I'm an active volunteer with Inyo County Search and Rescue. I was not around during the author's search efforts but have heard much about this article over the years. I have heard about the harrowing story, the amazing accomplishments of his personal efforts, and the resulting missions that took place to give closure.
Unfortunately, I have heard more about this article because of the antagonistic rhetoric used while telling his tale and to sum up his personal beef with law enforcement personnel - and the "sorry, not sorry" follow-up message to attempt to make that rhetoric ok. To clean-up his rhetoric - he attempts to make clear that he respects any SAR team and his beef with with the Sheriff's Office. He also makes it convenient to add that SAR teams operate under the Sheriff's Office. I have known quite a few who have been offended by the author's statements. These are folks who volunteer and who give a significant amount of their personal time to respond, to put themselves in sometimes very risky/challenging situations to save lives and provide closure.
I have personally been on a number of very challenging searches and rescues in the vicinity of this incident - some of the toughest things I've faced in my life. This is my choice, I am a volunteer and am passionate about going into the mountains to help others as I would hope to be helped. I have known a number of truly good human beings who are passionate about giving of their personal time to help others get out of a difficult space and to help provide closure. In the end, none do it for anyone else's approval. That said, being painted with antagonism when you have done nothing but give can feel like a punch to the gut.
I hope that you will take the fruits from this narrative and leave behind the saltiness. First responders, whether full-time professionals or part-time volunteers, have their quirks. But there are many good humans out there and we have to believe in that -- otherwise, life would be way too salty.
SAR varies a lot depending on the team, agency, and coordinator. I think it's reasonable to remind people that these are largely volunteer efforts, but it's also reasonable to call out and criticize problems with SAR when they arise. These can be due to poor training, insufficient funding, an inexperienced or unenthusiastic coordinator, or a corrupt sheriff's office. (They exist.)
It's been a while since I last read through Tom's stuff, but as I recall, his main gripe was with the Inyo County Sheriff's Office (and, in the Ewasko case, NPS).
And he's right: because SAR operations, in the US, usually fall under the management of law enforcement agencies, you get as side effects the usual problems associated with law enforcement -- poor information management, big egos, paranoia, credit-seeking, and an emphasis on security over getting the job done, among other problems. This is especially problematic on big incidents where multiple agencies are involved.
CalOES exists in part to get all the kids to play along in the same sandbox, but that sometimes doesn't happen until the operation gets enough attention for a CalOES bigwig to appear in person, and then suddenly the various sheriffs involved start acting like adults.
(Purely for background: I've been in SAR for several years, currently on a hiatus but was extremely active and responded to numerous incidents across the state. I was trained and certified in incident management, was a team leader, and an instructor for several different skillsets. I've butted heads with sheriffs a couple times and had my wrists slapped a time or two. Sometimes they were in the right, sometimes I was.)
As someone from the alps where search operations are not rare this makes me wonder. Over here the teams that do the search are seperate entities specifically trained for the (alpine) terrain they operate in.
If they need a specific tool or capability only the police or the firefighters have, they ask them for help. That being said those alpine units are closer to an ambulance than to law enforcement, because that makes more sense
That sounds like the right way to do it. This is another casualty of the for-profit medical industry in the US; SAR is one of few free medical-related services available and we are quite firm that it stay that way (exclusions apply; don't visit New Hampshire!).
We do have an independent Mountain Rescue Association here that can certify teams for specialized technical rescues, and those teams are generally among the best in the country. Maybe not skilled to alpine mountaineering standards, but they can search for and retrieve people from extremely challenging terrain at 14,000 ft.
There is also a national search and rescue organization (NASAR), but they are a joke, speaking candidly. They have almost no presence in the west and we can't figure out what they're actually doing with the membership dues from the few suckers that decide to join in exchange for a sticker. They offer some certifications in some regions, but they're optional and many teams just develop their own programs.
But, nobody gets to deploy until a sheriff says-so, teams usually need a sworn (law enforcement) member escort on any operation, they are funded by their local sheriff's office (and whatever grants or community donations they can get), and the sheriff can decide when it's time to go home. That makes SAR across the US a patchwork quilt of solid teams and ragtag posses, with a broad variety of attitudes and standards.
There is a mutual aid system that allows counties to develop agreements (MOA/MOU) to render aid if requested, and is often used to dispatch higher-qualified resources to difficult operations in poorer counties.
But it's still, always, a law enforcement operation.
I don't disagree with your points. Sometimes there are personality issues (we're all a little quirky), sometimes there are structural/institutional issues. The point I raise is pretty focused on the author's harsh parting words and how they are generalized enough to affect those who aren't the individual(s) in question.
I have met, played with, and admire several Inyo County SAR members, and have only had iffy encounters with the Inyo Sheriffs so far, so in a way I aligned with what the author said. Luckily this man's blog post has nothing to do with you or anything that happened during your time, everyone is entitled to their unique/weird experiences and opinions, and you don't need to defend anyone.
The author sometimes seems a bit unaware that despite being aligned with Riverside Mountain RU, he's not really credentialed to be mixing and gaining access to the ear or information of all the other involved agencies. After he was essentially the source of a leak (the bank card) and had moved evidence, folks might have been justifiably hesitant to enlist him and/or engage him fully. Plus he accomplished something they weren't able to. Annoying! It's a premise for a great story that he inserted himself in this puzzle, and he got to see a whole heck of a lot of puzzle pieces, but does he deserve to place the last few pieces? And might he be a little bit bitter that he wasn't "better recognized" for his work? People are just people. Once we find them rotting in the desert we maybe realize that none of the little stuff matters.
