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crazy eyes mustafa posted:Mentioning David Paulides will probably set off a figurative avalanche of very bad unfunny joke posts so I’ll just do one to get the reddit out of everyone’s system: “he forgot the reptilian illuminati space nazi connection, lol” I honestly can't tell if you're saying Bigfoot is disappearing and memory wiping tourists or what.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:09
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and nobody looking for bigfoot is going to find one.
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I find the Missing 411 stuff and David Paulides to be interesting, but beyond presenting individual cases, it's hard to draw any conclusions from his stuff other than "nature is dangerous" I mean, he's pretty clearly angling towards some kind of "falls into a portal to somewhere or somewhen else" explanation, but is real coy about ever saying exactly what he thinks. On the other side, he presents some disappearances that are legit loving baffling, even the ones that don't explicitly feature missing time or mysterious reappearances where searchers had looked for days. That said, I think folks overestimate just how thorough wilderness searches can be. To take a case that isn't at all mysterious, though it is tragic, take the Bear Brook Murders. In 1985, the bodies of two murder victims were discovered in a barrel in Bear Brook State Park. A detailed search of the area was conducted after the discovery of one barrel but somehow managed to miss a second barrel less than a mile away that also contained bodies. Said barrel sat for 15 more years before being discovered, despite investigators being positive that they were both dumped before the 1985 discovery. The second barrel was hidden, in that it wasn't just sitting out in the open, but it wasn't like buried or anything. When it was found, everyone basically said "how the hell did we miss that?!" While I'm the first to point out cops being lazy and not searching or other kinds of malfeasance, that doesn't seem to be the case here. Just somehow literally hundreds of people went out searching the woods after a body is found in a 55 gallon drum and somehow overlooked a second drum right nearby. It really makes me wonder how many bodies the search teams literally walk right past because of some quirk of geography or something else equally mundane.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:44
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Outrail posted:I'm talking more about the potential for some creep to keep taking people and having a huge list of 'missing, presumed lost'. Disclaimer: I am not a serial killer and do not spend time figuring how best to dispose of the bodies of my enemies. Because I'm disabled and would need help lifting them. I recommend Death in Yosemite, if you're curious.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:48
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hemale in pain posted:I feel like this has to be such a remote possibility that it's not worth worrying about and travelling with a friend would cut the risk down to basically zero. So what you're saying is nobody would suspect a thing... Arsenic Lupin posted:Nah. Going into Yosemite (for instance) takes effort, and finding victims who won't be missed for a long time is even harder. Hiking into the back country and hoping to find another hiker? Better to grab somebody at a well-populated site and (one solution) dump them a mile from the highway. Unfortunately, it's very well documented that the cops don't care what happens to sex workers, homeless people, and transients. There's a Highway in BC that's basically famous for being the place to pick up women and murder them.
