8 ms·

US hiker 'lost for 26 days before dying'

28 points by sjcsjc 10y ago

curtis 10y ago
This article has some more details: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-after-disappearing-from-appalachian-trail-survived-for-weeks/KAcHuKSdYVHNTNu0qQobvK/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-...
- PuffinBlue 10y ago
  I don't think I understand how dangerous these forests must be. It seems extraordinary that someone can step off the trail like this and get so lost so near to where they need to be. It also seems extraordinary that a hiker of her age, carrying as little kit as she was, decided to do this alone.
  - LoganCale 10y ago
    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.
    - PuffinBlue 10y ago
      > 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.
  - fuzzywalrus 10y ago
    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.
  - curtis 10y ago
    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.
    - LoganCale 10y ago
      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.
United857 10y ago
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 :( https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/personal-locator-beacons.html https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/personal-locator-bea...
- baddox 10y ago
  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.
- curtis 10y ago
  Looking at it the other way, why don't search and rescue services have a mobile cell-phone "tower" attached to an aircraft?
  - paavokoya 10y ago
    This is a fantastic idea, although they'd need to have several carriers to make it feasible (what if someone uses t-mobile instead of verizon?
    - PuffinBlue 10y ago
      At least on UK networks you get an indication that says 'emergency calls only' when you are within range of any network. Does a similar thing happen in the US? Also seems like a perfect application for those Stingrays the police have stockpiled.
      - codecamper 10y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if these would have been used if the lost person was rich or famous.
      - LoganCale 10y ago
xofer 10y ago
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.
- tfm 10y ago
  Well, you'll need water, which generally finds itself at lower ground .... Are folks not taught stuff about lighting smokey fires to attract attention, or would there have been local factors that prevented it in this case?
  - curtis 10y ago
    She was set up near a stream. And it sounds like maybe she tried to start a fire but was unable to.
  - xofer 10y ago
    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. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/26/when-you-find-my-body-please-call-my-husband-wrote-dying-hiker-lost-along-the-appalachian-trail/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/2...
- mcbits 10y ago
  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.)
  - zyxley 10y ago
    Since at least the 40s, the advice of the US Forest Service has been to travel downhill, remaining in place if injured or there's nowhere further downhill to go: http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5435268.pdf http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb543526...
LoganCale 10y ago
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.
- DarkTree 10y ago
  > you simply go back the way you came until you find it again In a densely wooded, unfamiliar remote area, it isn't so simple just to backtrack, especially if you begin to panic. In a way, it is similar to falling through ice, and not being able to simply find your way back to the hole you fell through. Panic plays a role.
- PuffinBlue 10y ago
  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. Here's one for instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/2r32uy/how_could_a_woman_just_vanish_on_july_22_2013/cncex4z https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/2r32uy...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    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.
DarkTree 10y ago
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.
- zyxley 10y ago
  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.
  - LoganCale 10y ago
    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.
- tfm 10y ago
  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.
sixQuarks 10y ago
We can expect to see a movie made about this within 2 years.
- DanBC 10y ago
  We already have Gerry. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0302674/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_19 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0302674/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_19
ape4 10y ago
Probably the "trail" wasn't marked every inch like a sidewalk. But had blazes every so often so hard to return to.
curtis 10y ago
Here's another article with some more specifics: http://outthere.bangordailynews.com/2016/05/26/outdoor-recreation/warden-file-on-largay-disappearance-leaves-plenty-of-questions/ http://outthere.bangordailynews.com/2016/05/26/outdoor-recre... This part stood out: 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.

28 points by sjcsjc 10y ago

This article has some more details: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-after-disappearing-from-appalachian-trail-survived-for-weeks/KAcHuKSdYVHNTNu0qQobvK/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-...

PuffinBlue 10y ago
I don't think I understand how dangerous these forests must be. It seems extraordinary that someone can step off the trail like this and get so lost so near to where they need to be. It also seems extraordinary that a hiker of her age, carrying as little kit as she was, decided to do this alone.
- LoganCale 10y ago
  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.
  - PuffinBlue 10y ago
    > 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.
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  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.
- curtis 10y ago
  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.
  - LoganCale 10y ago
    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.

United857 10y ago

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 :( https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/personal-locator-beacons.html https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/personal-locator-bea...

baddox 10y ago
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.
curtis 10y ago
Looking at it the other way, why don't search and rescue services have a mobile cell-phone "tower" attached to an aircraft?
- paavokoya 10y ago
  This is a fantastic idea, although they'd need to have several carriers to make it feasible (what if someone uses t-mobile instead of verizon?
  - PuffinBlue 10y ago
    At least on UK networks you get an indication that says 'emergency calls only' when you are within range of any network. Does a similar thing happen in the US? Also seems like a perfect application for those Stingrays the police have stockpiled.
    - codecamper 10y ago
      Interesting. I wonder if these would have been used if the lost person was rich or famous.
    - LoganCale 10y ago

xofer 10y ago

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.

tfm 10y ago
Well, you'll need water, which generally finds itself at lower ground .... Are folks not taught stuff about lighting smokey fires to attract attention, or would there have been local factors that prevented it in this case?
- curtis 10y ago
  She was set up near a stream. And it sounds like maybe she tried to start a fire but was unable to.
- xofer 10y ago
  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. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/26/when-you-find-my-body-please-call-my-husband-wrote-dying-hiker-lost-along-the-appalachian-trail/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/2...
mcbits 10y ago
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.)
- zyxley 10y ago
  Since at least the 40s, the advice of the US Forest Service has been to travel downhill, remaining in place if injured or there's nowhere further downhill to go: http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5435268.pdf http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb543526...

LoganCale 10y ago

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.

DarkTree 10y ago
> you simply go back the way you came until you find it again In a densely wooded, unfamiliar remote area, it isn't so simple just to backtrack, especially if you begin to panic. In a way, it is similar to falling through ice, and not being able to simply find your way back to the hole you fell through. Panic plays a role.
PuffinBlue 10y ago
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. Here's one for instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/2r32uy/how_could_a_woman_just_vanish_on_july_22_2013/cncex4z https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/2r32uy...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  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.

DarkTree 10y ago

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.

zyxley 10y ago
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.
- LoganCale 10y ago
  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.
tfm 10y ago
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.

sixQuarks 10y ago

We can expect to see a movie made about this within 2 years.

DanBC 10y ago
We already have Gerry. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0302674/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_19 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0302674/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_19

ape4 10y ago

Probably the "trail" wasn't marked every inch like a sidewalk. But had blazes every so often so hard to return to.

curtis 10y ago

Here's another article with some more specifics: http://outthere.bangordailynews.com/2016/05/26/outdoor-recreation/warden-file-on-largay-disappearance-leaves-plenty-of-questions/ http://outthere.bangordailynews.com/2016/05/26/outdoor-recre... This part stood out: 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.