another person stranded on remote road during winter conditions.

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northw...inn_county.html

What an incredibly sad tale....

I'm reticence to criticize people's choices too harshly. The likelihood of mental and physical impairment is a fact in survival situations. Fatigue, hunger, dehydration, stress, and lack of sleep make even simple tasks and choices difficult.

People starve after they forget the food they hid in the trunk. People familiar with the area turn south and spend their last hours wandering around a desolate wilderness instead of turning north and walking a short distance to a town. People who have used knives for years safely slip and bleed to death after laying open a vein. People with medical training forget what to do. Things get weird. Geniuses turn to morons.

This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical about technical solutions to problems. Technology can fail, but humans under stress can forget how to use technology. I once forgot how to put the batteries in a little radio I used. Batteries got weak so I put in my spare set. The radio stops working at all. I put the old set in figuring they are weak but might give me a few minutes. No dice. I put the radio away and figure it is broken. I get home and find the batteries were put in backward.

I must have put batteries in that little radio dozens of time and always got it right. But in the dark, rain, and a bit of nip in the air for some reason I remembered it wrong. It wasn't a survival situation and I didn't make any great efforts to troubleshoot it. It meant of missed the last half hour of the news. No big deal. What if it was the GPS unit I was depending on and my ideas on how to troubleshoot the problem was a faulty as my memory of battery orientation. The more complicated a device is the more chance there [sp] is of getting something wrong. Simple things only go together one way.

Perhaps I'm missing something but in a lot of these situations I'm seeing a lot of materials, even assuming deep snow and weakened frame due to hunger, that could be assembled into a fire that could be built into a bonfire that it would be hard not to see. Add tires and foam from the seat cushions for smoke during the day. Gasoline for brightness at night. Go big and wait for the forest service [to] arrive. Even if it takes a week, or even two, it beats 70 days.

I also wonder how much of this might have been the desired result. A guy who has no family or friends and who has faced a lot of disappointments might give self-rescue a good try but after a bit figures no one will think worse of them if they give up.

The same people in other circumstances might go for 'suicide by cop'. Suicide by wilderness is less violent.

Edit for spelling and punctuation.

You make many excellent points, Art. He may indeed have gone up there to die. I'm not sure why you'd mark off the days on a calender but who's to say what his thought process was?

While it may not help if you're in a remote enough spot and no one is looking for you, I always wonder why anyone goes over a month, assuming they have the means to start a fire, without burning their tires. You get an immense amount of smoke, visible for a long ways.

The sad fact is, if no one is looking for you and you're in a remote enough spot, a months worth of food and water might not be enough.

We will never know, but the observed efforts to free the car would argue against death by suicide. But it does seem like extremely passive behavior, particularly if he was only four miles away from a highway (Oregon 22).

Excellent points Art. There's a reason we all have multiple kits, think about our edc, prepare our homes, and launch ourselves on a never-ending journey of research, restocking and re-configuring, and it isn't because we think this kind of thing couldn't happen to us. It's precisely because we all know that it could. In learning all we can from situations like these, dissecting them to mine the gold, I'll save the judgement too.

Murphy's always around the corner and he magnifies even the smallest poor decision, especially in hind-sight. "Learning is easy, but knowing is a different story."

Sad story.

Given the situation, on an untravelled road like that, self-rescue was the only option. But on snowed-in road, that's not as easy as it looks. Sometimes you can't even tell where the road is. And travelling through heavy snow takes three times as much energy and hours. A daunting prospect, not undertaken lightly, with much that can go wrong. And when you decide that's what you must do, you may already be too weak to do it.

I suspect we may see more of these stories as the coming generation of older but still active seniors heads off the beaten path in search of adventure.

I guess it's a reminder to review the first and most important chapter of your survival manual -- "how to keep youself out of survival situations."

More than 15 years ago, a salesman by the name of Dewitt Finley changed his plans without telling anyone and turned off onto Bear Camp Rd. in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon. Yes, the same Bear Camp Rd. that the Kim family got stranded on in 2006.

Finley got stuck in the snow and apparently didn't make any attempt to hike out. He died of starvation after two months of sitting there in his truck/camper. Law enforcement said at the time that where he was stuck had the deepest snow; had he backtracked on foot, he might have made it out. His ordeal was documented in a series of letters he wrote to his wife, with the mention that his life was in God's hands, and if God wanted him found, he would be found. I guess he forgot that God gave him a brain and probably expected him to use it. The kicker in this particular incident was that either the Forest Service or county sheriff officers had locked the gates on each end of the road separately, WITHOUT checking the road to see if anyone was on it, very soon after Finley entered the area.

OTOH, here's a young man who got stuck in snow five years ago and lived to tell the tale: Man survives two weeks trapped in snow-covered car!

Sue

follow-up story

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/U...EMPLATE=DEFAULT

Interesting addition to the story there LazyJoe. Thanks for posting it.

Three miles. The big question to me is: did he know it was only a few miles to safety? Did he know and not care? Was this one of those classic male White Whale moments when men tell themselves they will do this, whatever this may be, or die trying? Seems to be mostly a male trait. Women, for the most part, seem to have more sense. Was his next destination a do-or-die goal?

Sometimes people just get in a funk and start thinking in circles. I get the feeling that if the proverbial 'little bird' had dropped by, administered a dope slap, and told him to get off his rear and start marching toward safety, he would have. Of course long before he died he would have been in no condition to walk out. Three miles would have been too far.

Three miles, even given extremely deep snow, is close. Depending on the terrain I wouldn't be surprised if he couldn't hear sounds or see a glow from the restaurant. But here again he wasn't a spring chicken so how acute his eyes and ears might have been remains a question.