The important thing to know is what the heading should be to that road, when you’re lost. Knowing one is no more than 17miles from you max, when under weather stress, does little good and offers little comfort.
That is very true. When I read the title it immediately brought to mind the 2006 events of James Kim disappearance and death. Although I'm on the other side of the planet and didn't know him or ever followed his TV show, the then news of him and his family being lost in the wild got my attention until the sad ending.
If you're lost, please stop moving and re-assess. If you have a cell signal, make a call for help (911 is just fine). If you don't, hopefully you brought a PLB. Go ahead and use it. If you can't make a call or use a PLB, then get out your GPS and start following your track back the way you came (almost always better than venturing deeper into the unknown just because there's supposed to be a road up ahead). If you also don't have a GPS, then get out your map and start figuring out how to go back the way you came in. If you don't have a map ... what the heck are you doing, anyway?
There are quite a few places where trying to follow water downstream, or even powerlines, will get you even deeper into trouble.
In most areas, people wait too long to ask for help, and they can make their situation worse by trying to self-rescue. In most counties that have wilderness areas, there's a county search and rescue team, all volunteers, who are familiar with the area and will be perfectly happy to come and get you at no cost. That comes with the added benefit that you'll get to meet some cool folks, and if you suddenly get sick or injured or something else goes wrong, people with first aid training will be right there.
SAR teaches kids, "if you're lost, hug a tree" for good reason.
Things are very situational dependent. If you're reading this on hacker news I'm /assuming/ my intended audience is an adult, probably intelligent enough to not intentionally wind up somewhere bad, but has found themselves there anyway.
If that happened they might not have a (working) phone and might also not have anything else but their whits.
Kids, usually, have a parent or guardian that expects to know where they are, so search and rescue is a reasonable expectation and staying near where you were last known to be is the best policy.
Adults aren't likely to be missed for hours or days. While I am not an expert it is my logical belief that reaching a situation where help resources can be summoned is a better policy, and further, that the above steps are also the most logical expansion routes FOR a search zone.
The approach when educating kids is a bit different, but the message is the same: once a person finds themselves in a bad situation, the preference is to stay put and ask for help, if possible.
> the above steps are also the most logical expansion routes FOR a search zone.
It doesn't really work like that. Although there are books on the subject (Lost Person Behavior) and some other efforts to figure out behavior statistically, and local SAR managers will have some hunches based on experience, nobody can entirely get into the head of a missing person and judge with any certainty whether one direction or another is better during a search.
Search managers are well aware that "follow water downhill" is common advice going back to the boy scouts, but when a missing person inevitably encounters some obstacle along the way, they deviate from that plan. The search area gets big really quickly, and SAR teams are a limited resource. It's way better to respond to coordinates from a phone call or a PLB than it is to spend days with a lot of boots on the ground.
> nobody can entirely get into the head of a missing person and judge with any certainty whether one direction or another is better during a search.
Let's say a group gets separated during a hike, and Bob goes missing. No one noticed for a little while. Bob doesn't have a map but is fairly capable in the outdoors.
Your group sends a couple people back to the last place he was seen. It's a nice straightforward search area. Bob isn't there. Now we need to widen the search area.
Bob might have followed a steam - and in the couple of hours it took to get back to where he was last seen, he may have gone a couple miles.
Or he might have tried to get to a high point to look around. The nearest likely hill is a mile away, but there's another option in the other direction.
Or maybe Bob retraced his steps and is headed back on the trail you all came in on together.
All of a sudden your search area is 15 square miles, and with each potential decision with every passing hour, it gets wider.
You could put complete trust in his abilities and just wait for him to self rescue, but what if he gets hurt? What if he doesn't show up in a couple days?
Wouldn't it have been great if Bob had hugged a tree?
> will be perfectly happy to come and get you at no cost.
There is a cost. If you were lost or injured due to negligence, they may charge you for it. Even if they don't charge you, rescues cost money. Some states have cheap insurance policies you can buy (in the range of a few bucks a year), which go towards the costs of search and rescue, but one way or another, money is spent. More than one might expect.
