The REAL Reason People Keep Going Missing in the National Parks

Comments · 1.7K

• TH

  @TheLoreLodge · 5 months ago · pinned

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• CO

  @CormackCrow · 5 months ago

  Ugh, PLANNING my hike?? I was just going to avoid granite, berry bushes, and rivers. Also probably trees, rocks, and hairy men. Just to be safe, y&apos;know.

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• CA

  @cambiata · 5 months ago

  My dad was retired military, so he went to survival training a few times. The thing he told me that stuck in my memory is that the first step in surviving a life or death situation is realizing that you are IN a life or death situation. &nbsp;Like that advice that if you are lost, stay put? You have to fully accept that you are lost before you&apos;ll do that; if you think &quot;no, I must be just off the trail, if I walk for a little bit longer I&apos;ll find it&quot; when the reality is you&apos;re just getting further and further away from rescue. &nbsp;This also applies to the people who climb mountains and they have a set time when they <b>must</b> turn back, but they don&apos;t do it because the zenith is so close, and then those people end up dying. If they realized &quot;I am, right now, in a life or death situation&quot; then hitting the top of the mountain wouldn&apos;t seem like such a great idea anymore.

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• SE

  @sevastianvolkov8973 · 5 months ago

  The best piece of advice I can give you (studying wildlife management in Alaska), and this will be backed up by anyone in search and rescue, and it&apos;s also against the instincts you have in that situation, so listen hard and remember. First of all, if you go alone, tell people where you&apos;re going, where you&apos;re starting from, and how long you expect to be. Second of all, if you find yourself lost, sit down and wait to be found unless you are in immediate danger. Think of it logically - there are a lot of degrees on a compass. Only one or a few will bring you closer to safety, the rest will bring you deeper into the wilderness. If you&apos;re picking at random or even in uncertainty, your odds suck. However, if you stop and wait, you&apos;re as close to where the search radius will begin as you&apos;re GUARANTEED to be. You don&apos;t want to get any farther from the search party than you already are. Yeah, if you end up having been 300 yards from the trailhead it&apos;ll be embarrassing, but the park ranger or whoever else comes to get you is still going to look at you very solemnly and tell you that you did the smart thing.

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• GI

  @gilbertdauterive668 · 5 months ago

  It&apos;s David Paulides, kidnapping people so he can sell more Missing 411 books. He&apos;s keeping them all at a secret base in Tartaria, which he was able to visit using the time travel uncovered by the Philadelphia Experiment.

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• SA

  @Samantha85 · 5 months ago

  People need to poop!!!! I’m convinced that a lot of missing cases are people going off trail to poop privately and then they get lost!

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• MA

  @Malthael2797 · 5 months ago

  I dunno man I think a katana fight with a bear would be pretty sicko mode for the 3 seconds I&apos;m alive during it.

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• ST

  @stevenlwills · 5 months ago

  People leave the trail for &quot;bathroom&quot; breaks, which is what happened to me once. I was hiking north on a heavily used trail and left the trail to take a leak, on the east side of the trail. Got spooked by a roaming coyote as im standing there pissing. After he trotted off, i turned back west to go back to the trail. I was only 30 - 40 yards off trail, but couldnt see it because the brush was so thick. Ended up going a little north of my intended west and wandered in the woods for about 20 minutes ( seemed like hours ) before coming back to the trail, completely disoriented because i was now facing south and nothing looked familiar. Took me a few minutes of sitting there to suss out where i was. All of this on a trail that i have hiked many times and knew well.

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• TH

  @TheTomSoloHere · 5 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3R3qPyhtsI&amp;t=230">3:50</a> no joke, it could be anybody. When I was in the scouts, we were hiking the 9 peaks trail in CA at early spring and found a group of grown men that had millions of miles hiked between them. We followed voices and found these dudes who had been lost for 3 whole days. They were rescued by teenage boy scouts, &nbsp;because 1 person in our group could hear them.

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• PO

  @POTUSJimmyCarter · 5 months ago (edited)

  I&apos;m a search and rescue technician down here in Texas. Last weekend I was scoping out places in the Sam Houston National Forest to &quot;get lost&quot; in as the subject of a training exercise for our canines. <br><br>The place I stepped off the trail, I went ten meters and was completely unable to visually see it anymore, even knowing where it was. Then, on a whim, I decided to follow the advice of &quot;following a creek back to civilization&quot; just to see what would happen to a lost hiker who chose to do that. Didn&apos;t work, dragged me even deeper into the forest. Had I not actually been keeping track of the back azimuths of my way out (also while live sharing my location via cellphone with my team and carrying a Garmin GPS with SOS capability as backup, because I&apos;m not about to pretend being a SAR technician means I&apos;m immune to Bad Things Happening), I suspect I would have genuinely become capital L Lost. And doing the math, in a real search effort given the scenario I&apos;d concocted, they&apos;d have to cover roughly 4.3 million square meters of space just by being told &quot;he was hiking this 13.3 mile stretch of trail and likes to stealth camp up to 100 meters off trail overnight&quot;.<br><br>Really put into focus how people get lost.<br><br>And, of course, if you REALLY wanna see people getting hopelessly lost, join the military and do a night land nav course. It&apos;s funny.<br><br>It&apos;s not funny, actually, I lied to you. It&apos;s scary how many of your superiors can&apos;t actually go from point A to point B without a GPS.

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• CH

  @Chr.Aza. · 5 months ago

  My brother got lost in Yosemite when he was 10 because he ran ahead trying to get back to the car in the parking lot first. Since he was a kid he thought he could take a shortcut by going off the trail but the way he went never intersected back with the trail and instead went the opposite direction. He disappeared for over 17 hours until he was found the next day.

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• DA

  @dawnmoriarty9347 · 5 months ago

  One reason I gave up hiking was people unrealistically insisting on pushing on when party members were literally dropping with exhaustion. In fact, &nbsp;back in the 1980s I was failed on a mountain leadership course for aborting due to having a party member having a medical issue. Apparently that particular examiner considered it an automatic fail if the course wasn&apos;t completed. No praise for saving the person&apos;s life &nbsp;- according to the paramedics

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