We're told he "didn’t even put on a shirt when he began his hike on June 11 that was supposed to last only three hours before he quickly couldn’t find his way and was reported missing six days later when he didn’t show up for a Father’s Day dinner."
Does this story make sense? Why a gallon of water? Why was he trekking up and down canyons?
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A three hour hike. A three how-er hike…
None of this makes sense.
The Santa Cruz mountain range is not a large area. It is surrounded by urban development and highways, and also crisscrossed by smaller roads. There are plenty of houses in the area. One would merely need to walk downhill in any direction to find people or get out within a day (assuming the ability to walk 5 to 10 miles in 24 hours). If one knows a starting location and is familiar with the map, it'd require maybe 2-3 miles to find people.
This guy was 34 and looked like a 65 year old zombie. Ten whole days?????? Something doesn't add up. Silicon Valley is known for high rates of autism, and there's plenty of marijuana growing in that area. Was he amnesic? Was he effectively a junkie or homeless street person lost in the woods?
In the Post comments, it says he's albino, which explains the dirty silver hair at 34. Not very bright to go in bright sunlight without a shirt.
I doubt he was accurately measuring the water, but he must have wanted to fill his stomach with anything when he could.
He drank a gallon of water a day.
A good idea to keep dehydration at bay.
That happened to me. I kept thinking I knew which way I'd come down but when I went back up it was actually a different draw. I could tell from the distant mountains my position had changed.
Luckily I could hear the highway in the distance so I ended up getting out that way before it got dark.
Never felt better btw, a real high.
If you do not take water with you - even on a 3 hour hike - you might be a moron.
Am I wrong in thinking this is a story because of the boot? Clearly there was plenty of water available, so that's not it. Lost for 10 days in a populated area could be a story, but the boot makes for better clickbait.
Rehajm beat me to it.
Sometimes there’s a snake in your boot.
Desert Drifter roams so I- at 71 - don't have to.
https://youtu.be/rS9DUCQRr7g?si=6Nu-sWw0zV0a2usV
I found the location in this story:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/santa-cruz-mountains-missing-man-19530191.php
McClish in the forest between Empire Grade and Big Basin Highway near Foreman Creek
It makes even less sense now. He was very close to his home town of Boulder Creek and between two highways. He was maybe 1/4 to 1/2 mile from the highways.
Google Maps "Foreman Creek Santa Cruz"
He's a local, Boulder Creek. (I'm about thirty miles away.) He was found in Big Basin park, a short drive from Boulder Creek. Three hours is the round trip time to a popular waterfall. There are maintained trails all over. Highest sun of the year. No shirt or water. Ten days.
I'm SO confused.
The Rule is, if you find running water, just follow the flow downstream. You will find civilization quickly.
An old indian trick is follow telephone lines. Increasing thickness points to civilization.
"The Rule is, if you find running water...."
He seems to have found plenty of water.
Seems to me, drinking a gallon of water a day without food would lead to water intoxication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication#:~:text=The%20swelling%20increases%20intracranial%20pressure,confusion%2C%20irritability%2C%20and%20drowsiness.
"Persons working in extreme heat and/or humidity for long periods must take care to drink and eat in ways that help to maintain electrolyte balance.... Psychogenic polydipsia is the psychiatric condition in which patients feel compelled to drink excessive quantities of water, thus putting them at risk of water intoxication.... At the onset of this condition, fluid outside the cells has an excessively low amount of solutes, such as sodium and other electrolytes, in comparison to fluid inside the cells, causing the fluid to move into the cells to balance its osmotic concentration. This causes the cells to swell. The swelling increases intracranial pressure in the brain, which leads to the first observable symptoms of water intoxication: headache, personality changes, changes in behavior, confusion, irritability, and drowsiness.... Both cerebral edema and interference with the central nervous system are dangerous and could result in seizures, brain damage, coma or death...."
"... confusion ...."
It must be a pretty unique set of circumstances. If the area is not vast, and it's pretty well developed around its periphery, and if it's hard to imagine how the man got lost and stayed lost for 10 days, then: Why did it take a bunch of emergency responders 10 days to find him? No helicopters? No infrared equipment? No search & rescue training? The story begs for more and better coverage.
Maybe he was in a "fugue state" like Walter White.
Could this be a Rosie Ruiz version of a lost in the woods marathon?