I thought he was clear he was taking about the sheriff's office rather than the search and rescue people.
Even then it was clearly a bit of a grudge and certainly passive aggresive (oh, if you can't even tell me this, I bet you can't organise a SAR operation). But it's an understandable reaction - that final multi day grueling trip could have been avoided if they'd just been told about the children's remains beforehand. Maybe you'd also be annoyed if you went on a trip like that because someone withheld information from you.
It's extra frustrating that he was never properly told the location even afterwards, so after all that effort he (and we) can't know what really happened to them.
I think at the end of the day, it's very understandable that Inyo County would be of the mind that they may not know every blow by blow detail but it's a case that's basically solved and they don't want to get dragged into a costly resurfacing of some minor point.
Thanks for sharing this. I've read this account quite a few times now and I've always wondered if his attitude towards the SAR teams was completely justified. I don't have any personal experience, but I read about rescue efforts by local SAR teams in the local news almost weekly. The risks and danger these volunteers expose themselves to in order to save others are incredible. And often they deal with people who are wholly unprepared and end up in situations requiring rescue that could have been easily avoided. That must be very frustrating sometimes. Thank you for your work!
I completely understand it how you view this piece as you are out there putting your life at risk. However, for me it came across as nothing more as some minor annoyances that seemed justified from his point of view in the grand scheme of things. We have to remember, he was also out there putting his life at risk too.
In fact, I felt he gave the search and rescue a lot of praise and as a reader I left with a very positive view of the Search and Rescue effort and the people involved, and his annoyances seemed to be with the sharing of information in the years after.
>> I have personally been on a number of very challenging searches and rescues in the vicinity of this incident - some of the toughest things I've faced in my life.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Can you tell us what made your searches so challenging. I suspect the team is well prepared, has adequate resources, and knowledge of the area. Was it mostly the unbearable heat and conditions?
The team is often very well prepared, very knowledgeable, and we mostly have the resources needed. That is what makes the mission possible.
Conditions are often challenging (weather, terrain (ranging from Mt. Whitney to Death Valley), and carrying 'rescue' loads, which are much more cumbersome than a recreational load) -- but that is sometimes the fun part of the work.
There are also very long days sometimes. For instance, helicopter resources are not always guaranteed due to availability from other agencies, limited weather windows, and caps on pilot flight hours. You might get flown-in and dropped miles in the back-country in challenging terrain and have to hike out with heavy gear and a litter after an extensive, physical mission - but that is sometimes a part of the adventure.
The biggest challenge is often the mental/emotional side of things - seeing how the person, their friends and family are affected; thinking that you could have done something differently; or wondering how you've gotten so lucky yourself. There have been some heart-breakers in my short time, for sure.
I read this after seeing a previous link to it on HN. One of the most haunting tales of folks getting lost in remote places[1]. I live in the West and love to explore remote places. But being from Western Europe originally, it took me a while to fully appreciate what "remote" means. You're dozens of miles away from water, cell service, human settlement. You're on your own. Be prepared. Bring an InReach and know how to use it. (Or, these days, an iPhone, if you can accept the limitations.)
As a German myself I think I can confidently say that most of my country-men don't have the slightest feeling for what "remote" actually means until they have actually been to some of these places outside of Europe. "Remote" to a German might mean that it takes more than 30 minutes to the next highway. "Remote" means that cell reception drops to 3G, or that there's only one gas station in a 20km radius. Lots of folks I knew always talked about going to the outback in Australia as their first major trip abroad, because "it's so remote". It's hard to convince them that there's "remote enough" and "way too remote". I know plenty of places, specifically in Canada and the US, where driving for ~ 60 minutes from a major city will get you somewhere remote enough that you won't spot another soul. This is hard to grasp for us Germans since there's basically no place in the whole country where you're truly by yourself. My two cents.
For me (fellow German) the first eye-opener was after arriving in LA and driving East along the I-10: first you drive for ~70 miles through the LA sprawl, then that peters out, then you reach Palm Springs, and then, after you have left that behind too, nothing (except for desert). The contrast between an agglomeration with 12.5 million people and the vast empty space right next to it is really fascinating...
Yep, I travel through the Sonora desert on a regular basis to visit family, most of the drive is just rocks and bare landscape. I always make sure to bring plenty of water on those drives in case the car breaks down or something.
It really is a feat of engineering when you think about it that highways were built and maintained over such vast distances and through some really inhospitable terrain. When driving that road I sometimes ponder what it was like building it.
Did you get a chance to drive around Nevada much? It's nearly as large as Germany, but has only two metropolitan areas, and outside of those ... very nearly nothing at all. There are signs warning that there's no petrol available for 160+km.
Also some of the best night sky in the country, and some areas are eerily still and quiet.
Broadly speaking, you have the Northeast Corridor, which is more or less a continuous conurbation from DC to Boston.
Outside of that, the Eastern US generally follows European models of density, with clear densely-populated urban regions (Chicago being the largest city, but more minor cities like Indianapolis or Dayton correspond well to minor urban centers in European countries, population wise), in a field of rural areas where there's basically a quantum of civilization anywhere the land is flat enough to actually support it. There's kind of omnipresent human presence in the rural areas of, say, Ohio (not unlike rural Netherlands, say), while the mountainous regions like West Virginia sees strips of small towns nestled in every river valley while the ridgelines are largely empty (like a lot of the Alps).
The boundary between rural-but-populated and rural-but-unpopulated in the US is not so much the Mississippi River, but the 100°W longitude line, the High Plains (or roughly a line running from Oklahoma City through Wichita and Omaha up to Winnipeg along I-29 and I-35). From here, there's basically nothing until you hit the Front Range and the beginning of the mountains.
