Great self-test.

http://www.alpharubicon.com/survpage/walkinghomejoe.htm


I think he needed a walking staff espcially with the presence of snow and unfriendly neighborhoods.

He can keep one in the truck for such a possibility.

Wow, seventeen miles in six hours, with a couple of snack stops and one sitdown meal. That guy was strokin' right along. Second the hiking stick idea...

Downside, a staff turns an invisible pedestrian into a noticeable walker.

Other things to factor in are time, weather and situation, all three were conducive for a 16 mile trek. What if you decision to trek home comes at 3pm in winter, with snow falling when the roads have iced over and traffic is gridlocked? What if a 10am earthquake pancakes your car (and BOB) in the parking garage? Either case, substantially less likely to hike home.

Its very good though to test things out, and get a sense of the real distance between your home and daytime locations.

I last walked home in the 3pm winter scenario, 9 miles through snow/ice in about 3 1/2 hours - got home before my brother who lives a few blocks away and left work at the same time. It was very unusual for anyone under the age of 9 to be out on foot alone in Seattle snow. If I was 16 miles away from home might rethink and wait out the storm/traffic or just bed down for the night at work (which may folks did).

If it was a 9.0 Seattle fault quake my objective would still be to get home, after some local work/CERT response obligations. Hereabouts lots of people live 30 or more miles from work, across floating bridges that may not be floating no more. Assuming my car or infrastructure are kaput, I'll still walk home if not injured, and expect to take a train of co-workers home with me for temporary shelter, seeing as it will take time to get back across the lake or up to the next county where they live. I hope the rest who start the long trek home have given their walk a try beforehand.

It is a good test, even when there are a number of ways to get there without a car. I do it every know and then, and our car hardly ever leaves the garage during the week. It's also good to do just in case you have to walk that far or further.

If you test it and it works, it may be a better option that sitting tight in an office or other location. Once you know you can do it and can assess how hard it is, then you can compare it to your others options when need arises.

I work in a major city, I use the car, I only know the express way, which is in some places not for pedestrians. This got me to thinking about route planners, do they take walkers in to consideration? So I went to find out. I found a site that calculated a route for me, 23km or 14 miles. So doable compared to "Joe".

I think the walking speed was abit leisurely as the time duration given was over 6 hours. Although given my current level of fitness that might not be far off the mark. Only one way to find out, right.

I will however review car kit in light of this, as here and now I don't have the clothes or boots to consider walking home now.

A good exercise.

My commute is 52 miles one way. I'll probably walk to a hotel - twice!

I've kept a copy of Joe's experience since I think it can provide more thought & usefulness after I go through it more slowly & carefully.

I think there is more useful info to be gleaned after more study.

Thanks for posting this link!

Me too. I used to walk to work daily. Then the dotcomm bust caused me to have to drive another 46 miles. Each way.
I have good walking shoes and some BOB stuff but.... it would be a LONG walk.

I've thought about and plan on carrying a Mt Bike or some sort of folding bike in my truck for just this purpose, add a rack on the back and a couple bags for your gear and your set to go. I work different places owning a cleaning business so walking would be hard if I had to go back and forth, especially carrying supplies, so either a two wheeled bike or even a three wheeled one would best suite me. But I agree, trying it before you actually have to do it in any type of emergency is the wise course. Another thought is the less obvious you are (camo yourself according to the surroundings) the better your going to be. Situation's would dictate weather or not you would attempt to walk home or wait out a given emergency, so having supplies at work, in you car/truck or your route home might also help. Sounds like he's on the right trac so to speak, something we all need to consider.

He took 2 liters of fluids with him, which worked in the below freezing temperatures, but I'd want a lot more than that for a summer walk. I'd suggest he try it again in July or August.

I don't know what his disaster scenario is. In the San Francisco Bay Area, walking home after an earthquake is very likely. Most roads on the peninsula have overpasses or are overpasses, and collapses are likely. As a corollary, this means don't bet on getting a room anywhere. Don't bet on buying a meal if the power is out.

