A dog and dumb luck to the rescue again.

Winter: be sure to run with minimal clothing, minimal water, no cell phone, and carry an iPod to distract you from your surroundings. Oh, yeah, don't even leave a note on your kitchen table as to where you're going. And don't forget the dog.

http://sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/general/news/story?id=2704879

Sue

Well, at least you got the first part right.

The article goes on and on about how tough she is, but mentions very little about being prepared. Tough she may be, but smart she ain't. The incident almost cost her life; I hope it does not cost her career.

Wow, great story; thanks for the link. Even if she had been well prepared it is the dog that saved her, since she was stuck at the bottom of the ravine. While I agree that she should have taken a cell phone, it is highly likely that she wouldn't have been able to get a signal in that steep, rocky location.

To cut her some slack, it is not easy to carry much gear when trail running. And while some basic stuff like a HeatSheet and firemaking gear would have been nice (if she had been able to find & utilize wood), signalling is what saved her. In this case the signal device was the dog.

This case is a good lesson of what Peter Kummerfeldt describes as a dangerous assumption: we often assume that in a suvival situation we won't be injured, that we will be free to move and act as needed. Good food for thought.

Here is another article from the Summitdaily.

-john

From the SummitDaily article:

"...When the sun came up on the second day, Ballengee began to scream for help and didn’t stop for 10 hours. A number of times she thought she heard voices or an ATV getting near, but nobody appeared. There was only the silent horror of her impending death."

A good time to have a whistle...

Could she have at least taken a space blanket and fox 40?

One of those cheesy little waist pouches on a belt, with the pouch at her back could have held a space blanket, some matches, tinder, a mirror, cellphone, whistle, etc.

A cellphone MIGHT not have worked, but I've been around Moab, and what they called a 'canyon' could have been more like a shallow ravine. And I'll bet she didn't know that a cellphone signal wouldn't get out.

I suspect that it was the old "It's never happened to me before, so I'm sure it won't today".

And I'll bet her family went into her home to look for clues. A cheap, easy quick one would have been a note on the kitchen table: "I'm going running at..............., from about (point A) to (point B), Wednesday, 12-20, 9:30 am. Back by 2:30 latest. Taking Taz."

Sue

It would be interesting to interview survivors of these various events and see what *they* would do differently.

I think most of these people would be unlikely to start carrying tinder. I suspect people would think it was downright odd to carry fire making material! :-(

But a whistle perhaps.

-john