Once you hit the Front Range and you look west, you're in a kind of combination of the previous two zones. There's again large urban centers. In some of the big valleys--Columbia, Snake, Central, and Willamette--you see basically a small slice of European-style omnipresent human presence in rural areas. But outside of these areas, the area is largely thoroughly unpopulated, more so than even the High Plains, due to either being a desert, mountainous, or both.
The Nevada section of US-50 is a particularly extreme case:
> In the stretch of highway between Fallon and Delta, Utah, a span of 409 miles (658 km), there are three small towns: Austin, Eureka, and Ely. This span is roughly the same distance as Boston, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, or Paris, France, to Zürich, Switzerland.
Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman in Western Australia for 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across the Nullarbor Plain to Ceduna, South Australia.
It then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula as it continues eastwards for 470 kilometres (290 mi), before reaching Port Augusta.
My wife and I drove that a few years ago on our NY-to-SF trip, and it was a truly memorable experience. And somewhere out in the desert you'd see a tiny wooden house left by a settler; we knew there was another town a few tens of miles further on and that we could be rescued if we broke down, but those early settlers... I can't get my head around that.
When I was 11 years old my (Australian) family took a trip to remote Western Australia. Because remote tourism was popular in Germany at the time, we heard a different variation of "German tourist does naive thing" in most the towns we visited. Occasionally it was American tourists instead. I think this was more reflective of the number of people from each country that came to the bush than any national trait, but the stories themselves were educational.
Highlights included going down the Tanami Track in a rental van during the wet season, taking nothing but a case of beer onto the 2000km 4wd-only Canning Stock Route[0] and getting bogged then rescued by a passing convoy, and walking down a seriously remote track for six hours with nothing but a day pack and a change of clothes then asking where "the next kiosk" was.
We were from a more built up area of Australia, so we had a good idea of what it was like in the really remote parts and prepared: two spare tires, spare bits and pieces like timing belts and radiator hoses, HF radio and an epirb, redundant water containers, checked in with the local police station to let them know our expected arrival dates, all the good stuff. It was still very strange being in a part of the world where people would stop if they saw you pulled over but not waving or signalling to them, because you might be in trouble and they knew there'd only be one or two cars a day. We were from an area of Australia where if you had a compass and followed any direction for a day or two on foot you'd eventually come to a road, but out there you could drive for a day and not see anything.
[0] The longest stock route in the world, and probably one of the worst roads in Australia, insofar as you can call it a road.
About a year after the Berlin Wall came down I spent months riding a bicycle around Germany, an Australian - I have never quite got over the experience of the condensed scale of Germany, that I could find a clump of forest to wild camp in (perhaps not legally) and when i woke, hop on my bike and in minutes buy breakfast. I could choose any road, and always found some where for lunch, and wasn’t once run off the road by a semi trailer
Hehe. One time I was in a ride share from Berlin to Essen.
"Where are you from"
I respond with something mid-western.
"How far from New York or LA is that?"
"I can drive a day in any direction and still be in the middle of nowhere".
It was cute to see the confused looks on everyones faces. I get it though, you drive a couple hours in any direction in Europe and you are likely to be in another country or a body of water.
I don't remember appreciating how barren and distant a place can be until I drove from Vegas to Death Valley, seeing absolutely nothing but grey soil and dust around me for hours, no hints of civilization outside of a dingy gas station once in a blue moon.
Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city.
I'm sure you can have an even more surreal experience of the sort in any former USSR state or China, given their size.
> I'm sure you can have an even more surreal experience of the sort in any former USSR state or China, given their size.
Mongolia is great for this, travelers can basically camp wherever they want and the nomadic locals are so friendly. They often invite travelers to stay in their yurts, be fed, and experience what their lives are like. It's so incredibly welcome after days of isolated tent camping, an experience that transcends language barriers.
> Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city.
I don't think many people think we're running out of physical space to house humans... but rather whether we're running out of productive land with ample resources.
In my experience, they really mean ‘there are too many people in the way of where I want to live’.
It doesn’t even directly have anything to do with resources or productive land, as when you really look at it, those are not usually limited either in any real sense (though might be more expensive than preferred due to relative economic competitiveness!).
In my experience (energy and mineral resource exploration) it means that population growth from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 8 billion today coupled with increased expectations of consumption levels across the globe has come at the expense of vast tracts of unique habitats and the elimination of most species on the planet along with our waste by products threatening our own continued existence at this scale into the future.
For what purpose?
Why is 8 billion 'better' than 2.5 billion, and how many people is too many (or not enough).
There is land left for us to cover over Trantor style, but there is little left in the way of prime habitat, the river mouths and edges have been largely urbanised at the expense of wet marsh filters that keep our petri dish of a planet clean.
Total fertility rate (TFR) is lower with longer average education for females, higher GDP per capita, higher contraceptive prevalence rate, and stronger family planning programs.
What exactly are you doing to increase | decrease the human population?
I don't feel any need to prove increasing population leads to increasing demands on a finite planet, it's readily apparent to anyone that bothers to look.
Why is it that you lack a stance on whether this is a good thing | bad thing?
Also Australia. In some areas, the properties (cattle stations) are measured in millions of acres. Biggest ranch in the US is 825k acres, whereas there are dozens in Australia in the 1-6 million acre range. Driving through Australia, you are generally driving through the middle of some of them.
Areas like Death Valley are empty because of a lack of water.