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Feb 8, 2021 22:52
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Cojawfee posted:or get gored by a bison because you were being an idiot. I might have told this before, but when I was a kid we were visiting family in Montana. The local news was doing a story about a bison incident in Yellowstone. My aunt couldn't hear it well from the kitchen so she yelled out to her husband, "What happened?" He answered, "Another goddamned tourist tried to pet the buffalo." Mr. Funny Pants fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 23:04
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Azathoth posted:It really makes me wonder how many bodies the search teams literally walk right past because of some quirk of geography or something else equally mundane. It also works in reverse. Geraldine Largay stepped off the Appalachian Trail in Maine and got turned around. She kept a journal. She was lost for twenty‐six days before succumbing to the elements. She was only six hundred yards from the trail. Searchers with dogs came within a hundred yards of her campsite without finding her. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 23:12
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Azathoth posted:It really makes me wonder how many bodies the search teams literally walk right past because of some quirk of geography or something else equally mundane. I've spent some time hiking in Yosemite, and some other big parks in california and elsewhere, and it's 100% this. Search & rescue for an alive human relies heavily on that human hearing people nearby and responding, or lighting a fire, or staying right on a trail. You can walk 20 feet off of a well-traveled trail and completely disappear from view. And when people are searching a large area of dozens (or worse, hundreds) of square miles, they cannot look under every rock and behind every tree. Sight lines can be severely restricted. And flights overhead aren't great either, you can miss someone because they're in shadow, or there's any kind of foliage, or just because the angle you flew past was slightly wrong. And, bodies do not always last long in the wilderness. Once someone dies in a place where there's coyotes, bears, mountain lions, or even just like foxes, their remains can be scattered. If they're in a spot with some slope, they can be tumbled downhill mixed with dead leaves and eroding earth. Bones exposed to weather that includes rain and snow decay, they don't just bleach and turn into perfect white skeletons like you might see in the desert. People disappear into yosemite because it's huge, the terrain is extremely severe, there are active predators and scavenger animals, there's lots of trees, lots of weather including dozens of feet of snow in the winter, and it's impossible for S&R people to explore every nook and cranny. And it's an incredibly popular park that in non-covid times attracts around 4.5 million visitors annually. If even 0.001% of those visitors do something stupid enough to maybe die off-trail, that amounts to 45 idiots a year. And based on my own experiences in the park, the rate at which people do stupid poo poo off-trail is probably more like .01%. At least. And that's only that low because the large majority of Yosemite visitors drive into the valley, walk on paved trails for a while, and then drive home.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:12
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Platystemon posted:It also works in reverse, too. Yeah that story I've read about a few times and it's fascinating. She believed she was doing the right thing, staying in place, that's what people used to always say: wait to be rescued, stay in one spot. And she was drinking untreated water and suffering from severe intestinal distress. But even so, if she'd simply spent some time over the first week of her isolation walking straight away from her camp and then straight back, learning the area, becoming more familiar with her surroundings, she very likely would have eventually found the trail again. Her decision to hike alone wasn't that absurd given how heavily-traveled the AT is, but she compounded errors by getting lost and then spent a month dying 600 yards from help and the remains of her camp weren't found for years.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:15
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K2 wants to kill you, but Yosemite doesn't at all mind killing you.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:16
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I guy I knew crashed his plane near Revelstoke BC a few years back. They knew he crashed somewhere around Revelstoke, knew when he crashed but they didn't find the plane for another year after the crash despite it being maybe 50-75m away from a well travelled highway. They had planes scouring the area and all kinds of search parties but they were obviously too late. Searches in the wilderness are loving tough especially in a treed area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMA2iF6RuXk
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Feb 8, 2021 23:20
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Scent dogs are better at finding people than people are admittedly, but “didn’t look hard enough” is expressly ruled out in these instances. The fact that a lot of them turn up in an area that’s already been searched doesn’t necessarily mean the second or third search was more thorough than the first. It’s as if they go missing then reappear later in a very obvious location, many discovered by air after several previous flyovers of the same area. Most of them still haven’t been found, so some trace of them must still be put there somewhere, right? Boots if nothing else. I think it is important not to state any one conclusion over the other for the cause of these disappearances, because “it was bigfoot” is equally asinine to the most evidentially inconsistent mundane explanation. It’s a misapplication of Occam’s razor (same as saying the simplest explanation for the moon landings is that they were hoaxes [they were real]). The most important thing is to find a satisfactory answer for each individual disappearance- to say that law enforcement is just screwing up is an easy and uninformed position to take for someone who has no part in the investigation. Police, park rangers, military are not folks who cotton to doubtful hypotheses: they are trained skeptics, and for them to say they don’t know what happened or even have a theory as to what happened is significant.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:34
