Tom Mangan’s always-excellent Two-Heel Drive hiking blog features a good post about a Bay Area couple who got lost for five days in relatively small, well-traveled Castle Rock State Park (in the Santa Cruz mountains – not the park near Dunsmuir).
He links to a newspaper story detailing their ordeal – and all the mistakes they made. Nice to have your every indiscretion spelled out like that, but there are some lessons worth learning if you do any hiking at all to new streams and rivers.
One lesson overlooked in the story? Always tell somebody where you’re going. This couple didn’t.
[tags]hiking, two-heel drive, castle rock state park, lost[/tags]
It surely is a cautionary tale, alright. Tom covered it pretty well, so I decided to take a different tack and put together “The Hiker’s Top 25 Rules for Returning Home Safely” (see link). I’m hoping enough folks will read it and thereby avoid the harrowing experience of this couple.
winehiker(Quote)
Good idea, though twenty-five rules are a lot for fly fishers. We’re an impatient bunch, and the whole fly fishing endeavor is largely based on hope to begin with. Still, I know I read them all… 8-)
Tom Chandler(Quote)
tc: you got my last name misspelled; this causes me to miss important links when I do ego-searches on google.
tom(Quote)
Someday when I grow up, I’m gonna be like TC and do megalomania searches on google!
winehiker(Quote)
If that couple wasn’t warning enough, the family from San Francisco that were lost in Oregon for over a week should be. Thankfully the mother and her two girls were found alive and safe, however the body of the husband was found today. We hear of incidents like this every year. Always be prepared whenever you’re in the wild, regardless of whether you’re familiar with the area or not. Mother nature doesn’t mess around.
guy(Quote)
@guy; I carry a full kit of emergency stuff up here during the winter, where trouble really is right around the corner.
Sadly, this family wasn’t the first trapped by this mountainous route, which is often offered up by the online mapping services without a warning.
As for megalomania searches, until just recently, Wally the Wonderdog googled higher than I did. So much for megalomania.
Tom Chandler(Quote)