Sometimes guests get lost in my house. My kitchen is open and leads directly to my living room but there’s a stair hall behind the kitchen wall and behind that is a door for my laundry room, so kind of three parallel traffic corridors. It is confusing if you don’t recognize the landmarks. Had to launch S&R a couple of times but fortunately we’ve never found anyone by the sinks drinking from their flip flop…
Ann Althouse said..."... confusion ...."
Maybe that's the answer we're all looking for. He got lost for days in a place where all he had to do was walk in a straight line for a few hours because water intoxication led him to walk in circles. All those waterfalls keeping him hydrated were really just 1 waterfall he kept coming back to.
The caption to a photo in the piece (my emphasis) says, "The lost hiker, who also reportedly ate wild berries, said he would sleep on wet leaves as he screamed for help."
That's a good time-saving trick!
It might even be better than Patrick McManus's Modified Stationary Panic, a maneuver he recommends when you're lost in the woods so that when you get the panic out of your system you're no more lost than you were before.
As to the berries - misidentifying berries was what killed that benighted young man from Into the Wild, wasn't it? Or at least, the berries hastened his death by starvation by adding dehydration and weakness. Sounds as if this guy just got lucky.
From personal experience I can say it's normal and harmless to drink a gallon a day on a hot weather rough terrain hike. IF you also have food. When i hike anywhere up there, I take sun protection, food water, maps, leatherman.
And a partner. The risk is getting injured and becoming immobilized off-trail. It is very rugged terrain. People die by driving off roads into steep wooded canyons.
None of this makes sense. In most of that region, you're never out of hearing of a road or highway. It's popular with the folks who drive loud fast motorcycles, which can be heard for miles.
"Patrick McManus"
He was hilarious.
"And a partner."
Exactly. If nothing else, it reduces your chance of being attacked by a bear by 50%. More if you make sure you can run faster than your hiking buddy.
Seriously, along with not hiking by yourself, you should have a check in time with someone so that if something happens they will know to alert the authorities. Finally, drinking unfiltered water in the wild is a good way to get seriously ill. I'm not buying any of it.
Aggie, good points. The region is equipped with experienced S&R teams precisely because of the combination of terrain, hikers, foolish drivers and motorcyclists, and fire / flood hazard. Big Basin Park
was heavily damaged by the last round of fires, a few years ago.
But I wouldn't call the region "pretty well developed". Even outside the park, you can be a mile or three from the nearest house or road.
A!so, local PG&E has been surveying from helicopters recently, in prep for fire season. They sometimes fly at night with infrared cameras to look for electrical hotspots and illegal fires.
I used to live in Boulder Creek. If he was lost for ten days, I’d say he didn’t have a plan and so his motion was Brownian.
That said, Big Basin and to the north is unpopulated and the most isolated land in the greater Bay Area. The Santa Cruz mountains were formed by the San Andreas Fault and the terrain is rugged. I would not want to bushwhack there. Lots of steep ravines; traveling downhill isn’t trivial.
Again, my guess is that he didn’t cover much ground despite being out there ten days.
Ann Althouse:
Seems to me, drinking a gallon of water a day without food would lead to water intoxication.
You easily perspire a gallon a day when it's hot. When I worked at the saw mill I had a gallon milk jug beside me and drank more than a gallon of water in eight hours because I was drenched in sweat. His danger was no food. As your pulled quote implies, he was excreting his electrolytes. His being albino couldn't help.
And, of course as others have pointed out, setting out stupidly underprepared and wandering instead of either staying put or walking downhill. He found running water, just friggin' follow it if you're not staying put. Somewhere it will cross civilization.
Something that struck me odd is that he said he found water daily but looked utterly filthy. “I go up a canyon, down a canyon to the next waterfall and sit down by the waterfall and drink water out of my boot,” McClish also said, according to KSBW. Unwashed for ten days filthy while sitting next to a waterfall. Why drink from a boot? Cup your hands and drink water w/o sweat and foot fungus in it.
“There were multiple reports of witnesses hearing someone yelling for help, but the location of that person was hard to establish,” the Cal Fire San Mateo – Santa Cruz department said in a social media post.
He told ABC 7 LA he was grateful when he saw all the boot prints and paw prints on the ground of first responders looking for him.
He wandered. 2c
Yes, you risk giardia if you drink unfiltered water. But you WILL DIE if you don't drink water, so I would take the risk and deal with the consequences later.
