11 lost in NC Wilderness

Reports are coming in about 11 persons lost in the Shining Rock Wilderness Area of western NC. These folks are reported to be three adults and eight teen-aged scouts missing since 2100hrs EDT 23 September. SAR in progress, updates when available.

Hope this story has a happy ending. Here is a link to a CNN article.

They found the scouts safe and well.

After getting off course they stayed the night instead of trying to find their way out in the dark.

Cool beans...

And that is a shining example, folks, of how it is done! Leave it to a group of Scouts to set a great example.

Here's a few more details to this great story.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20070925/a_scouts25.art.htm

Hi LumpyJaw,

I'm going to have to disagree with you there are suggest this is not a great story. The adult instructors were useless, they got themselves and their scouts lost and it took them a few days to extract themselves, not by any method, but by dumb luck.

I don't agree the adult instructors were useless. They obviously made sure the troop were properly equipped for their outing, with enough food for an extra day. Whether they were wrong to rely on their map or not, once they were no longer sure of their location, the decisions made were all good ones: they avoided panic and kept the scouts' spirits up; they camped and rested rather than getting exhausted; they followed a stream down the mountain; they kept their eyes open and found electrical lines and a road.

Hindsight is or should be 20-20. Foresight rarely is. IMHO what often matters most is what is perceived and done in between.

Frank 2135,
Ditto and amen!
They were lost - they walked out alive.
That's a geat story!

I have to side with the others on this and disagree with you. Aside from getting lost in the first place, I think the adult leaders did exactly what they should have done. And if your attitude to survival can be summed up by "Don't Get Lost", then I think you're missing the whole point of this forum.

One potential error was the lone scout leader going for help towards the end of the ordeal as reported. At the minimum, he probably should have proceeded using the buddy system.

Flinx

In this case I do not think there was much choice, since there were only 3 adults. Leaving 8 scouts with 1 adult may have created more serious issues if those remaining had an on-site emergency.

From what has been reported, (in my humble opinion) the scouts and the leaders did an outstanding job. They stopped, regrouped (mentally), made a plan, executed the plan and made adjustments when and where necessary. The leaders kept their heads and provided the support required for the situation they encountered.

Pete

Hi aarwolfe,

There have been plenty of well documented occassions for survival methods and techniques to be employed whilst knowing exactly where you are and knowing where you need to be. Not knowing where you are and not knowing where you should be heading is perhaps one of the most important hurdles to overcome in the psychology of survival because being lost creates mental barriers to firstly formulating and the secondly implementing a plan of action even if that plan of action is just to sit down and wait to be rescued. Being slightly lost in many circumstances leads to be being completely lost because of the inability to understand and accept that navigational mistakes have been made and the requirement to correct those navigation errors promptly. Being completely lost now has the ability to turn a jaunt in the woods into a serious survival situation. Even from the story published in USAToday the adult leader instructor has still not accepted any responsibility for his mistakes.


A tell tale sign of panicked adult instructors was the fact that the scout group had been hiking for half an hour in the dark.


For someone who is lost, night time navigation is not a good idea in the dark as people tend to get even more lost, especially for those whose daytime navigational skills are suspect together with the added problems of tripping up in the dark, falling over cliffs etc. The scout leaders were indeed panicking. If they weren't they would have set up camp much earlier and not in a grassy bog after dark.


The boys weren't lost, they were following the adult instructors. It was the adult instructor who were lost.

I'm glad that they were all found save and well.


By not being lost your chances of a successful survival outcome have just been improved exponentially.

IMO the scouts learned much more from this experience than if the weekend had gone off perfectly. Now they've had the experience of getting lost, maintaining a cool perspective and getting themselves out. They actually practiced STOP in the real world and not in the classroom. Priceless.

I agree completely...uh, which may not really bolster your arguement.

As for the scouts, I've learned not make judgements based on news reports. I'd love to know more about how the leaders made their decisions and what exactly the situation was like (terrain, weather, skill levels, past experiences, etc...). Does the Boy Scout "main office" launch an investgation to find out what went wrong when something like this happens or do they just ignore it?

-Blast

But was it a 12 year old with wet feet standing a grassy bog, tired and exhausted, in the dark, who shouted STOP or one of the adult instructors.

The leader probably should have stayed but I don't consider it a serious error since he was following a road and could easily return. And, we don't know the qualifications of the two adults that stayed with the kids. But yeah, leaders need to lead - stay with the kids and send another adult down the road.

It is neither difficult nor unusual to get lost on such hikes. You can't develop plans or preparations so elaborate that it won't happen: even GPS & maps can lead you astray (maps are wrong sometimes, even aerial photos out-of-date and deceptive...)

You always have to have Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, and invest in each based on the consequence of having to fall back to the next plan and the likelihood that all predecessor plans fail. You put effort into "don't get lost" as Plan A, but not to the point of neglecting Plan B (extra rations, etc) and Plan C.