Don't bet on a convenient time of day for the earthquake, so have glow sticks and reflective tape - but don't bet on people having lights to reflect off the tape if they're on bikes. A letter carrier I know was run down by a guy on a bike - he wasn't hospitalized, but he was unable to work for several days and thought his spleen was ruptured. If you're hit by someone on a bike, you'll be hurt.

I would absolutely take a camera. If this is the Big One, having photographs to document the conditions will be very nice for later years and generations. Notice how his photos and comments about them added to the story? "Luke! Use the camera!"

"...It would be hard to leave some of it behind if I had to walk..."

Maybe your best bet would be to take the hike with nothing ('cept maybe some water), and see what you wished you had on the walk. Four miles is not all that far, one hour twenty minutes or so, maybe a tad longer thanks to the hills...

I like the idea of carrying a camera. I've heard you should carry a cheap disposable camera in case of a car crash so you can document the damage and positions. I like to get them for doing Army training. If I break or lose it, I'm not out much like I would be with my digital camera, but its fun to take pictures to remember what I've done. You can also use a camera for self-defense, to diffuse a situation before it gets violent. Taking a person's picture can be pretty intimidating. How many people have been caught on cellphone cameras and arrested? It can also be a good way to make friends; "Here's a picture of Joe, some guy I met on my walk during the earthquake of 2009. Right after this he gave me a coke."

A camera has a lot of good uses and a disposable one is light weight and less then $10. I know many people have cameras on their phones, but if you don't its a tool worth considering.

And if you must have another use, once you run out of film the flash could be used as a signal. The flash is really bright and disposable cameras will continue to flash after the films gone until the battery dies (a long time).

Yet another reason why I like my dingleberry; the built in camera.

15 miles is going to be about my daily limit with gear over moderate terrain. I suppose I could push it if I had to and maybe double the mileage, but I'd be absolutely worthless at the end of the hike, if not dead. We're talking dark to dark brisk walking.

Used to be I could walk hike a lot more without feeling it. It sucks to get old.

Cell phone cameras are nice, if you have them. But I've sort of gone with the policy of dispersion. My cell phone, camera, PDA and MP3 player all seperate. My GPS would be too if I had one. The main reason for that is I can listen to music until my battery dies and still make phone calls. I can drop my phone and still have my calender. A little less convenient weight and bulk wise, and if you have your phone you have all those things. But with seperate devices you have greater aggregate battery life and a smaller chance of breaking them all at once. Whatever, it works for me, but I have yet to convince anyone else.

Too too true! OTOH, for me it still appears that it beats the alternative.

On a more serious note, one of the few advantages of age seems to be the ability to "pace" yourself better, and thus increase endurance, a sort of "tortoise and hare" effect.

I have to routinely drive up to Seattle from south of Olympia, WA, about 85 miles. Fortunately, I am never more than 100 ft from my 4WD vehicle, for whatever good that would be (probably not all that much) except that I would have access to my backpack and the vehicle tool bag.

I often think what an awful trip it would be to get home if a quake hit while I was there. The Alaskan Way Viaduct would be the first to go down. Then probably most of the bridges and overpasses, many of the trees and power poles, and lots of the high-rise buildings (it has too many for a city sitting on seven faults). Then wade through a few tons of broken glass, loose bricks, miscellaneous metal, approximately 4 million scared people, quite a large area built on fill...

There's no way you can prepare very well for that kind of scenario. I would figure that IF I could get through safely, I would probably be talking about ten days, minimum.

I guess I need to buy another couple of boxes of granola bars.

Sue

Too True!

Hmm, do you think it would be enough to incapacitate a small animal? Perhaps you could improvise a trap with it. Improbable, but its possible.

Oh dear Lord, there'd be a fair amount of that whole I-5 corridor along your route that'd be toast. So much of it is elevated, but I gotta think in a quake you'd have Queen Anne and Capital hill structures come tumbling down onto the freeway anyways. I always figured if the big one hit when I was living there, it'd be about as bad as it could get just about anywhere on the planet. Then there's the big tidal surge rebounding around in Elliot Bay and Hood Canal and such. It would not be fun to be skirting through Fife on I-5 or old 99 and watch the big wall of water either coming up the tidal flats Tsunami style, or down the Puyallup River valley as a La Har from Bonney Lake, Twin Lakes, and Mud Mountain Dam all letting go. Ugly!