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Bear in mind also the search for a just vanished living child is going to be more thorough than a search for an all but confirmed adult corpse
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Feb 8, 2021 23:37
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I was told that if I ever got lost to go downhill until I find water then follow the water downstream until I hit civilization, but I realize none of that is wise or even followable advice in the big empty parts of the west
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Feb 8, 2021 23:42
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Arsenic Lupin posted:K2 wants to kill you, but Yosemite doesn't at all mind killing you. Yosemite I wouldn’t see it coming, apparently. K2 I would deserve it. Everest I would definitely deserve it. Respect the mountains, folks- these are sacred places not to be mucked around with.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:05
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What I wouldn’t give to have seen the Firefall at Glacier Point when it was a thing, though.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:06
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Empty Sandwich posted:I was told that if I ever got lost to go downhill until I find water then follow the water downstream until I hit civilization, but I realize none of that is wise or even followable advice in the big empty parts of the west yeah i think this is what happened to that couple that found the PCT hiker exactly one year to the day that he died. they eventually found the waterfall they had been chasing but it was totally impassible
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Feb 9, 2021 00:17
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I know it's not 100% reliable but i don't think there's any excuse not to bring a dedicated GPS unit with you if you go hiking or whatever. Even if you just keep it in the backpack for emergencies and never turn it on I'd think you'd be nuts to go out without one in 2021 when they're so readily available and not very expensive.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:17
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Yeah bring a transponder, a gun if you are allowed to have one and are already comfortable and familiar carrying one, and never go hiking alone
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Feb 9, 2021 00:20
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It’s interesting, while I don’t know anything about the Bill guy I know that region a bit. If you’re not from the Western US or somewhere like South Florida, Australia, Brazil or South Africa where massive totally untamed tracts wilderness with hazards 10000+ foot mountains or nearly impassible swamps is smack up against very populated urban areas flanked by what perceived as very safe and controlled hiking trails it’s hard to grasp just how quickly things can go from “a nice place to walk your dog” to alone and unafraid and soon to be either getting lost, falling to death in the winter or getting heatstroke in the summer. One day when I went “hiking” (with ice axes and spikes) on mount baldy after a snow storm, 4 people died on the mountain because it’s still perceived as a reasonable hike to do in your skateboard shoes since it’s in the middle of Los Angeles, even though during the winter it can literally be among the deadliest mountains in the world. And even with the gear I had I should have turned back much earlier since we didn’t have ropes and anchors and such.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:30
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If you're into search and rescue stories, some teams like the RMRU have publicly available mission logs. (although a lot of them are pretty short and boring, short and boring is good when the goal is finding people and getting them to safety)crazy eyes mustafa posted:bring a transponder, a gun if you are allowed to have one and are already comfortable and familiar carrying one, and never go hiking alone
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Feb 9, 2021 00:32
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:I might have told this before, but when I was a kid we were visiting family in Montana. The local news was doing a story about a bison incident. My aunt couldn't hear it well from the kitchen so she yelled out to her husband, "What happened?" He answered, "Another goddamned tourist tried to pet the buffalo." For that tourist, the day a bison graced them with its horns was the most important day of their lives; for your aunt, it was Tuesday.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:34
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SpaceSDoorGunner posted:It’s interesting, while I don’t know anything about the Bill guy I know that region a bit. If you’re not from the Western US or somewhere like South Florida, Australia, Brazil or South Africa where massive totally untamed tracts wilderness with hazards 10000+ foot mountains or nearly impassible swamps is smack up against very populated urban areas flanked by what perceived as very safe and controlled hiking trails it’s hard to grasp just how quickly things can go from “a nice place to walk your dog” to alone and unafraid and soon to be either getting lost, falling to death in the winter or getting heatstroke in the summer.