Overall it's a good lesson in contingency planning for the kids. It would be interesting to know what Plan C(?) was since they were likely nearly out of food at that point.

It doesn't matter, they've been through the process, excellent training.

That's very true. The possibility of the unexpected happening is one of the reasons to go into the woods in the first place. At least it was when I was a kid.

Interesting article that. How to make a melodrama out of a crisis. Personally I don't think that they were in any real danger.


As others have noted, movement across country at night is a Bad Idea.

I disagree with the idea that the Leader going for help is poor leadership. Period. If you are leading the group and an incident occurs someone may have to go for help. It's your job to decide who, and how many.

In making that decision you have to consider skill levels, level of risk etc. Are you the best person to go for help? Will your absence put the group at risk?

One of the cardinal rules of group leadership is that you do not ask anyone to do anything that you are not prepared to do yourself. And be seen to do it. You also have to retain the respect of the group. Under some circumstances remaining with the group can result in accusations of cowardice. Even when remaining is vital to the groups survival. As in "It was very risky so he sent someone else, the cowardly P.O.S."

If you do send other people you need to be very clear about the reasons why they are being sent. So that every one knows, and understands.

i would say it's the other way around--make a crisis out
of a melodrama..calling out the dogs for a big group of
overdue scouts is a bit much...

They were not in trouble yet, but if one of the party twists an ankle or knee then the group can no longer move together. It only takes one misstep and that's a large group. Moving in the dark risks turning a minor embarrassment into something with much reduced tactical possibilities.

This assumes it's true - "moonlit sky" sounds like an editor's embellishment.


OK, I should back off as not enough is known. It's the leadership vs. management issue again... I was thinking in terms that once you're out of sight down that road you're not leading that group until you return.

As a thought experiment: let's pretend they had a 406 MHz beacon. What's the point at which you activate it? My understanding was that "being lost" by itself isn't good enough, but nearly out of food or water would be. But in this case SAR resources were being deployed anyway. Knowing what they knew at the time what's the right time to have activated a PBL had they had one?

"As others have noted, movement across country at night is a Bad Idea."

Not always. One report indicated a "moonlit night". I have navigated my way pretty good distances by moonlight, and on occasion read a map by moonlight.

And don't forget Bear Grylls' advice on his African segment, about how moving at night through packs of nocturnal predators was a good idea...

Frank2135

I'd be all over Bear Grylls' advice. Heck, we should all sleep during the day and only travel at night

Being a big fan of 406 MHz PLB's (yes, I have one) I thought about that very thing. The troop members were never in a life-threatening situation so it would not have been appropriate to set-off a PLB signal.

Still, as an assistant Scoutmaster myself, it would be good to know that I could call on help if things got bad and life was in jeapordy.

Ken K.

Here's another way to look at it. If they had a 406 PLB, which I would recommend, the fact that they didn't set it off is really an indication that this was not a serious situation, so nobody has to panic. One nice feature of the new SPOT device is that OK button, perfect for such a situation.

When I took my private pilot training, I was taught that if you have to make a precautionary landing (a controlled landing other than your destination, usually not at an airport), and you have no way of contacting the authorities, you were to wait until the SAR time on your flight plan (usually 1 hour after your ETA), and then manually activate your ELT (emergency locator transmitter). The theory was that (1) no-one would be organizing a search until you were reported overdue, so you would just be wasting battery power; (2) once you were reported overdue, the search and rescue people would come looking for you, so the sooner you were found the better off everyone would be.

I would follow the same logic today - even if I had plenty of supplies and knew where I was, as soon as I knew or had reason to believe that SAR had been alerted, I would activate the PLB, if only to make their job easier.

All this fuss because they were due back on Sunday and they didn't get back until Monday.

Change one detail and get them back on Sunday night and this wouldn't be a news story. It would be:

"How was your hike, Honey?"
"It was fun, Mom. We got lost for a while but we ran into somebody who told us which way to go."
"That's nice, I do hope you're not too tired for soccer practice tomorrow."

But its interesting to consider the situation when you are not in danger but you are overdue and know that all hell is breaking loose at home. If you know that SAR is probably being called out, do you activate the PLB to speed up the resolution of the process or might that cause SAR to assume that you're in even more danger and perhaps take extra risks to get to as soon as possible.

On the other hand, how much time do you give as a buffer? I don't want my wife to call SAR if I hiked a little slower than I anticipated, but if I break my leg on day 2 of a week long hike I don't want to wait an exra few days before they even start looking for me.

Looks like I need a PLB and a SPOT and a sat phone and perhaps a ham radio or two.

Wow, I missed this story when it came out.