I sometimes hike out there and often don't see another person all day. Rarely do I see a drop of water, though, even though I'm only there in the "wetter" time.
> Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city
I don't think people literally mean there isn't enough land for more humans to stand on. It's about the resources required by Homo Sapiens.
First I'd have to buy one! - but I've never felt the need. I expect that bringing along a magic "help" button would change my risk perception, such that I'd be more likely to end up needing to use it.
No judgment of anyone else who wants to carry one, of course! We all have to balance risks and rewards in whatever way makes sense for our own lives.
Indeed, both sides are valid. Experienced individual/s in the backcountry is different than inexperienced and traveling with dependents.
It makes me curious if satellite/gps features on modern cell phones or vehicles would aid in a situation like this
I don't suggest trusting your cell phone GPS any farther than you can throw it once you're outside of town. They've gotten a lot better, but mine still went out a couple months ago on the back roads between two cities about 45 minutes apart. No big deal, I was heading to the bigger town and there were plenty of signs. Plus it's a drive I used to make all the time, just was a little rusty.
There's still a lot of places where cell service doesn't reach and unless you have a specialized unit, they will be worthless in situations like this.
You don't need cell service for the GPS to work, it's a GPS and should work anywhere with open skies. But you would need an offline map to use it for something, and that map had better not tell you an impassable road is drivable.
Satellite connection in the new iPhone should work anywhere in the US for emergencies IIRC.
If you had the foresight to download maps for the area you got lost in, then it might help. The you still have everything that compromises the GPS signal. Proper GPS units indicate how many satellites are available and you can work out how accurate the positioning is from there. Keep in mind big landscape features can bounce the signal around.
Basically, it could be helpful in the event that you've got the maps available to you and you're already somewhat familiar with how to use a GPS and what their limitations are. Also, keep in mind how often your navigation app tells you to take an exit off the highway when you're actually on the frontage road. It's a tool, but it's not magic. Someone linked the Chretiens' story. They had a GPS unit, but not the understanding of its limitations. Relying on it was what went wrong in their situation.
I fall back to a road atlas when I need to navigate outside of town if I'm not on the interstate. It just works. Topo maps for hiking and a compass. If you know how to use them, it takes 99% of the guesswork out of the equation.
"Proper" GPS units don't magically have maps, especially detailed ones, either.
And, especially for driving purposes, knowing things like the number of satellites locked on and how many feet of precision you have isn't very relevant.
I agree that in general backup topo maps and a compass are useful in any case.
But even maps are not magic. The knowledge that a "road" on a map may not be something navigable by a normal vehicle and driver or that a military base won't have a perimeter regularly patrolled by soldiers requires knowledge that a map won't give you.
I feel like we're bouncing between contexts here, so I'm going to try to organize my thoughts a bit.
A proper GPS unit will give you a lat/long reading as well as additional information that can help you determine how accurate those numbers are. This can be referenced on a topo map and to help determine your location in addition to landscape features. The accuracy of the GPS location is quite important as the difference between thinking you should make a slight turn onto a road that turns into a minimum maintenance quagmire and knowing you should stay on the visually identical main road can easily be measured in meters.
As far as whether cell phone navigation features could help people in these situations, they would have to already be prepared and familiar with its use. In many or most cases like this, the affected individuals were unfamiliar enough with what they were getting into that they would not have had the maps downloaded before finding themselves out of reach of cell signal. Without the maps downloaded, they'd be pretty much out of luck.
Even if they had the maps downloaded, there will be no real-time updates on road conditions as there is no cell signal. Most of the maps I've downloaded in the past didn't come with information such as roads only being passable at certain times of year. I know there are maps out there with that level of detail, but you'd have to have planned properly and made sure the maps were up to date and had the relevant details. At which point you probably wouldn't find yourself in the situation in the first place.
I've left this point alone so far, but your battery will not last for long trying to use it while outside of cell range. You can turn off all your data, wifi, etc, if your phone can decouple that from GPS availability, but it's still a lot of screen time and battery use. At some point, you're out of juice. It's more of a time constraint than a functional constraint, but it's something to keep in mind should you find yourself in this situation.
Basically, if folks are prepared for the situation, the cell phone navigation would probably help. The majority of people who wind up lost down a back road were not prepared and the cell phone nav wouldn't help.
I can't get the number of satellites out of iOS but I can absolutely get a lat/long and accuracy. (Android you can get the number of satellites.)
Yes, you need to know how to use your phone and download the appropriate app(s) and maps while connected to the Internet. And you should probably have an external battery pack.
And many people won't prepare before setting out. But I'm not sure how different that is from a dedicated GPS unit or even map/compass. The only thing I use my ancient dedicated waterproof Garmin GPS for is sea kayaking so I don't risk my phone.
I guess it just comes down to preparation then. A cell phone with maps downloaded is probably more convenient than a GPS with maps downloaded. I just don't think it's going to help much for the sort of situations that are being discussed in the thread where adequate research and planning were not done even though those things (albeit in less digital form) were absolutely available at that time as well.
I ran into some folks in a similar situation a few years back in the Lucerne valley. We were driving out to check a campsite for a party we were going to have the next weekend and came across some folks in a Pontiac Grand Am - same story, they’d started getting bogged down in the sand and so kept accelerating deeper into the nowhere, eventually getting high centered on some rocks. When we found them it was a Sunday and they’d been there for nine hours, they told us they hadn’t seen anyone. We were in a big F250 4x4 so we pulled them out and got them pointed back down the road. I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t shown up that day.
To their credit they had two cases of bottled water in their car so they weren’t entirely stupid.