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Feb 9, 2021 00:54
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idk seems like jumping at shadows to me. the answer is already contained in the premise. if most are never found, and sometimes it takes several combings over the same area to produce results, it just suggests very obviously that it's difficult to find corpses in national parks. there is no other answer beyond the mundane. people die - heart attacks, suicide, murder, misadventure - whatever - and finding them is hard. no ulterior forces, no vanishing or reappearing corpses.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:02
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Haifisch posted:If you're into search and rescue stories, some teams like the RMRU have publicly available mission logs. (although a lot of them are pretty short and boring, short and boring is good when the goal is finding people and getting them to safety) One of the things I always do is leave a little note in my car with my exact plans. Since sometimes you arrive at a place you intend to hike and a lot is full, or there's a little road closure, or whatever and you decide at that moment to like, maybe change to a different trailhead or whatever. I just figure if I go missing, they're going to find my car immediately, and a note on the dash (writing-side down, you have to break glass to get it) that says like "we intend to hike up x trail, stay at y camp area, return on day z, we have 1 extra day of food, we will not voluntarily stay out past such-and-such date no matter what") takes two minutes to jot down and someday might save my life. That's on top of sending our plans before we head out, to at least two family members. A lot of these wilderness survival/death stories begin with the victim(s) deciding to make a fateful change to their plans that leaves rescuers looking in the wrong place for them. And we've had multiple occasions where circumstances pushed us to make some probably harmless alteration to our original plans.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:08
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Leperflesh posted:One of the things I always do is leave a little note in my car with my exact plans. Since sometimes you arrive at a place you intend to hike and a lot is full, or there's a little road closure, or whatever and you decide at that moment to like, maybe change to a different trailhead or whatever. I just figure if I go missing, they're going to find my car immediately, and a note on the dash (writing-side down, you have to break glass to get it) that says like "we intend to hike up x trail, stay at y camp area, return on day z, we have 1 extra day of food, we will not voluntarily stay out past such-and-such date no matter what") takes two minutes to jot down and someday might save my life. And then there are brain geniuses like Aron Ralston who think that not leaving anything and then loving off to some of the most extreme terrain the US has to offer is not a bad plan.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:12
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I can understand the yearning for true solitude. I might do that kind of thing myself if I didn't have a wife and family who would be really pissed at me for doing it. But it really doesn't interrupt your solitude and sense of self-reliance and so forth to leave a note where people can find it if you don't turn up alive when you're supposed to. And, of course, then not wildly deviate from your plans on a whim. Even if what you're planning to do is go off-trail (where that's permitted of course) and explore some remote area, you can carry a transponder and leave behind info about the area you intend to explore and when you intend to return.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:19
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Empty Sandwich posted:I was told that if I ever got lost to go downhill until I find water then follow the water downstream until I hit civilization, but I realize none of that is wise or even followable advice in the big empty parts of the west especially not in yosemite, they call it getting "ledged out" where you get stuck in some canyon and you can no longer descend or go back up
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Feb 9, 2021 01:37
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Pablo Bluth posted:Snowdon is quite good at killing tourists despite being just 1085m up. I think two died a few years back - my dad was making his own attempt at summiting it at the time and quit about an hour away from the top because the blizzards were so bad. Pen y Fan in Wales (which is ~200m shorter) killed some army lads a while back because they were doing extreme training in the summer heat in all their gear, I'm pretty sure I drove past them on their initial march up.
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Feb 9, 2021 01:44
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I <3 buttes
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Feb 9, 2021 02:00
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I go hunting on my own quite a lot. Phone with a GPS app and a battery pack is my principal navigation, plus additional ways to find north/south (compass and actual GPS) with an exit plan if I lose my navigational aids. Always assume the first and second navigational aids will disappear at some point. I want to start moving out of cell reception this year so will be getting an in-reach and decent radio. The problem is you see people relying on one device for navigation, communication and emergency situations and that's just doomed to fail. The hardest thing is finding someone you can trust for your safety contact. So many times I've explained the very simple concept of 'Set an alarm. If you do not hear from me by 5pm something is wrong. I will be within 1k of this point' and they just... don't understand. I've asked other people to be my safety and they think I'm being stupid and paranoid. Someone in my area died last year about 500m from their car, nobody realized they were missing for about 24 hrs and they were found a day after that during a cold snap. Suddenly everyone is extremely safety conscious but I expect that to last another 6 months before people stop giving a poo poo.