And I'd be very surprised if one gallon of water could lead to water intoxication in a person exercising outdoors in summer.
On reading MartyH and the man's stating he went up and down repeatedly it sounds like he looped a lot.
It is California, so not much there ever makes sense to me. The guy's home is 10 miles from the backside of the Big Basin State Park. I'll accept that's mountainous terrain and heavily wooded miles, and the short distance might explain going in without proper clothing and equipment. But in 10 days, you'd think each morning, he could pick up the sun rise and walk that direction for an hour. It is only 2 miles east to hit a trail. Why get your footwear wet?
One would merely need to walk downhill in any direction to find people or get out within a day
true that
downhill
”… after the first five days, when I started to kind of realize that I might be in over my head.”
Ya think, Mister?
Safety precautions he did not take include (but are obviously not limited to) the following:
(1) He did not tell anyone where he was going and when he expected to be back. Consequently it was six days before he was missed and apparently the SR people didn’t even know where to start looking. If it hadn’t been Fathers Day no one would have missed him for some number of additional weeks.
(2) He did not carry a personal locator beacon (PLB). Rescuers could have been on their way to his exact coordinates as soon as he realized he was lost.
(3) He apparently carried no map or compass. Not to mention no canteen and no means to make water safe to drink. (If you think giardia is bad — and it is — wait until you start taking doses of Flagyl to cure it.)
(4) He wasn’t dressed appropriately.
Did he have a death wish or was he just stupid?
The Santa Cruz range is actually sizable and very rugged, steep, dense. Yes there are homes in Boulder Creek and Bonny Doon and Felton but those villages are further apart than they look on a map. Hiking there you are decidedly not between two easily accessible roads. Walking the roads from Boulder Creek to Bonny Doon will take around 15 hours. Far.
The guy was an experienced hiker but wildfires had eliminated many landmarks. He appears covered in ash so it makes sense.
when I started to kind of realize that I might be in over my head
Last week, coming down from my daily hike, I ran into the rescue team heading up. Turns out a hiker from Georgia got half way up a cliff, got stuck, and called for help. "Flipped out", is what I was told. Anyway, the rescuers got up to him, decided that lowering him would be too dangerous, and called in a helicopter. How embarrassing. He was lucky, much further up the canyon and cell phone coverage disappears.
Oligonicella said...
On reading MartyH and the man's stating he went up and down repeatedly it sounds like he looped a lot.
Without a compass and a map that’s the most likely result.
I got lost in this area once. Trekking up and down mountains trying to find the trail.
He was found in a state park and drank out a waterfall. Hello? Y'know who vists waterfalls? Other hikers. And everyone knows if you find an creek or river - just follow it downhill and you'll get to some building or campsite.
This story sounds a little fake. But I've seen people climb 2500 foot mountains with no water in summer. And some of them end up being Evac'ed. Why didn't this guy bring water with him?
Going on a 3 hour hike with no water is super dumb. And no shirt - even dumber.
"Flipped out", is what I was told. Anyway, the rescuers got up to him, decided that lowering him would be too dangerous, and called in a helicopter. How embarrassing. He was lucky, much further up the canyon and cell phone coverage disappears."
Well, that is what happens when a state park has Fat Acceptance Hiking Week.
Does anybody else do this?
What I'll do, especially on a trail I've never been on, I'll walk the few dozen yards and then turn around to see the entrance to the trail from the other direction. I'll occaisionally stop to find landmarks for the return hike.
Fisherman trails are easy. You're either going up stream or down stream.
"How Much Water You Should Drink Every Day - Cleveland Clinic Health ...
Oct 13, 2022The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine recommends the following for daily fluid intake: 125 ounces (3.7 liters) for males. 91 ounces (2.7 liters) for females"
Avid outdoorsman and frequent commenter, Howard lived in that area.
Haven't heard from him in a while.
Does anybody else do this?
My watch has a backtrack feature, so you can return the way you came. That said, I stick to maintained trails and there is usually a lot of traffic: mountain bikers, trail runners, and dog walkers. Most of whom whiz by, leaving me no delusions of youth. The most interesting dog walker is a gal who runs with three huskies leashed to a chest harness. Those are well trained dogs.