I always figured the best bet would be to head east and get to high ground skirting the cascades from Issaquah through Black Diamond and around to Enumclaw. It is the long way around, but at least you'd be away from the urban hazards and most of the reservoir water. That's assuming Mount Rainier doesn't let go and blast the whole area to heck.

I see U of W is still predicting a force 9+ quake as imminent along the Juan de Fuca line. That'd pretty much make most of the urban sprawl along the I-5 corridor and along the west side (Bremerton) disappear I reckon.

I think one of the worst things about this kind of situation would be the fears of the people 'back home'.

You would know that you were (relatively) safe, and working your way back. They would not only be busy trying to survive, but would have the extra stress of not knowing how you were doing, or where you were.

I can't think of any kind of communication that would be guaranteed to work in this situation.

I guess I would try a little of everything, and hope I could get word to them that I was heading home.

Spread Spectrum HF burst transmission at 100w ERP would probably suffice. Those have shown to work under some of the nastiest electromagnetic conditions.

FWIW my local family emergency comm plan relies on simple ham frequencies. We have enough siblings with their ham tickets that all that's necessary is to pick some discrete frequencies / repeaters and check in (or not). And keep our HTs charged up and handy. We still all hope to call out of region to a safe number and check in, but we hope the local ham communication will be durable and useful to us.

When the big one hits in Seattle I'll have immediate family isolated in North Seattle, south of the collapsed bridges across the Montlake cut, and all over the Eastside of Lake Washington. My family is either retired, works in downtown Seattle, or works at a common location on the Eastside. We Eastside brothers have a plan to touch base with each other and coordinate family communication and LD calls out of the region, the downtown workers can all evac to another brother's home south of the Montlake cut. My retired parents are in North Seattle, but they have potential assistance from neighbors and siblings within a mile or two. Actually I'm the most exposed, 1/4 mile from the Seattle fault, and probably one of the longest walks home. But we're all off the soil that will liquify or landslide and above the brown line (lahar zones). The most difficult is a mother-in-law living 15 miles away in a senior center, but that facility's performance during the Dec 2006 wind storm was excellent.

Needless to say, we all have mutual assistance plans, in the event any/all of our homes/shelters are kaput, we know to go to our next closest family member (marked maps in the car and in BOBs).

All in all, a little prep and planning may give you peace of mind in an actual event, to the extent you can help those around you in more serious distress. I sure will be worrying about my wife and kids and family, but hope to have enough info soon enough that I can focus on others.

> one of the few advantages of age seems to be the ability to
> "pace" yourself better

To say nothing of the _requirement_ that you pace yourself. :->

Actually, i'm not sure if i could get to my present abode by walking home if something happened to the bridges.. so i proably should try and find other places i could go if need be..

The reality for me is that I'm not willing to every-day carry more than one device, so that device needs to do as much as possible. My phone doesn't do GPS so the result is that I don't have GPS unless I know in advance I'm going to need it. In practice I don't have much problem with battery life.

I think this ( EDC options) needs a separate thread. Is it best to have a "combo" gadget or an arsenal of different gadgets.

One day we were on a field (business) trip and had to take pictures. Camera was not with us and had to depend on the Nokia N-73 camera. Not bad for the job but battery went dead after 30 pictures. We still had to go to meetings ..etc. and there was no chance to charge the cell phone.

My old and faithful Nokia "Caveman" ( heh heh heh ) is always in the glove compartment ready for service. So I used it for the rest of the day; and only had chance to charge the primary cell phone at home at night.

My son follows a different strategy. He has one cell phone with camera, but has two spare batteries always nearby.

Its interesing to read everyone's EDC startegies. But as I said, it seems to need a seperate thread.

Sounds good, I think I'll go ahead and start one.