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Feb 9, 2021 02:47
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Reminds me of a first-hand account I'd read of a reporter who got lost in the wilderness with her husband. They went to Big Bend, which they were very familiar with, found it closed by a government shutdown, and so they went to Big Bend State Park. They lost the trail (twice) and spent 3 nights in the desert before he left her to get help, found his car, and got a search party that found her 2 nights later. http://bigbend.arkansasonline.com/ As she notes, if they'd told the state rangers where they were going and when they were coming back, they would have had a search going after one night.
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Feb 9, 2021 03:48
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crazy eyes mustafa posted:Yeah bring a transponder, a gun if you are allowed to have one and are already comfortable and familiar carrying one, and never go hiking alone Look at this bad post I never carry a gun (despite having a CCW), and often hike alone. And even backpack alone. And I'm a laaady
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Feb 9, 2021 04:01
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Leperflesh posted:One of the things I always do is leave a little note in my car with my exact plans. there's nothing incredibly dangerous or remote locally, but the mountain state parks all have little stations at the trailhead. everybody is supposed to fill out a card with the party's names and ages, the planned route, and the make and model of their car, even if they're just doing the little 2-hour loop trail, just in case something goes wrong
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Feb 9, 2021 04:23
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hemale in pain posted:I know it's not 100% reliable but i don't think there's any excuse not to bring a dedicated GPS unit with you if you go hiking or whatever. Even if you just keep it in the backpack for emergencies and never turn it on I'd think you'd be nuts to go out without one in 2021 when they're so readily available and not very expensive. Personal Locator Beacon SpaceSDoorGunner posted:It’s interesting, while I don’t know anything about the Bill guy I know that region a bit. If you’re not from the Western US or somewhere like South Florida, Australia, Brazil or South Africa where massive totally untamed tracts wilderness with hazards 10000+ foot mountains or nearly impassible swamps is smack up against very populated urban areas flanked by what perceived as very safe and controlled hiking trails it’s hard to grasp just how quickly things can go from “a nice place to walk your dog” to alone and unafraid and soon to be either getting lost, falling to death in the winter or getting heatstroke in the summer. Jason Rother died not far from Joshua Tree NP. He was dropped off in the desert on a training exercise and all his fellows forgot about him. He hiked seventeen miles in extreme heat and died a couple of miles from the base. The only went looking for him when it was noticed that more weapons were checked out of the armory than were returned. His body wasn’t found for four months.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:00
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Platystemon posted:Jason Rother died not far from Joshua Tree NP.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:22
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That article is worth looking at, basically he was negligently killed by idiot fuckers being stupid in his immediate chain of command.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:35
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Leperflesh posted:That article is worth looking at, basically he was negligently killed by idiot fuckers being stupid in his immediate chain of command. There are too many stories like this in the military. Someone dies for no reason because some rear end in a top hat or assholes didn't want to do their job.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:42
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It's just reminding me too much of that poor couple on vacation in Australia who was abandoned by their scuba diving tour in the middle of the ocean because the company failed to do a headcount and roll call before leaving. Thomas and Eileen Lonergan. IIRC there's decent evidence that they managed to survive at least 17 hours out there before succumbing to exhaustion and dehydration, and someone leaked diary entries from them to try and claim it was a double suicide despite the fact that all that had to be done to save their lives was a head count.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:43
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Empty Sandwich posted:there's nothing incredibly dangerous or remote locally, but the mountain state parks all have little stations at the trailhead. everybody is supposed to fill out a card with the party's names and ages, the planned route, and the make and model of their car, even if they're just doing the little 2-hour loop trail, just in case something goes wrong Problem is idiot fuckers who're likely to get lost are the same idiot fuckers who wouldn't bother filling out a form.
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Feb 9, 2021 05:57
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RobotCoupeDetat posted:I never carry a gun (despite having a CCW), and often hike alone. And even backpack alone. And I'm a laaady Cool. Let us know if you find anything interesting! 
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Feb 9, 2021 15:33
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