It is also not a way to "meet some cool folks". Needing a rescue is not something to be taken lightly. Not all rescues succeed, and people die in the wilderness every year, despite large rescue efforts when they go missing. Be safe. SAR may be a safety net, but don't take that for granted.
I don't recall any credible cases where someone was charged by a search and rescue organization. Some other organizations might (AMR has recently started showing up at calls and charging for the kind of basic first aid that SAR traditionally has provided for free), but in general it's SAR policy not to charge even when the person involved made some really bone-headed decisions.
If you get air-ambulanced, yes, you'll probably end up with a hefty bill for that and your insurance company probably has a clause exempting them from paying it. REACH (https://reachair.com/membership/) and AirMedCare (https://www.airmedcarenetwork.com/) both provide affordable insurance for this.
But if it's CHP or air national guard that picks you up, you shouldn't expect to get a bill for it.
Pilots need flight hours and ground SAR personnel need regular training. There are a handful of areas where SAR might get a bit over-worked now and again, but usually more calls are better than no calls. Yes, the rescues incur some cost, but a significant amount of that cost is covered by the SAR volunteers themselves.
And yes, it is a way to "meet some cool folks". Obviously I don't mean go out and call for a rescue if you don't need one, but talk to any SAR volunteer and they'll almost universally say the same thing: they'd rather people call sooner than later, and they're happy to walk out with them.
The call-outs that get really expensive are the ones where somebody disappears and SAR has got no damn clue where they went. Those can stretch on for several days before the search is suspended, can consume multiple air resources, and increases the risk of injury for volunteers. In many of those cases, the search would've ended successfully far earlier if someone involved had called as soon as they thought there was trouble.
New Hampshire is one of the ones that bills, yes. Over 70K in bills over the last 10 years. They aren't the only state that does it. I'm glad you are in CA where it is free, but that is not universal. It has been a hot topic of discussion for years, but there is no universal answer, and people have been billed. Yes, the culture is that people want to help, and that it should be free, but the entire reason that some state laws allow billing, as well as the reason for insurance plans to exist, is because there is a cost which needs to be paid.
Your original comment was not obvious in its intent to say that SAR folks are cool. It sounded like a superficial recommendation to go out and be safe, and to call SAR early and often because they are a free and 100% reliable safety net. You clearly know enough to know that isn't true.
So NH has billed a whopping $7,000 a year over the past 10 years. Yes, they charge in some cases--there was a weird recent one where they took a donation in lieu of billing someone. But these cases are ones that make the newspapers. It's not at all common.
New Hampshire is not just "one of the ones that bills", they are very nearly the only one that charges for rescues. A few other states have passed laws allowing them to charge for rescues, but they rarely or don't at all act on it, and a few popular areas with very small tax bases charge for rescues but they too are exceptions. [1] This is the definition of "the exception that proves the rule".
By contrast, the attitude at the statewide SAR conferences I've attended, and from SAR volunteers I've talked to across the country and in Canada, and from official statements from the National Association for Search And Rescue, and other agencies, are all opposed to charging people for rescues, and for good reasons.
Like the official statement from the national Mountain Rescue Association says: "...no one should ever be made to feel they must delay in notifying the proper authorities of a search or rescue incident out of fear of possible charges. We ask all outdoors groups and organizations to join us in sending this mountain safety education message." [2]
And as the former president of the Colorado Search and Rescue board says, "...people, fearing costs, have refused rescue despite grim injuries: a climber who hobbled down a 3,000-ft. mountain with a broken ankle; a woman who set out on her own to locate her missing husband; a lost and bewildered runner who hid from rescue crews. 'We know that when people believe that they are going to receive a large bill for a SAR mission, they delay a call for help or they refuse to call for help'". [3]
One of the most frustrating messages we have to continually get out to the public is that it's okay to call for search and rescue and that they should not expect to be charged for it. Every hour that someone is lost or endangered and delays calling for rescue adds to the size and complexity of the operation. We want search operations to be small, easy, and fast, and the only way for that to happen is for people to call sooner rather than later. New Hampshire's policy is screwing with that messaging and fuck them for that.
