SURVIVAL STORIES

The Reality of Maybe Dying in the Woods

By Headwaters News, 10-05-05

Today’s New York Times piece about the increasing number of people who disappear in the West's wild country will surely strike a different chord with the majority of the paper’s readers than it will with many of us. Those people it mentions who disappear, do so in our back yard. For many Westerners, the wilderness that can swallow human lives (be they from far off places or down the street) in an instant isn’t a distant enigma — it’s a part of our daily lives.

As quoted in the times, "People fall off their horse, break something, have a heart attack," said Thomas Rieger, the Carbon County, Mont., undersheriff. "Suicides are a big deal. We had a guy from Missoula not long ago, he loaded himself up with a hundred and fifty pounds of rocks and walked right into a fishing lake. Found his body at the bottom of the lake." Just this summer, hikers went missing in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Sierra and in the mountains near Vail, plus surely numerous other places. Most were found.

What’s creepy are the numbers: according to the Times, America’s 500 million acres of public land taketh away an unknown number of people, unknown because nobody’s ever counted. In a normal year, the article notes, about a dozen people alone disappear in the Beartooth Range of Montana. That’s just one area. What about from everywhere else? Nobody really knows.

For those who spend any significant amount of time in the woods or on mountains, the idea of respecting the wild and being prepared for anything is an attempt to reduce the risk of getting lost or worse. It isn’t alarmist, or woo-woo; its common sense learned through experience and from others.

But there are other ideas out there about wilderness that might get people into trouble. Again from the Times, said Mr. Rieger, "People get up there, they think they're getting closer to God."

That idea may be more plausible than the one that comes forth from, of all places, television, specifically reality television. Shows like Survivor have spawned a whole mutant breed of outdoor-related shows that pit man and woman against the elements of raw nature. What the so-called “reality shows� fail to mention is that the battle is scripted and controlled, which, as evident in the Times piece, never happens in real nature.

A couple weeks ago, this editor had the privilege of supplementing his income by shuttling a foreign film crew down a local stretch of whitewater so they could produce the pilot for a reality show, titled something like “extreme surviving�. The premise: a young, fit guy gets dumped into the middle of the Rocky Mountain wilderness with nothing but a small backpack and a couple of candy bars and has to find his way out.

Our job on the river was to help the crew film him as he navigated the canyon, rappelling from cliffs and swimming the rapids in his jeans and cotton sweatshirt. The audience was to think he was alone as he navigated the rapids with no safety gear. Yet, he wore a wetsuit and lifejacket and swam behind an out-of-camera-shot kayak and was greeted after each take by a team with a blanket and hot beverage. It was cold, and we were truely focused on his safety.

Wild places do offer a certain type of reality unmatched by anything else. People interpret that differently, except when it comes to death, or near-death experiences. Those are real in the West’s wildest places. Not to be confused with what we see on TV.

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