Whatever the outcome, I think the scoutmasters made one critical mistake that turned the whole thing from an enjoyable hike into a potential survival situation: They deviated from their plans.

While my motto for the unexpected comes from Clint Eastwood - "Improvise, adapt, overcome," I also have a very Russian philosphy for most situations that I got from Fred Dalton Thompson - "Your average Ruskie, son, doesn't take a dump without a plan."

These adults ran into Stranger-Dangers who told them that the trail ahead "fizzled out." But instead of sticking to their original plan, or better, retracing their steps back along the path they had already traversed, they decided to head off in an unknown, unplanned direction, seeking something that was marked on their map. If the trail ahead becomes impassable or unfollowable, then take the trail behind, but either way, you stick to the freakin' trail! Leaving the trail is the simplest, quickest, easiest, and most foolproof method of getting lost.

If it were just the adults, and they were looking for a little of the unexpected, which can be good as well as bad, then I'd say, "Well, that's the risk you take when you go exploring." But these guys had a groups of minor children in their charge, and had no business going anywhere or doing anything that wasn't in the original plan (or their backup plan, if they had one), without a major compelling reason. And I don't consider a couple of strangers telling you that the trail ahead "fizzles out" to be a compelling enough reason to deviate from the plans.

Had they stuck to the original trail, or reversed direction and retraced their inbound trail, they might have been late, might have spent an extra night in the wild before getting home, but they probably would not have gotten lost.

They did make another, minor mistake in hiking on after dark. My own childhood camping experience taught me the hard way that A) setting up any kind of camp in the dark is difficult at best, and maybe even dangerous, and B) hiking through the woods after dark is at the very least dangerous, if not foolhardy.

I have a little scar on my shin to this day that I got when I was about 12 from walking through the woods in the dark; I stepped in a hole I couldn't see, fell forward onto a rock, and lost a chunk of flesh on a sharp edge. Fortunately, it didn't crack the bone or require stitches, but it did require butterfly closures and was pretty painful. Moonlight isn't particularly helpful when you're in the woods in the middle of summer - the leaves have a tendancy to screen out full daytime sunlight, let alone moonlight.

Then there's gathering wood and building a fire by flashlight; it's not easy, or particularly safe, considering the types of critters that can be found under logs and branches at night in North Carolina. Setting up tents by firelight and flashlight is also not easy, especially the part where you swing a heavy blunt instrument to drive tent pegs into the ground.

So while these guys do seem to have made some smart decisions, they also made some potentially fatal bad decisions, either out of carelessness or a misplaced sense of adventure-seeking. This was a Boy Scout camping trip, not the USMC Crucible - they were out there for some safe fun, not for a real-world test of their survival skills.

The very best way out of a survival situation is to not get into it in the first place. Sometimes it's unavoidable no matter what you do, but in this case it was completely avoidable.

But that assumes the beacon isn't lost, and that it works at all. Since the beacons aren't ever tested ever leaving the factory - at least my ResQFix isn't testable without needing factory service afterwards to replace the batteries - I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume the beacon works.

(I vaguely seem to recall that there was one set of tests run on small planes - by the FAA? SARSAT? - in Alaska? - where many beacons - 30%-50% - actually didn't work when tested. This is hazy memory but it did leave an impression not to assume too much of equipment that is never tested)


The SARSAT protocol that the beacons use to broadcast to the satellites has seven spare bits if I recall correctly. It would be possible to add encodings for activation reason - "OK", "test", "need rescue, not time critical", etc.

The main problem is that you don't know how long the beacon must be left active before the satellite pass and you hate to consume a non-replaceable battery on an OK in case an actual emergency arises later.

The other problem is that satellite resources aren't unlimited. From the documents I've read discussing doppler shift measurement in the satellites there is going to be a definite limit to the number of active beacons the system casn handle at any one time. And since this is an international system piggybacking on other people's satellites increasing capacity might not be easy, and definitely won't be cheap.

From the ARC web site listing the ResQFix features:

Full functional self-test of internal circuitry, battery voltage and power, 406 MHz transmission and GPS acquisition—an ACR exclusive

Are you saying the unit nust be sent in for factory service after a self test?

uh, looks like I have retract my statement (a polite way of saying eat those words).

The manual for the ResQFIX states: ACR strongly recommends performing the self test once per month.

What I saw was a recommendation to test the GPS no more than once in the life of th battery. This was also stated for any test in some older ACR beacons. But not the ResQFix... and it morphed in my head to "replace batteries after test" instead of "replace batteries after second test".

They say it sends the satellites a signal marked "self-test". If that packet also has the UID I wonder if there's a way to find out from the SARSAT Control Center that the test was heard?

Thanks for that. I plan on adding one t my kit soon.



Since the system is highly automated it seems it should be easy to flag your online registration into a ‘test mode’ that would call/email you to complete the test cycle. Perhaps someday.