I read this here in 2019 I think, and visited Death Valley last October. When we were preparing the drive from Vegas to Mammoth lake, Google Maps would show different routes every day. It turned out the 190 was closed and they were busy working on it, updating the status regularly. After driving for a couple of hours we hit a roadblock and without any cell phone reception we felt really helpless. We gambled a bit and took a narrow winding road towards Telescope Peak (I believe). Then I started thinking about the Germans because the road we were on was not even on my cached Google Maps. I just saw it isn't on the live one either... Luckily we made it just fine and took a 3 hour southern detour past Ridgecrest. We still made it to Willy's Hot Springs near Mammoth lake before nightfall. What a fantastic trip!
We drove from Death Valley to Ridgecrest. The 40 miles from the 190/178 junction to Trona where the loneliest drive ever. Just a strip of asphalt in the dark, with nearly no street markings and shrubbery on both sides.
I grew up (what I since learned people distinguish as "primitive") camping, hiking, in the ocean, etc. Not fear, but respect, for the power of nature was ingrained from the time of my earliest memories.
It wasn't until I was an adult I realized I was assuming this was universal and sadly it's definitely not.
I hear stories like this more often than I'd like and all I can do is shake my head. It's just sad and tragic and unnecessary.
Another poster already commented on this, but as a German I think it is important to provide some perspective:
There is next to no way to be outside of civilization and basic infrastructure for more than 30min of walking. Ok, maybe it is hyperbole and it is really 1-2 hours of walking in any direction but you're honestly going to have a tough time to not run into people and infrastructure anywhere in the country.
Western Europe is really dense when it comes to distance between urban areas in a way that has to feel foreign/weird for Americans. The distance between everything feels really different in the US versus Germany which either side will never fully understand or grasp until they're exposed to it in real life.
I appreciated it truly for the first time when I nearly ran out of gas on Route 66 back when I was a tourist before moving to the US. The needle was at 0, I had sweaty palms like never before. In contrast, a 2 hour drive anywhere in Germany feels really long and annoying, you will certainly pass multiple major urban areas.
This reminded me of the strange story of Takako Konishi, a woman from Japan who came to North Dakota and was found dead, dressed very inappropriately for the cold winter weather.
The story that was shared by news outlets said she was searching for the briefcase full of cash that appeared in the movie Fargo by the Coen Brothers.
I read this series and some of Mahood's other writings just as I was getting into Search and Rescue myself and it was quite inspiring.
I've been on a few extended searches and there's a lot of thought and research that goes into getting into people's heads to try to figure out where they went.
I think the most heartwarming aspect of this story is simply the institutions and the people available and involved with the search process. Long after the vehicle was abandoned, a lot of people, time, and expertise were let loose and focused on the problem of this missing family.
As of a week ago, they may have stopped now, teams have been searching the local mountains for a missing hiker. They're already 2 weeks into the search.
We take these institutions for granted, but I'm grateful to the team members and volunteers that work these cases.
Can anyone identify the cabin, Anvil Canyon and the other places on Google Maps? Best I can come up with is this route from the cabin to the canyon, but Google says it is 19 miles (versus 4 miles in the article):
Being a dad with 2 young kids, it kinds of break my heart to read this kind of stories. I wouldn't be moved if this was the story of 2 adults only, but man, bringing kids, who at this age have 100% trust on you, to die like that. Poor souls.
I will never forget the feeling of reading this for the first time on my iPad some years ago. It kind of helped me get out of a rut, his grit is inspiring.
RE >> "Costs for the search were approximately $80,000 in 1996 dollars."
I have a question about this. But before I proceed, let me be clear: I am not questioning the expense - in my view, it's well spent.
My question: when my local government nit-picks over the cost of a fixing a pot-hole on a main boulevard, how do costs like this get justified at the government level? Especially given the time frame: the vehicle had clearly been there a while and they had evidence that the Germans were there possibly as early as July and the search was October. Not to be grim, but the odds of a survival case were low. Not questioning the expense (well spent), but I'm curious to know more about how these sorts of expenses get justified and approved at the bureaucratic level? This is not a criticism, just a question.
It’s my impression that you’ve uncovered a tiny tiny tip of a very very large iceberg. One simple answer is that not fixing a pothole has almost zero political cost. However, not organizing a huge mediagenic search when tourists from a developed country might die could have a massive blowback. So I think they will just tweak the budget of something else later when everyone else has forgotten in order to pay for the search.
But think about the police departments in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago. They quietly pay settlements of tens of millions of dollars per year for police misconduct of all kinds. Somehow these costs are buried in opaque sections of the budget that no one is willing to disclose. It never appears as a line item. It would take multiple annual freedom of information act applications to start to get to the bottom of what’s happening there.
Since the first time I read this, I've wondered what they could have done to survive once the car got stuck. The only thing I came up with is to set fire to the car and hope the smoke would get someone to come look.
I think that's actually the recommended course of action, if you're stuck somewhere remote, especially in the snow. Light the spare tire on fire-tire smoke is very dark & thick, and can been seen for miles in the daytime.
I guess I need to search the YouTubes for "Survival techniques to light your car tire on fire." I honestly don't think I have anything in my car, this second, that could do that. How much heat does a tire need to light up? Is one of those mini-spares enough tire to make a good signal?
Its easy (well easier) with motorcycles, as you can readily get fuel out of the tank, assuming you have some fire source. But for a car? Not sure.
Mind, for this specific case, you have to appreciate that these folks were rather far from the beaten path. They were certainly far away from the local ranger stations and what not. Ideally someone may have seen it and reported it, but I wouldn't necessarily guarantee it. They were in a pretty large valley where this happened.
