blizzard, and hoping to end up near where we started. I wasn't unprepared and had a paper map and compass, and knew eventually we'd hit a forest service road but it could have made for a very long night in the cold as we marched back to our vehicle.
It's not dangerous if you have navigational skills. Most people, however, do not, or haven't developed theirs very effectively. I see it myself sometimes with other hikers at the front of a group—they take a wrong turn and suddenly have no idea where they are and start freaking out rather than just backtracking. Fortunately they're in a group, generally of people who can navigate and do know where they are, but when someone with poor navigational skills gets into that situation it usually leads to panic and bad decisions.
It's not at all extraordinary that a hiker of her age decided to go backpacking alone (which in this case she didn't—she was with someone else who left). It's a very common thing for people to solo hike and backpack. Carrying a small amount of gear is not a problem either—it's the norm. But navigational tools of some sort, even just a micro compass and a map, are generally considered an essential.
> It's not dangerous if you have navigational skills.
I'm ex-military so this point is probably why I don't understand the mindset, I just had navigation slammed into me time and time again. And we weren't allowed GPS so you got it right and you learning to recover if you did screw up.
> It's not at all extraordinary that a hiker of her age decided to go backpacking alone (which in this case she didn't—she was with someone else who left).
Another articles mention she started without them and stayed at a lodge with a number of other people so definitely took the decision to go alone. I guess the buddy/buddy thing is built into me too.
> Carrying a small amount of gear is not a problem either—it's the norm.
Another article mentioned she was carrying less than the normal 35lbs. Obviously I'm not sure what the norm is so defer to your experience.
I think she must have gotten lost and disoriented while very close to the trail and then spent a lot of time walking in the wrong direction without paying enough attention to be able to retrace her route even back to that first place where she realized she was lost. At some point she realized that moving was getting her more lost and she stopped. But at that point she was too far away from the trail for the searchers to find her.
In fact, I wonder if at the end, once she'd set up a permanent camp, if she stayed put because she was flat out afraid she'd get lost again if she left the camp even to go a few yards. This might have been a legitimate fear, but there is a way to handle it -- you leave "blaze" marks on the trees as you pass them so you can retrace your route. But maybe she wasn't familiar with this technique.
That does seem a possibility—or once she set up her camp she remembered the somewhat poor advice of staying put (this can be good if you're actively being searched for and likely to be found quickly, but once days or weeks have gone by can be bad to continue as your chances of being found decrease).
There are a lot of good ways to leave "telltales" you can follow once you're in a situation where you're lost. Branches forming an arrow on the ground back towards your camp, each within sight of the next, are an easy way to do it.
This is really sad. Part of me wonders why, in such a remote area, she decided to go far enough off the trail to get lost just to use the bathroom.
It's scary how disorienting the woods can be.
I was hiking in the woods in my backyard and after a few twists and turns to get around thorny areas, discovered about 20 minutes later I was hiking in the opposite direction I thought I was. It was completely dumbfounding.
It takes real skill to walk in a straight line, even with a compass. The best navigator I know taught me the trick of lining up good landmarks and concentrating on those, head straight for them, then choose another, but by crikey it takes effort to do it even halfway decently.
This would almost certainly have been a case of answering the call of nature, going a very little way off-track to preserve decency, getting ever so slightly turned around to lose the trail, then an escalating series of "corrections" as it becomes clear that it's all going wrong. It's a very sombering and saddening thought.
This kind of thing is why a visual marker - orange reflector tape, sidewalk chalk, whatever - should be a part of any serious hiker's kit. Going off trail at all? Leave a nice obvious path back to it.
Please don't do this. I see people doing it, even going so far as to leave flagging tape on obvious, maintained trails so they don't "lose their way". And usually people don't remove it after. It makes an area trashy, especially when done unnecessarily—and saying you should do it whenever you go off-trail is very unnecessary.
If your navigational skills are poor enough that you can't trust yourself to walk off-trail without getting lost, use a passive system like running a GPS receiver during your hike so you can backtrack along its track until you find your trail.
I'm a very regular hiker and backpacker, and while I always feel bad in situations like this, I also always feel that people who get lost so easily that they can't find the trail—especially one so developed as the Appalachian Trail—after stepping off it for a few minutes shouldn't be hiking alone, or should be using some sort of navigational aid to help avoid that happening. She wasn't initially hiking alone, but she should've left when her hiking partner did if she wasn't competent enough to navigate solo.
Perhaps I'm unusual among hikers, in that I hike off-trail regularly, hunt for lost and abandoned trails for fun, and am a trailwork volunteer with the Forest Service, but I cannot understand how people get lost. If you lose the trail, you simply go back the way you came until you find it again. And yet people get lost all the time.
Apparently Maine is singularly treacherous for hikers due to the density and scale of it's woods.
I've seen comments from many experienced hunters/hikers how say they live/hike in the woods up there and all of them mentioned how easy it would be to become disorientated.
I wonder if a "road pressure" map would be useful to encourage people to know what they are doing. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in Michigan where there are developed roads all over the place. When there's (even moderately trafficked) roads 1/2 mile away in 3 directions, you aren't very lost, so I've never felt the need to be incredibly well prepared. When it's 5 miles in one direction the thought process needs to be a little different.
