Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Sad and avoidable. Sleeping bag, candles, food, water, flashlight, batteries, signaling, and a few other geegaws that would fit into a small gym bag and you could wait it out in relative comfort…certainly more comfort than freezing to death in a treewell somewhere.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

A Nevada couple missing for a week in the California mountains after their vehicle became stuck following a sudden snow storm have been found, the woman survived the ordeal, but her boyfriend died, police said.

Paula Lane, 46, and Roderick Clifton, 44, were reported missing on Nov. 29, after they left Clifton’s mother’s home in Citrus Heights, Calif., on their way home to Nevada.

The couple are believed to have taken their Jeep off-roading when they became stranded off Highway 88/89 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, police said.

“They spent that first day, and slept, in the vehicle before Roderick left to go find help, but he never came back,” said Bryan Fritsch, a spokesman for the Citrus Heights police department.

Stay with the vehicle. This chick went out and was found by relatives who were searching for her. Dang lucky, if you ask me. Why didnt the boyfriend have the same luck? I’m guessing that by the time she left the vehicle to look for help they had been missing long enough that the area was being saturated with searchers. Just a guess.

It’s not tough to do: sleeping bag, water, food, firestarting, signal materials, a good book, and warm clothes. Even in the 21st century in a First World industrialized nation you can still wind up stuck in the middle of nowhere freezing to death.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

May 08, 2011 I posted about this unfortunate couple.

Succinctly, an older Canadian couple gets stuck in the middle of nowhere. Husband goes off on foot to get help and is never seen again. Wife stays with the vehicle and is found alive seven weeks later. My prescient comment:

I’m going to say that the odds of finding the husband alive are absolutely nil. In fact, I’ll be surprised if they find a body within the next few weeks. Probably be one of those cases where they have to wait until hunting season when some hunter finds it.

I was, of course, right. Behold:

ELKO, Nev. • Two hunters found the remains Saturday of a Canadian man who was stranded in remote northern Elko County in March 2011 along with his wife, the Elko County Sheriff’s Office reported Sunday in a news release.

I’m a bit surprised they even found a body at all. Lotta space out there for a guy to go missing…especially when the local fauna scatter the bones all over the place.  If I had to guess, I’d say cause of death was likely hypothermia. I’d be interested in knowing how far he got from the car…and, I’m sure they’ll say the body was found only a half mile from a resort hotel or a pay phone or some other thing that woulda saved him.

Equip your vehicle and stay with your vehicle. That’s the lesson.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

A 33-year-old hiker is in stable condition at a Salt Lake City hospital after he was trapped in a drainage tunnel in the foothills east of the city for four days and three nights.

…

When his cell phone died, he found a rock and banged it against the tunnel walls in hopes of attracting someone’s attention. But no one ever came although numerous hikers passed by above the tunnel.

…

By Saturday afternoon, after four days without any food or water since the fall, it became clear that he needed to take action. Samuelsen decided to crawl out of the corrugated tunnel. He was able to find a piece of wood and make a split of sorts for his severely fractured leg. He eventually crawled to a nearby highway, where he was discovered by a motorist.

…

According to doctors at St. Mark’s Hospital, Samuelsen’s right leg is broken in numerous places, and may need to be amputated, because the wound was open for four days.

Biiiig balls. A compound leg fracture is major bad news. Just the mental image of looking down and seeing a jagged chunk of bone sticking out of the skin is enough to make my stomach do flip flops.

A couple things I’m curious about. First, why didnt anyone miss this guy for four days? One of the first rules of going somewhere is to let folks know where you’ll be, when you’ll be back, and at what point to start worrying. Second, he had no food and water for four days? So where was his pack? Did he lose it in the fall? Did he even have one?

I can understand the cell phone being useless…there are plenty of places I can go out here where signal is absolutely nil. This is why when I go hunting I usually take the cellphone and a couple aerial flares. But, I also tell people where the heck I’m going and when to expect me back and, more importantly, when to call the SAR guys. (“I’ll be in hunting area 282, I’ll wrap it up around 4pm, if you don’t hear from me by 9pm start panicking.”) This is also why I keep pen and paper in my hunting kit…so I can leave a note at the truck in case I have to change plans.