And, as an anecdote, my friends and I were stuck near there for 3 days one year. But it was in the mud, in the nearby dry ("dry") lake, and we were near a road. Never in any danger. But it was a fun extraction.
Clip one end of the jumper cables to the battery and short the other end across a small chunk of metal until it gets hot enough to ignite paper (or just spark them onto some torn up paper), add whatever else you have to build it up, add paper soaked in engine oil until that ignites, and then feed it with oil-soaked fabric and eventually shreds of tire until those burn readily, and then the whole tire (deflated first of course)
Just what I would try, not really sure if you could get it hot enough. Maybe a lithium battery would add enough oomph?
I thought about using the upholstery or plastic panels from the dash etc. but that's probably all flame retardant on any modern car.
The general problem is that even if you're a well-prepared person in general when driving to remote locations--you're probably not (and can't easily be) well-prepared when flying to a foreign country and renting a car.
Heck, forget the foreign country part. I'd be a lot more prepared for somewhere like Death Valley if I drove there from the East than if I flew there and rented a car.
Yeah, I think advice is typically stay with your car, though probably relies on people knowing you're missing (easier to search roads than everywhere) or there being at least occasional traffic on that route.
I remember they found the car first. Would staying by the car not have bought them enough time?
I don't know if the advantage was enough, but basically the conclusion was that they found the car first. And this type of story keeps on happening (like the car in Washington state a few years ago where the only person who died wandered away from their car), to the extent there's a real lesson to stay still.
In hindsight, their best bet might have been to walk back to the Geologist's Cabin and wait for someone to come along. Supposedly it's usually stocked with some food and water, and there's a spring right next to it.
It would have been about a 4 mile walk with an elevation gain of about 1000 feet. Admittedly not easy with little kids, but they ultimately did make it 8 miles in the other direction.
I read this story and mapped it out a few years ago, and they could (probably) have walked out the way they came. They passed a low scrubby area with a spring on the way in. I imagine most people would have simply backtracked on foot and (probably) survived.
I can only guess they had absolutely no idea where they actually were - but perhaps thought they knew where they were. That is the only explanation for continuing forwards on foot rather than turning back. If you're looking at the wrong place on a map, especially an inadequate map, it's easy to think you're going the right way when they are 'dead' wrong.
Well, the supposition in the story was that they assumed a military base would have big nasty fences patrolled by guards--as opposed to being a large patch of desert that the military blew stuff up in.
Though they were in a bad situation in any case, with hindsight, they should have headed back down to West Side Road--not that there would be much traffic at that time of year. And even tried to cross the basin to Badwater if possible.
I don't think that would have been survivable. It's about a 20 mile hike down to the valley, and that day they had a high temp of 124 degrees F in the valley. Walking 20 miles at 124 degrees with no shade with a four year old and an eleven year old does not seem survivable to me. They don't call it Death Valley for nothing.
The Geologist's cabin is about 4500 feet higher than the valley, so you'd expect the high temp to be about 100, but in the shade with adequate water (which there is at the Geologist's cabin), it's probably not life threatening.
Again, with the huge benefit of hindsight, it looks to me like there was unlimited water and at least a few days of food in the cabin, but I really have no idea how often people come by there. Some have suggested starting a smoky fire, maybe with a car tire. Another option would be to leave the family up at the cabin, and have the dad head down to the valley alone at night or very early in the morning to get help. He'd be able to move a lot faster without a four year old in tow.
In 1996, I'm not sure what their options would have been, but today a Personal Locator Beacon or some other satellite communication system is good to have if you're in a remote place with no cell reception.
The cabin they passed on the way there wasn't that far compared to how far they got in the end, the best option would likely have been to take what they had from the car and stay there. And try to set a tyre alight as a signal for help.
That said, since it seems there wasn't much investigation until the car sighting in October, it's unlikely even that would have been enough.
Been awhile since I read the story, but for starters you don't drive your rental minivan into the unpaved desert wilderness, which IIRC is what they did.
If you're simply stuck in an otherwise functioning vehicle, in something easily digged like sand... just get unstuck and go back from where you came. You can use the carpets/floor mats from within the vehicle if needed to get yourself out of sand in a pinch. It's just a matter of getting dirty and manual labor. I get stuck in desert sand pretty regularly, and only abandon the vehicle that got me into the isolated mess as a last resort, i.e. if it's irreparably broken or totally out of fuel.
An automobile can very easily deliver its occupants to fatal-as-pedestrian situations. As a former mechanic and gearhead, I'd strongly recommend becoming mechanically inclined and able to improvise repairs on your vehicle if you intend to do such things. And select the vehicle such as to maximize success on that front.
Long long ago I'd drive around an old toyota tercel on desert roads and fire trails and such. I had a couple jacks, a shovel, and a couple big pieces of plywood in the back, and never got myself stuck in any meaningful way that couldn't be unstuck with a bit of effort, but I'd always stop as soon as there was any hint of problem and address it with the tools I brought with me.
I recently got a BMW 128i quite stuck in some sand at a sandy beach parking lot. I didn't have any reasonable tools and my tool-less efforts to get unstuck got me even more stuck.
Were I stuck in the desert with the BMW, limited water, no shade an no tools, it probably would have been a pretty serious problem. Things can go from manageable to unmanageable quite quickly sometimes.
I dunno man, if there's a functioning jack and floor mats you can generally worst-case inchworm the vehicle out.