I would also refuse to volunteer my expertise to any agency that charges people for being rescued. If the agency's gonna collect, I expect to get my cut too. I volunteer to keep it free for the subjects of the search.
The attitude that people should pay for rescues tends to come from the same people that are quick to forget their own mishaps and quicker still to criticize others from the safety of their own spotless decision-making. There's at least a couple of these people that show up to every fundraiser or other public event to say, "maybe you shouldn't rescue people that made bad decisions." I really don't respect those folks.
There are already a lot of public safety services that do not directly charge the people involved in the incidents they respond to. This is a debate the country has already had and settled: you generally don't get charged for calling police or fire. New Hampshire ought to consider applying their charge-for-response approach to those agencies too and see how that works out for 'em.
> Your original comment was not obvious in its intent to say that SAR folks are cool. It sounded like a superficial recommendation to go out and be safe, and to call SAR early and often because they are a free and 100% reliable safety net. You clearly know enough to know that isn't true.
Yes, SAR folks are cool -- I mean in that most of them are friendly, capable, and professional, and want people to get home in good condition.
But the rest of your interpretation is fine too. I do in fact recommend that people go out (and have fun) and be safe, and call SAR early and often, because it should be free, and because it's a more reliable safety net when the calls come in earlier instead of later.
You may view that as "superficial", if you want, but I put a significant amount of my own time and money into making it true.
There's a single highway that connects it to the rest of the country, and it's 550km to the nearest major city. That highway doesn't actually run to the town though; in the winter there's an ice road, and in the summer there's a ferry from the west side of the lake.
If you're stranded in the bush near there, you're pretty much hoping that you can signal an aircraft that can land on the lake and pick you up. My guess is that the SaskPower repair/rescue crew probably came in via helicopter. I'm going to spend a few minutes here looking at the satellite view to try to find the power line (I can almost guarantee that it's a single one that links Wollaston Lake and Hatchet lake)
Edit: didn't find the power line, but did find confirmation that the repair was helicopter:
> "We have to charter a helicopter to fly the line to find out what the issue is and that's what we did on Friday. We discovered the four poles that were toppled and discovered him as well."
> The man had been out on the lake in a boat when bad weather struck. His rather dire circumstances may save him from the financial consequences of his unorthodox rescue signal -- which could cost the utility upwards of $100,000 to repair.
It's also worth noting that Saskatchewan is not very populated in general, either. There are 1.2M people, in an area 1.5x the size of California (which has 39.5M). At least 500K of those are way south of Wollaston, in Regina and Saskatoon.
There is no one around when you're up that far north. You're not getting overflights the way you might in the US. There are 3 flights (~30 max passengers each) daily to CZWL (Wollaston) by one SK airline - there's one other airline that might service it, not sure. There might be a few other small aircraft, but in an area with about 1k people, not many. So, yeah - you are not getting rescued without being lucky, and/or taking drastic measures.
Really, though, that's true once you leave the 49th parallel. In general, you get about half way up through the provinces in Canada, and there is nothing much left to go find.
Not quite true in northwest BC and all of AB are exceptions, AB due to oil, BC may be the same and/or mining. Then you have to get up into the territories.
You sound like you're around here :). I'm in Regina. If you're nearby and want to grab coffee, my email's in my profile. There aren't too many SK HNers...
Alas, no, I'm a Vancouverite. I just travel north a bit here and there, and to the prairies on occasion. You pick things up, and, well, there's not a huge amount of difference (in density at least) between northwest BC and northern SK/MB, so a lot of the same points apply.
And of course, there's always google for the numbers when I (somewhat inevitably) forget them.
You gotta be careful with that. You may end up causing major damage infrastructure and potentially lead to fatalities. Creating smoke in an area where the probability of causing a forest fire is negligible is one thing, but purposely starting a forest fire is extremely dangerous and illegal.
