4 ms·

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

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.

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.