The advantage of sand is you can easily shuffle it around even with bare hands. It takes time and labor, you'll get filthy and sweaty, but just keep making little mounds under the tires like four ramps with the floor mats under the tires. Use the jack one corner at a time to make these mounds under them. It'll gradually make progress in the direction you desire, gravity assisting.
I often help tourists out of washes near my desert cabin, being surrounded by airbnbs, it's a comically regular occurrence around there.
They tend to get frustrated and give up very quickly, after what efforts they made only worsened things by fixating on digging out the tires (?!?!?), neglecting to realize the underbody is completely beached on the ground. But it requires actually getting down on the ground and filthy to even see the real problem at the underside, sometimes requiring substantial digging just to get at that.
One thing that is genuinely problematic though; VW/Audi likes to use a weird half-scissor jack that's basically useless in sand/gravel/dirt, anything loose. It just scoops the ground like a shovel instead of lifting the car. The ubiquitous Japanese compact scissor jacks are far superior.
Supposedly the van had 3 flat tires. That said, it also had an unused spare tire. It certainly would have been worth trying to get two good tires on the front and try to keep moving.
The more fundamental problem I suspect is that they may not have been thinking clearly given all of the empty alcohol bottles that were found. In the van, there was an empty bottle of beer and an an empty bottle of Bourbon. There was another beer bottle 2 miles from the car. Near their remains were found, there was an empty 2 liter bottle of wine and another empty bottle of beer.
Flat tires are kind of not a big deal in sand, and actually do a better job of finding some grip in the loose stuff.
Standard operating procedure is to intentionally deflate tires for sandy terrain... fully inflated all-seasons tend to just spin.
I own a desert cabin on an unpaved road, and once drove the ~12 miles from town with a flat by deliberately keeping the flat side in the soft sandy shoulder for the entire pavement portion (~11 miles) of the trip. There was very little drama, and the wheel with the flat only got its paint scuffed up by the sand. Of course I drove slow to not beat up the bodywork with tire carcass, but it was perfectly mobile despite being a drive wheel on an open diff.
But WRT to ze Germans, they presumably got flats after making the idiotic choice to drive off-road in a rugged desert terrain in an unprepared minivan. Don't do that.
Once the car got stuck they were in a bad spot - nobody knew they were out there so nobody was looking for them. It's remotely possible that hiking back out the way they came in would have done something, but the most likely thing would have been to start as dirty a smoke fire as they could during the day - and hope that a passing plane reported it.
Yeah, this is the correct answer. They simply didn't have the skills, ability, resources, or technology to survive in those circumstances once the car was crippled. They needed a big dose of good luck, and none came.
I think when people ask this question, what they actually mean is, "what would be a smart thing to do if I were in this situation?" In the interests of answering that question with the best advice currently available:
- Tell someone where you're going, how you're planning to get there, and when you should be back. It should be someone whose judgement you trust. I know, this is a chore, it's more fun to just take off on a whim for a weekend. But really, this is the number one thing that can get you found.
- Today we have really cool Garmin InReach devices that work (nearly) everywhere in (nearly) all conditions. They aren't terribly expensive. You can push a button for an SOS and a nearby agency may receive your coordinates. I'm using some qualifiers here because heavy cloud cover or snow can interfere with the devices, they can run out of battery, there can be miscommunications for your coordinates (I've personally seen this happen), and the team dispatched to your location may not be terribly motivated for any number of reasons. InReach devices are not well-loved by SAR teams because of their tendency to get activated accidentally or because a hiker "got too tired to keep going" (neither of which is a good enough reason not to respond to any new InReach alert as a potentially life-threatening emergency).
- Learn you some wilderness first aid if you can, it's probably the single best tool in your box for getting you out of bad situations. You'll get better at recognizing some common ailments and potentials for injury and you'll have a better sense of what to carry. I did not like the REI/NOLS WFA class, but it's better than nothing and is available in many popular outdoor areas.
- Recognize when you're in the shit, stop, and reassess as calmly as possible. This has got to be the most frequently recurring pattern I see in accident reports and debriefings. So many people, even ones that should know better (maybe especially ones that should know better) get tunnel vision as things start to get progressively worse. Different sports have different phrases for it, in mountaineering it's called summit fever. The road is muddy, the sky is gray, and your car is starting to bog down? STOP. Take a few beats. Eat a candy bar. Get out, stretch your legs if appropriate. Whatever, the point is to do something different for a minute so you have time to reflect on your situation. Reassess: have things been getting worse for the last few minutes? What happens if they continue to worsen? Why do you think they'll get better if you keep going forward? Then, make a decision.
- When lost, the current advice from NASAR and most organizations is to stop moving and stay put, but this can be really situational. Some situations may call for continuing to move towards something that looks like civilization, but there are also lots of areas where trying to do this ends up getting you into serious trouble. Once you deviate very far from your intended plan, the chances of finding you fall off a cliff (heh... little black humor there). Generally, your best chances of being found are on a trail, in a clearing.
There are PLBs which are supposed to be more reliable than satellite messengers. But I like the idea of inReach more since can send messages telling the responders the situation, friends where you are going, friends to send lesser help, or friends to not call authorities when late. There are more than emergencies that happen outside of cell range.
Another thing to mention is have GPS and maps. It is good to have backups whether hiking GPS and/or paper maps and compass. If using phone, keep it charged and have battery charger.
Finally, be prepared for the conditions. Carry the essentials while hiking. Carry lots of water in desert. Carry water in car. The Germans would have been in much better shape with lots of water in car.
>Recognize when you're in the shit, stop, and reassess as calmly as possible. This has got to be the most frequently recurring pattern I see in accident reports and debriefings.
