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Search Ends for Hiker Lost in B.C. Woods, September 3, 2008, CBC News

[The]RCMP has called off a search for a German hiker who vanished 40 days ago in the wilderness of northern B.C.

Boats, planes and helicopters scoured the area, and searchers did find evidence of his journey. His backpack was found on a sandbar in the Kechika River upstream from Terminus Mountain. A pouch containing his passport, map, and papers was found in a logjam on the Gataga River. “We’re assuming something happened to him and he lost his life,” RCMP Staff Sgt. Tom Roy said. “He either fell in the river or befell some other misfortune.”

The German hiker may not have been lost, but when you don’t show up at the appropriate time for a pickup, the red flag goes up. The authorities deem this person “missing” or lost. Solo adventurers assume one of the greatest risks while travelling in the wilderness. By travelling alone there is no other person available to come to the rescue should something go awry. Most people get lost while on their own. If a trail is not well-marked, either by footpath or by sign, it’s not difficult to lose your way if you don’t pay attention. Birdwatchers are particularly susceptible to straying off the path, getting lured deeper into the bush while trying to identify a species or peering too long through binoculars or camera lens. Hunters also fall victim to their own inexperience at orienteering and survival. Every year, hundreds of North Americans get lost, injured, or even die while hiking through remote sections of national or provincial parks and other wild areas. These incidents, all of them, are preventable.

Before the advent of cellphones, emergency locating beacons, global positioning systems, and satellite phones, travelling in the bush demanded more attention to detail and direction. Technology, again, with the availability of instant communication and wayfinding, has eliminated the need for basic orienteering skills — the reading of “sign” is no longer required. For today’s adventurer, the dependency on such gear is paramount, and like all the other outdoor clothing and accouterment, an outdoor enthusiast is judged by the quality and extent of his kit. It is now typical to find people in the outdoors fully loaded down with the latest and most expensive gear, but still lacking in woods etiquette and trail skills.

At the last rapid on the Seal River in northern Manitoba, Deaf Rapids — a rather vicious maelstrom of turbulent river dropping fifty vertical feet into ocean tidewater — I was forced to sit upstream with my group, waiting three hours for the tide to come in before attempting to run the rapids. Locating this particular nasty piece of whitewater is sometimes difficult because of the fog that rolls in from Hudson Bay and the endless approach rapids that lead up to it. And because of the abrupt pitch off into the ocean, there is no visible or even audible warning that the rapid is near. In a case such as this, the only tactical procedure is to follow the topographical map with birds-eye precision, counting down every turn or twist in the river, noting each braid as the river fans out in multiple channels, at the same time taking sight references as you manoeuvre through the whitewater. It’s not easy to keep looking at a map while running difficult whitewater in a canoe … but it’s absolutely necessary.

We ran Deaf Rapids at eleven o’clock at night, when the tide was full and it was still light enough to navigate up the coast to the sanctity of a goose-hunt shack (safe from polar bears). The next day, at low tide, another canoe group arrived. They were in a sorry state, having dumped in the rapids with near-death circumstances. The leader, as it turned out, had no maps at all but was relying on his GPS for directional prompting. Unable to determine exactly where he was, he had inadvertently led his group into the vortex of Deaf Rapids where they all capsized. Even armed with the most expensive global positioning system, the guide was lost, albeit momentarily, but enough to put his group in peril.

The inherent problem, and the primary reason people get lost or turned around, even when armed with topographic maps and GPS, lies in the fact that they have trouble interpreting information on a map. For some, it’s a distance/time enigma — judging how far you’ve travelled in a specific amount of time — for others, it’s a direct interpretation perplexity — computing real, three-dimensional landscapes onto a two-dimensional map. The accuracy of the GPS is astounding, but you are still expected to have a certain comprehension of eye-visual-to-map understanding. And like all outdoor skills, map reading comes with experience.

Canoeists get lost constantly while portaging their gear. It happened to me, years ago, but it’s frightening how easily it can happen. And in the Canadian wilderness there is no such thing as a shortcut; trying to locate an easier, shorter way to arrive at a destination usually besets a world of trouble. Canoeists today are notorious for trying to find an easier or quicker way around obstacles because of their latent distaste for portaging.

On my first canoe trip to Temagami in 1970, I was solo paddling with the accompaniment of a couple of friends. We ventured up the torturous portages of the north channel of the Lady Evelyn River and had decided to portage (bushwhack) cross-country to the south branch of the river instead of continuing upstream to the lake that divides the two. My friends went off with their packs, which was the wiser thing to do, but I had decided to carry my canoe over unfamiliar ground where there was no trail. The stretch on the map showed a shortcut of about four hundred metres, but after trudging twice that distance through a mélange of deadfall, rock, and impenetrable tag alder, I eventually heard the sound of running water. Thinking I was near the other channel, I pushed on; but when I reached the shore of the river, I was perplexed as to how I managed to get to the opposite side of the rapids and why the current was flowing in the wrong direction. I put down my canoe. About fifty feet away I noticed a pack sitting by the shore. It was mine. I had gone full circle and returned almost precisely to the spot where I started portaging! Embarrassed and not wanting my friends to know of my error, I grabbed my pack and ran to catch up with them.

This kind of directional miscarriage is not always reserved for the individual. I’ve seen whole groups get lost while portaging across a prospective shortcut. One of my regular customers while I was in the outfitting business was the Queen’s Fifth Regiment from England. This elite group of soldiers, about twenty crack militiamen, was to go on a “work” vacation — a wilderness canoe trip in Canada. I outfitted them and designed a route that would challenge their abilities. One week into their trip, they decided to make a shortcut over a swath of land that would cut short their trip by about five kilometres. The distance would be about one kilometre overland. Carrying their gear from Point A to Point B seemed to be a simple matter. Half carried packs while the others shouldered canoes, and off they went in more than one direction. After wandering for about an hour, the soldiers who were still more or less banded together dropped their gear midway across the shortcut and tried desperately to find their way back to the start point. After some time they located the remainder of their gear along with a few confounded compatriots, loaded up and trekked off in what they thought was the direction of their selected target. Another hour had lapsed but they arrived, with some difficulty, at the lake where they were supposed to be. But there was no sign of the others. Striking off in the direction of where they thought they left their first load, they got thoroughly confused and ended up back in the same place. After much shouting, the men finally began to assemble on the far shore but without most of their packs and tents which had been left somewhere midway along the shortcut. They spent a rainy night without their tents and a good deal of their personal gear, huddled under canoes at the end of their shortcut. They retrieved their lost gear the next morning. The one hour it would have originally taken to remain on their original route, took almost an entire additional day to sort out the mess they created by attempting a shorter route.