I’m still trying to wrap my head around a family of ten….let alone the hiking part. Ten people isnt a hike…it’s a patrol. Who wrangles eight kids along a trail?? At least the Irish twins were old enough to go out and bushwhack their way to help.
Anyway…I’ve been down that way and, like much of backcountry Montana, its awfully pretty but, as Blaine famously said, “You lose it here, you’re in a world of hurt.”
Note the detail about everyone being sick from the water. You’ve got no idea whats upstream….dead animals, various fecal adventures, a Bronx zoo of bacteria and pathogens, etc, etc. Twenty bucks gets you a LifeStraw that will let you drink from a Calcutta sewer. I keep one in all my outdoor packs. Bad enough getting lost in the woods, who needs to compound that problem with a bad case of the runs?
Also, note that not only were the trusting GPS, they were trusting phone GPS, which is even more sketchy. Map and compass, man. Even if they’d just found a couple baselines (like a river or road) to establish they probably coulda saved themselves some grief.
As we taught the kids in hunter safety, you gotta have some respect for mom nature ’cause she sure doesn’t respect you.
On a hike of their likely duration a map wouldn’t even be required for an emergency exit. Just a magnetic compass and a known safe direction.
i admit that I’ll be doing some hiking this fall and using my phone as my gps. However I’ll have minimum 1 compass with along with a map and gear to overnight (including a Sport Berkey).
Steelheart
GPS? Compass? Map? All good ideas (although a couple are much more gooder than the other), but am I led to believe the sun does not rise in the east and set in the west in Texas?
That only helps if you have some idea of which way is civilization…..
And ‘the east’ and ‘the west’ are really pretty general….
Again, I see people visit here are assume that the technology that works in the “big city” works everywhere, because they don’t understand it.
As already stated a simple magnetic compass and a brief study of a map prior to departure would have saved them a lot of “distress and consternation”.
We are the 4th largest state in the Union with a population just over 1 million. If you do the math there are a lot of “open spaces” for people to fall off into.
They took the time to come all the way from Texas. You would have thought they would have planned a little better.
Sun rises in East, goes down in the West. I bet that they weren’t wearing an analog watch or a watch at all. They would have had a basic compass on their wrist. Dumb and Dumber.
Ya know.. (although I usually carried one) I never used a compass on backpacking/hiking trips.. However me and my father would always spend a considerable amount of time looking over a topo map of the area we intended to travel. If you hike in at a river, know that there is a ranger station two miles upriver, or a road 3 miles downriver.. etc. No excuse not to be aware of the area your going to these days with google maps..
Additionally, there was always the “Hey uncle Bob.. we are going hiking along the river at this location.. if we dont check in in two days, please send the cavalry..”
I always took a compass even though I almost never used it. The one time I used it, I was coming back to the truck after hunting and the fog had rolled in…thick stuff. As I was walking I came to a creek running directly across my direction of travel. I thought “Waitasec, I didnt cross a creek coming in here.” Checked with the compass and saw that I had gotten turned 90-degrees. The creek was one that i paralleled on my way in..I had gotten turned around so that instead of walking along the same direction as the creek, I was walking towards and across it. Quite the learning experience.
“They got a little more adventure than they bargained for, but it’ll be a story they can tell for a long time,” Chase said.
If I was that stupid & put my kids at risk, I wouldn’t be telling the story to anyone!