Since moving to Maine, I have wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. I am mostly resigned to the idea that I will never hike the entire 2,000+ mile trail, largely since I'll be seventy in less than a year, but I might hike the last part of it, which is known as the 100 Mile Wilderness. Now that I no longer have cats who are in their 20s, I could be away a couple of weeks. I've discussed it in the thread that I just linked to. It's the section where the woman's body was found two years after she had gotten lost. The thing with these trails is that you're not just walking. Mostly, you're going up and down mountains the whole way. Since there is a marked trail, it doesn't require rappelling or rock climbing, but neither is it like walking across a field. Although these trails are marked, they are maintained by volunteers so the maintenance of them may differ from place to place, and, as the dead woman learned, once you get off the trail, the wilderness can mess with your head. People who get hurt or lost aren't necessarily dumbasses. As much care as you might want to place on what you're doing, you're probably going to mess up at some point along a two-thousand-mile hike. One slip, tripping over a root, or a rock, or an area where the markings aren't so visible, and you can get messed up. Delays along the way might tempt you to do some night hiking so as to reach the next shelter, and so on. Along the Appalachian Trail, there are several side trails so merely following a path won't necessarily get you where you want to go. One of my concerns in hiking the trail would be that I don't know how painful it might prove to be or how quickly I'll be able to get from one part of the trail to another, so I'd worry that I'd miss a check-in point and my wife would panic, leading to an unnecessary but expensive search and rescue. She called the Sheriff's Department once because she hadn't heard from me while I was cutting trees on my land, My phone battery had simply died, and I had a flat tire getting back to the hotel I was going to spend the night in.
"This thread is too stupid." "This thread is too boring." "This thread is juuuuuust right." ...unless you were referring to a toilet paper commercial.
Dunno one way or the other but if she had just broken and chipped her fingernails like she had to crawl to make it to the stream, it would be movie material. As it is, I’m sure there are some ghost writers out there who are already canvassing the dear lady for a book. Never let a crisis, bogus or otherwise go to waste.
Latest update says that the water source she was by is mostly non-potable. The law enforcement officer was quoted as saying she would need the strongest immune system in the world to survive drinking from it, unless she had a great camping filtration unit with her. A tryst in the woods, in a nice tent, with a married guy, is the way I'll spin this, for now. Yeah, like others in here don't come up with some truly crazy stuff........
As the Boy Scouts say, "be prepared." And a 2,000 mile "hike??" Sheesh, I don't even like to ride in the car that much.
This one may not end well..... https://news.yahoo.com/family-hiker-missing-2-weeks-050924137.html Of course, it's a great idea to do an overnight hike around Mt. Rainier, which has some tricky trails even during daylight hours. We hiked a few, a while back.
It is so easy to get turned around, and so easy to panic. It sounds like he was new to the area. I was just thinking that you can buy GPS tracking tags to put on possessions, animals and the elderly. Hiking would be an ideal market for the product. You could carry the tag and turn it on when you need assistance so as to conserve battery life, assuming you can get into a sufficient clearing. I would think it would be easy enough to create an account that notifies someone if the things starts transmitting. State and National parks could rent them out short-term, as could outfitters. They would not work in all cases, but it's better than nothing.
There are also satellite phones that can connect in very remote locations. I would think that these might make for a strong rental market, as well.
There you go. Just what the doctor ordered. Lots of different options at lots of different price points. There are some rental options out there. I don't know how many lost hikers there in a given year, and if this really is all the big of an issue (sensationalist headlines notwithstanding.)
Yvonne’s daughter bought 3 “gotennas”, one for each of us and are the size of a large magic marker. She did the hiking and milling about looking for rocks and stuff so it stands to reason why she would need one more than my wife and I but it is a neat gift just the same. They pair with the Apple phones so I guess if someone is out of phone range and down or lost for whatever reason, it can be used as a locator beacon and the phones will pick up on it.
It is a strange thing. Just like some people who have never fired a gun but yet buy the things without being trained, there are a lot of folks who simply look at some awesome pictures and say, I’m gonna go climb that mountain or hike that trail without first learning about what they are about to embark upon. I took a little more than just survival training in the military and have navigated through a lot of S. Louisiana bayous so camping out or hiking is actually easier to me than finding my way around in a city. That said, there are only a few times when I felt comfortable going backwoods or through a swamp without an experienced companion. Everyone likes to think that they’re some hotshot movie woodsman and can fight a bear and eat the heart of it afterwards but there’s just too many things that can go wrong. In all things, if most people would just put their ego on hold and think for a while before taking that trip back to nature, there would be a lot less people winding up as a part of nature instead of taking pictures of it. Oh yeah, I meant to post a small story earlier on and didn’t. I met 2 young ladies whilst I was bar tending one night in Lathrop Wells, Nevada. They were from G. Britain and were hiking across the U.S. We put them up for the night in the then empty bunkhouse after they had dinner and a couple of drinks and the next morning they said their goodbyes and started walking down the road with their thumbs out. The thing is, nearly everyone in our small town of 35 offered to put them on the next bus to get to their destination. We tried to convince them that it was too dangerous to hike in that part of the country but no, they were fully experienced and wanted to hike. Both of their bodies were found in southern Washington about 4 months later.