Hope this guy keeps his leg (at least he didnt have to cut it off himself like that guy that lost his arm a few years back). I’d like more info on what happened to his gear, though. And, hey, you’ve always got gear in your pack for this kinda situation, right? Right?

Technically, not a stranding…but I’ll use that tag for convenience.

Another tragic story about a couple who Jim Kimmed themselves.

GLOBE, Ariz. (AP) – Dana and Elizabeth Davis had spent nearly five grueling days stranded in their car in the rugged Arizona mountains during a snowstorm when they finally realized they needed to venture out for help.

The car had run out of gas, and their rations of sandwiches, cookies, chocolate bars and juice were depleted. Dana, 86, bundled in multiple layers of clothing, put socks on his hands for warmth as he and 82-year-old Elizabeth started walking.

What happened next became a story of incredible tragedy and survival. Elizabeth collapsed just 15 to 20 feet into the walk, her body in a weakened state after five days in the cold. Dana forged ahead, walking eight miles, spending a night under a tree and leaving behind pieces of his wife’s knitting yarn to create a trail to the body.

My usual comment about this sort of thing is ’stay with the vehicle’. Easier to do when you’ve actually got a pack of gear in the vehicle for just this sort of an emergency….sleping bag, blankets, candles, food, water, etc. But, beyond that, one of the biggest factors in these cases is that people made a mistake and then compounded it. If youre not driving a four wheel drive vehicle and your not equipped for an impromptu roadside campout then you need to stop and turn the frak around when you realize you’ve a) gone in the wrong direction and b) the pavement has disappeared. Taking unfamiliar ’short cuts’ seems to be a common thread here too. It seems like amny of these situations could have been avoided by just turning around and going back the way you came once you realized you were not where you were supposed to be.

On the other hand, I’ve also come across stories of people who stayed with the vehicle and died anyway, usually from starvation over a course of several weeks. So, even staying with the vehicle, while normally a good choice, can sometimes prove to be equally ineffective. In every case, however, prior planning would have made a difference…more than anything else, knowing when to turn around and say ’screw this, I’m going back’ would have made all the difference. After that, having a bag of gear for just such a situation would probably have turned several of these tragedies into happy endings.

I’ve a surplus military pack that has a goodly selection of items I’d want to have in such a situation…the absolute first thing that went in the bag was a sleeping bag and a wool blanket. After that, a broad selection of the usual things you’d want to have….matches, firestarter, candle lantern, water, flares, flashlight, batts, etc, etc. Stuff like that would have made the difference in some of these cases, myabe not in others….but at least the opportunity is there with the right gear.

Previous posts can be found under the category: strandings

A Dutch music promoter and his German girlfriend died from heat stroke after apparently getting out of their car in the California desert to go for help.

Who drives into a desert without proper preparations ‘just in case’? A couple cases of bottled water is $12 at WalMart. Get stuck, sit in the shade, drink water, flag down the next car that passes, go home alive.

Staying with the vehicle is almost (not always, but usually always) the best choice…especially if you’ve got, oh, a five-gallon jug of water in it and some methods for signalling help.

Some folks gotta learn hard.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Man, theres a lot of this going around……..

PORTLAND, Ore. – The body of a man was found in his pickup truck on a mountain road, along with a calendar he kept of his ordeal for nearly 70 days, authorities said Friday.

Stayed with the vehicle, but died anyway. Although, apparently, no one reported him missing so no one was looking for him.

Fascinating story out of Nevada. A Canadian couple got their van stuck in the middle of nowhere and the husband left to find help. They still havent found him yet. The wife stayed in the vehicle and survived, barely, almost seven weeks.