If you're lost in the mountains, it's best to sit down in the shade right where you first realized you were lost, conserve your strength and water, and wait for rescue. If you foolishly went out without telling anyone what you intended to do, and have to walk your way out of danger, you go DOWN a watercourse, never up.
Going downhill along a water path is well known to be the best bet when totally lost. It's also a LOT easier than UP one ridge, down then UP another... And down has pitfalls (heh) of ts own.
My BS detector is twitching.
"Avid outdoorsman and frequent commenter, Howard lived in that area.
Haven't heard from him in a while."
Howard was spotted just this weekend at Jacob Riis Beach for a twofer.
"Seems to me, drinking a gallon of water a day without food would lead to water intoxication."
Don't know about that, but drinking water out of your smelly boot is gross, just make a cup with your hands. It also leads to blisters.
Bonny Doon was the location of Heinlein's house. So that places it for me.
"And I'd be very surprised if one gallon of water could lead to water intoxication in a person exercising outdoors in summer."
Every rich white woman drinks at least that much in a day.
Haven't you seen the trophy wives schlepping around those refillable designer water bottles?
They'd rather lose their cell phone...
FullMoon said...
"Avid outdoorsman and frequent commenter, Howard lived in that area.
Haven't heard from him in a while."
He's rethinking his stance on Trump. Even he believes Bidenomics has been a shit show and nothing is being built back better or otherwise.
This makes no sense. In that area you are within a one day walk of a road. If he found a creek he could follow it down toward the pacific ocean. He would eventually come to highway 1, a heavily travelled road.
Gallon of water is about the same as 11 bottles of beer.
Who among us has never, on a football Sunday?
If it was me. I woulda..( )
Well, why didn't he/her just ( )
I always bring my phone and tell someone where I am good going. If I'm going out of cell phone range I bring my SPOT locator with which I can send my location to emergency services if I get lost or hurt.
What Enigma said above. Either you walk uphill and hit Skyline Road or you walk downhill and hit Highway 1. Chances are you'll hit some other road in between. There must be more to the story.
Was it always the same boot, or did he alternate?
As Marge Simpson said when Homer got lost, I knew he would head downhill, with the implication that he was lazy. Here, a lazy man would have been out by late afternoon.
@Michael: Walking the roads from Boulder Creek to Bonny Doon will take around 15 hours.
Did you check the story/map I linked above? He left shirtless from Boulder Creek for a "3 hour hike" and was found seemingly 1/2 mile from Boulder Creek -- just up the hill at Foreman Creek. None of the coverage said that he went down to Bonny Doon. From Foreman Creek to Bonny Doon he'd would have needed to cross Empire Grade road (or walk along it) and/or cross Alba road too. Empire Grade has substantial car traffic.
The 10-day-lost story makes no sense other than as a panic, mental illness, suffering from a stroke, suffering from heat stroke, ionic/fluid imbalance, drug abuse, etc. Given California's documented issues with homelessness, I'd venture that passersby heard his screams and merely thought he was on drugs. Stay away... Given the Santa Cruz regional culture, he may well have been on drugs.
Look at Google earth and see what an easy stroll it would have been for any of our commenters to reach the Pacific or Skyline Drive. Absurd. Commenters underestimate the terribly rough and steep terrain and the improbability of bushwhacking across that land. I have hiked there. A few hundred yards off a trail,and you are lost. And following a narrow creek down that treacherous territory to the sea would have been impossible.
I suspect part of the "it's fake" feeling is the story has been filtered through a journo trying to make what they think is a coherent narrative, based on their own preconception of what he went through, out of a story about a guy who was probably wandering in circles for the better part of 10 days.
This was in southern California, not northern or central coast, but once my husband and I were hiking in the Ventura mountains the day before our return to Texas. We were to fly home on Southwest Airlines, which as everyone knows means we needed to check in at exactly 24 hours and zero seconds before the flight - no later - in order to get good boarding position.
Suddenly we realized that we had no cellphone coverage and were much too far from our car to get back there and drive to a signal! So our hike became a quest for one or two bars of ANYTHING, with the clock running down.
We finally found a hint of cell service on a ridge, so we stayed put until the moment of truth. Success!
I mean, this story lacks the peril a la that movie - made for TV, I think - in which Doogie Hauser and some woman play a couple of former military members who get stuck in the snow in their car with their baby only maybe ten miles from the main road but nearly die trying, first, to survive until rescue and then, when it's clear rescue isn't coming, to walk out...
