Stayed with the vehicle and survived. This is almost, but not always, the case. However, it is the outcome often enough that staying with the vehicle should be the preferred choice.
Notes From The Bunker
Stayed with the vehicle and survived. This is almost, but not always, the case. However, it is the outcome often enough that staying with the vehicle should be the preferred choice.
Why is it in these survival stories people always seem obsessed with what people ate? Gives the impression food is the key to survival.
With the exception of O2 I don’t think there is a -single- key to survival, however food is definitely on the upper end of my list.
I suspect the newspaper articles mention the food angle for two reasons:
1) Everyone reading is going to wonder what the folks did for food
2) It ‘humanizes’ the story. It sounds much more ‘accessible’ to say “…survived on Girls Scout cookies (Thin Mints rule!) and Cheetohs….” thanto simply say “..survived on food they had in the vehicle…”.
For me, when I read aricles like this, the question I always have is what did they use for toilet paper?
“Everyone reading is going to wonder what the folks did for food” – My point exactly. People ought to be thinking about how they kept from getting hypothermia and how they kept hydrated long before food, but that is not where the human mind seems to go.
What I don’t get is the story reported they were only three miles from a lighthouse. They could have walked it in an hour. Are people really that helpless?
Well, you have to know which direction the lighthouse is, and you have to know its there, and you have to know how far it is.
Well, first the lighthouse only has people around it mid-June to September. It isn’t an active lighthouse. Further, any lighthouse keeper that is there is a volunteer and keepers are not required to actually stay at the lighthouse. Conditions there are primitive at best.
Second, that area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is remote. Just as remote as areas out west. Nearest “civilization” is probably Tahquamenon Falls State Park (~20 miles from where they were found) or maybe Paradise, MI (~30 miles).
Unless you are snowmobiling, most of Michigan’s UP doesn’t “open up” until Memorial Day at the earliest. Lodges, motels, restaurants, etc are more than likely closed vs. open Thanksgiving to Memorial Day.
Granted, these ladies could have planned/prepared a lot better but the article is misleading because it implies that the area they were in is a fairly populated area which is definitely not the case.
Lesson, keep one weeks worth of food, a good snow shovel and a cb radio in your vehicle, as well as a gps device and a phone. Had they spent ten hours with a snow shovel they would wuite likely have been able to free their vehicle, turn it around and build some momentum back towards whatever road they came from.
Dont forget to keep ample reading material in your car as well.
When I first read headline, I thought it was about 2 children. The article doesn’t mention if they used GPS to get to where they got stuck, but I’ve seen too many of these stories where people don’t have the sense God gave a goose.
But that’s not new; back in the 60’s I read a Reader’s Digest article about a small plane that went down in New York. All 4 people survived, tho I think 1 had a broken leg. They used their ingenuity to keep safe & entertained; a nice camp, and made playing cards out of seat upholstery. They all eventually starved to death. The kicker was that from the crash site one could hear the traffic on a nearby major road.
Another story from just a few years ago was a man in Oregon who, for some reason, drove off the highway in the Coast Range in early winter. He went only a few miles, but sat there and eventually starved to death. He kept a journal, but I don’t recall if he explained why he didn’t walk back to the highway. There wasn’t, at first, too much snow.