Articles:
Rita Chretien, who vanished with husband in March, found in Nevada wilderness; husband still missing
Rita Chretien’s 49 days in the wilderness amaze survival experts
Not just Rita Chretien beat the odds: three other women’s stories of surviving the wilderness
Rita Chretien, Missing Canadian Woman, Found Alive In Nevada After 49 Days In Wilderness, Search For Husband Resumes

I’m going to say that the odds of finding the husband alive are absolutely nil. In fact, I’ll be surprised if they find a body within the next few weeks. Probably be one of those cases where they have to wait until hunting season when some hunter finds it. (Thats how quite a few small plane crashes are found.)

I was actually repacking my emergency bag (which is really a large backpack, for the sake of convenience) the other night and while there isnt enough food in there to get me through seven weeks of being stuck, there is enough in there to help keep me from having to stay trapped….parachute flares, for example. One article makes mention of a new GPS and the implication, although it isnt explored, is that the couple followed their GPS blindly and it led them onto the Road From Hell. This is similar to what happened in the Kim misadventure, although the Kims problem included reading a map without noting the warning about road closures. This epic fail was glossed over as the family then blamed everyone except, naturally, the guy who actually misread the map and got his family into the mess.

Several amazingly important lessons to be had here:
1) In the age of internet, satellites, and people everywhere you go you can still get stuck on a road somewhere and not see another human for almost two months
2) Pack emergency gear. Im adding another couple parachute flares and some more freeze drieds to my pack.
3) Stay. With. The. Vehicle.

That last part cannot be emphasized enough. People who survive these situations almost invariably do better when they stay with the vehicle. There are a few exceptions, but as a rule your chances of being found are much better if you stay with the vehicle. And, if you trick out your vehicle with a few niceties like a sleeping bag, water, stash of food and that sort of thing you may wind up becoming three inches of column space in a human interest section of the paper rather than eight inches of column space about a horrific starvation episode. (Montana guy, a few years back, was found after he and his dog had to spend a couple weeks stuck somewhere. He was fine, dog was fine. Why? He basically had a full complement of camping and survival gear in the back of his truck. He may have gotten a wee bit hungry but he didnt have to eat his dog and they didnt wind up having to put him on the Dachau diet recovery feeding program. [Yeah, if you feed a starving person like they were a normal person they tend to die. You actually have to give them starvation-level quantities of food in slightly increasing amounts to bring them back to the point where they can eat something without the sudden shock killing them. A lot of concentration camp victims died when horrified GI’s gave them their rations to eat. They meant well, but….])

I’ve got five gallons of water, five gallons of gas, a backpack full of essentials, in the truck, along with a headfull of preparedness info and an attitude of caution, and I still won’t go out driving if the weather looks bad. Why buy trouble? But if I got stuck on a logging road somewhere you can bloody well believe that I’d have no qualms about staying put and riding it out. Thats why I carry a backpack full of gear in the truck. It’s also why I dont blindly trust a map or GPS.

Archives: A similar post about another guy who got stuck

PHOENIX – Henry Morello prayed to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. But as the 84-year-old spent a fifth night stuck in a ditch in the Arizona desert, he started to lose hope.

“My phone went dead, my battery went dead, and I went dead,” Morello said.

But Morello lived to tell his tale Tuesday at a Phoenix hospital, where the diabetic man was admitted in good condition despite drinking windshield wiper fluid to stay hydrated.

He didn’t have water, Morello said, so he broke open the wiper fluid container with a rock and filtered it with napkin to try to make it safe.

Well, he gets points for not really giving up. And for staying with the vehicle. On the other hand, if you live in a state thats famous for people dying of thirst and temperatures that can fry an egg on the sidewalk and you dont carry something as simple as water in your vehicle….well, perhaps natural selection shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. (And, seriously, the patron saint of lost things??? You know the catalog of Catholic saints enough to know which one to pray to regarding lost things but you dont know enough to throw a $6 case of bottled water in the back of your ‘Burban?)

Water, sleeping bag, reading material, some food, flashlight & batts. There’s your bare essentials list. Not rocket surgery. Add to it as you see fit, but those basics are pretty much enough to save the overwhelming majority of people who get stranded in their rigs.