...and the gross-out factor a la that movie where the guy has to cut off his arm to escape a rock slide OR the story that's the subject of this post in which the boot-drinking occurs.
But aside from those faults it's got it all: scenic beauty, a single unfortunate mistake, suspense, and finally triumph! It's a classic tale of Man against Nature.
Besides following the water, just watch the sun. In the morning keep it at your back and in the afternoon keep it in front. You go west you will eventually find something.
When I was 17, my buddy and I set off to hike across the Grand Canyon in late summer. We did north rim to south rim because the maps said the north rim was 4000 feet above the bottom of the canyon at the Colorado River, but the south rim was only 3000 feet above the river. It was a two-day hike, and the first day was pretty easy. It turns out that the first 2000 feet down the north rim was steep and on switchbacks, but the next 2000 feet was 10 or so miles that seemed pretty flat.
We camped near the Colorado River that night, and my buddy decided he couldn't walk anymore. He had gotten a new pair of hiking boots, and his feet were killing him. So he joined a mule train going up to the south rim, but me -- "macho me", idiot that I was -- decided to hike up the trail to the south rim.
It would be overly dramatic to say that "I could have died", but it sometimes felt that way. This was August and most sensible people weren't hiking out of the Grand Canyon. After my buddy's mule train passed me, I saw NO ONE on the trail. Eventually, after many hours, I came around a switch-back in the trail and came face-to-face with a family that had just strolled down from the South Rim to get a good view of the Canyon. They took my pack and got me to the rim. Saved my life? It seemed that way at the time.
"Does this story make sense? "
I heard on the radio that he is claiming that he lost 30 lbs. No one can lose 30 lbs in 10 days. I'm calling B.S. on this story.
Maybe he discovered a new Mystery Spot which kept him disoriented.
Ann Althouse said...
"Seems to me, drinking a gallon of water a day without food would lead to water intoxication."
The medical condition is called Hyponatremia. I actually suffered from it once and ended up in the ICU. You get mentally fuzzy, become very dizzy, have a major headache and lose some control of your muscles. (Which causes bodily shaking all over.)
Foreman Creek? Hell's bells, that area is less than a mile from downtown Boulder Creek, and bounded on the NE and SW by the principal roads in the area, Hwy 9 and Empire Grade Road, both less than a mile away. He could literally hear any noisy traffic, and as it happens the area is popular with the loud-motorcycle crowd. If he headed NW he could have gone as far as 2.5 miles before hitting a main road, and that's the maximum straightline distance.
It's steep wooded terrain, but it's not Siberia.
Godfather,
Hiking out to the south rim on Bright Angel in the summer is a right bastard. I sympathize, even empathize, because I once did Kaibab-river-Bright Angel in one day. But it was May and I was in a group of four. On the way out we gave away all our spare water, food, and flashlights to the tourists struggling up from Indian Garden. They were still coming out two hours after sunset.
Several years ago the DC police were having tryouts for their bicycle patrol unit. I think it was around this time of year. One of the candidates drank too much water and died as a result.
Fred Drinkwster. He was in Big Basin in a ravine miles from Boulder Creek.
I once went hiking solo in about August in South Mountain Park in Phoenix. It was after lunch, and I was solo because I was working temporarily in Phoenix and didn't know anyone - otherwise I wouldn't have done it!
I was doing this because as a very small child, ages four through six, I had lived in Mesa, and my family used to go to South Mountain Park frequently for picnics and such. I had happy memories of it, and no memories of exertion - probably because my parents would park in some parking lot only a few hundred yards from the picnic area, with three kids under 6. But at this time I was working out of our Seattle office, and was no longer acclimated to that climate.
So I started up this hiking trail, well sunscreened, with water but not enough. I can't remember how long I was going uphill, but I started noticing that there was no one else going uphill - everyone was coming down. And I was having to stop and take breaks at every switchback. So I turned back, and possibly saved my own life.
Michael is a sensible local.
In order to contribute, I must say that if it were me, I would have climbed to the top of tallest tree and located the aforementioned nearby roads and headed that way.
Or, waited 'till nightfall and used the stars as my guide
In the movies, second only to following water down to civilization
I once went hiking solo in about August in South Mountain Park in Phoenix. It was after lunch
I looked that up. The recommended start times are 4-5 AM :)
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