Yep, Admiral Cloudberg's analysis of plane crashes has this as a recurring theme, practically every time there isn't a mechanical failure, the crash is "controlled flight into terrain".
Yeah - and like this case the critical moment of error was minutes or hours before the “obvious” issue. Leaving paved roads in an area you know nothing about and are unprepared for is a bad idea.
The proximate issue was almost certainly that they were running late and, not being familiar with the US West, didn't realize that just because there was a "road" on the map, didn't mean that there was a shortcut that a passenger vehicle could go on.
You can do as you like. Me, I'm going to tramp out the international distress signal in letters big enough to see at 10,000 feet. "Hey, there's an SOS! Let's check it out!" And I'll be back at the ranger station thanking them for saving my behind.
You, you might get lucky when the ranger says "hey, wasn't that same car there 3 months ago? Let's check it out!" and recovers your desiccated body.
Tramp out how? You'll find little terrain that you can alter. Many trails are faint (as in a novice will likely not see them when they're right there) despite nothing erasing them for ages. There's minimal vegetation already, nothing that will show to a passing plane.
I would consider a signal mirror a last resort as using one means you can't take shelter and will cook all the much faster. Smoke is more of an option but I would much prefer to save my gasoline for running the AC than for burning a tire. If I had some other fuel source fine, but it's such a low probability scenario it's not something I'm going to prepare for. My safety standards out there is never to be farther from asphalt than I can hoof it back if need be.
If you find these types of 'disappeared in the wilderness' stories interesting, there's a really interesting one about a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains:
It's horrible that it seems the parents died before the children too. What an awful way to die, but totally understandable that in the moment they were more worried about retrieving the rental car and making it to LA on time than finding shelter for the long haul.
There's no "long haul" out there. I've never been in that part of the park, but from looking at the map I would say the only likely survival there would be to hunker down and push the button (the backcountry equivalent to calling 911--not an option back then.)
If that were not an option I would wait for nightfall, keep all lights and navigation, space blankets, sun umbrella and the jerry can of water, abandon everything else and try to hoof it. I would consider success unlikely. Given the supplies they had I would consider survival impossible.
It depends on the situation. If you have had a breakdown and have to hoof it (which normally shouldn't happen anyway--you should be prepared to hold out until you're reported overdue and they're looking for you) you could be in a situation where you know ahead is shorter than behind. That assumes you know where you are and what the roads around are like.
I feel like there is a strand in the human brain that cannot deal with not knowing things or being uncertain. You see this in mysteries like this, but you see the same thing in people's belief that UFOs are aliens, or conspiracy theories or religion. People pick an answer and then adhere to it ABSOLUTELY, being less willing to accept it is uncertain than they are facts like gravity. One example of this is flat earth. But the same "thought structure" occurs with people in political matters or vaccine/climate change denial.
There's an entire series of books titled "Death in ..." for US national parks, each one detailing incidents where people (not always tourists) ended up dead because they didn't take the risks seriously. https://longreads.com/2022/11/15/death-in-national-parks/
At Valley of Fire, 30-60 minutes from Las Vegas, there's a hike with a permanent sign at the beginning no matter the season/weather saying:
"HEAT WARNING. Hiking is not recommended."
This is despite the park recommending the hike on their map/brochure and at the visitor centre...
Obviously it gets hot there and being close to Vegas means people show up in jeans and with poor wayfinding skills. But I do wonder if the sign dissuades no one but desensitises others. Bit of a balancing act trying to adequately warn people who pay little attention, but keep it as the wild experience people want to have.
Australian parks have hike grades, indicated on trailheads.
I guess they should not scrimp on signage and put more explicit descriptions, such as "if you can't run half a marathon under X hours or don't have Y liters of water per person you will likely die".
I think people tune this out though because it often feels like overkill for the season/weather or something else. Obviously the weather changes or the exposure is different once you're out there. But it won't stop people tuning it out. The signposted hike in question is very, very tame, maybe 1.5km.
I like the per-trail signage idea. Broader things like 4L/day recommendations aren't going to seem realistic for many people. Or education around over-provisioning water: added weight makes for more exercise, and means you're not miserly rationing water and hating the hike.
Yeah, that sign is stupid. In the right time of year it's perfectly reasonable to hike. In the hot time you would have to be insane--but the sign doesn't distinguish between those cases.
Just drove down US-50 in Tahoe this morning in all the snow, and a good portion of road signs is out of whack: 55mph limit signs are a joke when you have the mandatory chains on, 35mph yellow signs are a joke in the summer, seems like they are trying to come up with some "average" values safe all-year-round despite winter and summer conditions being complete opposites.
Even in the heat, it's not a particularly long hike. Morning or evening wouldn't be an issue. That said, it's not like the majority of tourists show up early!
The people who need the signs aren't the ones who are paying attention to conditions. I never head out without either checking the weather myself or knowing that a person whose judgment I trust has checked the weather.
Because of pervasive ass-covering in the kinds of organizations responsible for this kind of messaging and infantilization of people just in general they just put a "pls don't do the thing you're here to do" sign that everyone will ignore rather than an informative sign and "make your own decision" that might actually help a few people think twice about doing something actually dumb.
I read an interview with a US park ranger. They said people walk right up to the edge of canyons to get a gander. Like they're at home watching TV. Makes the rangers cringe.
It's like they think the canyon was engineered by Disney amusement park engineers to be safe and normie-proof. Surely they wouldn't open a canyon attraction without first engineering the cliff to never collapse, right? If there's no guardrail, that must mean it's safe.
