TREKKING | AMPHIBIOUS CAMPING | EXPLORING | GPS UNITS | FASTPACKING | LUXURY CAMPING

Dugald Bremner

My first reaction is to envy the exciting perils of these men in T-shirts. Then I read something in the furrowed brows of the TV anchors: the chilling truth that newsworthy outdoorsfolk rarely make it back to check their Nielsens.

OK, you can die out there. Usually, though, misplacing yourself is neither so public nor so tragic. I, for one, get lost on a regular basis. Yet I always manage to find my way out before friends and family can agree which of my organs to donate and which to keep for themselves. Being prepared for getting lost is a skill like any other. The trick is to keep a cool head. The rational mind knows that fat reserves can keep you alive in the wild for weeks. Even better, the rational mind can think your butt back to safety.

The most obvious strategy is to turn back the way you came. My brother tells a story of being lost with his wife in Southern California's Los Padres National Forest. Relying on an outdated guidebook, they set off on a Saturday morning to spend the weekend hiking a long loop—not knowing that the Forest Service stopped maintaining the trail in the late eighties. They struggled for a day and a half through a maddening overgrowth of chaparral, manzanita, and poison oak before totally losing the trail in a place jovially known as the Devil's Potrero, or "pasture." They turned back late Sunday, but not in time to avoid an unplanned night in the woods. On Monday, when my sister-in-law didn't show up for work, concerned coworkers asked the Highway Patrol to check accident records for any sign of the missing couple. Their humiliating retreat didn't end until late that night, when they hitched a ride with a random band of beekeepers dressed, as my brother said, "all in white, like angels."

How painful is it to retrace your path when you planned a loop? Well, five years after this misadventure, my brother still rants at length about Forest Service budget cuts and their effect on trail maintenance. He forgets to mention that, while they were lost in the Los Padres, he and his wife conceived their first child.

For most of us, getting lost is little more than an inconvenience. The 21st century, however, has declared a holy war on inconvenience. With cell phones and GPS receivers, we can keep ourselves present and accounted for at all times. What a bunch of weenies we are. If you do get lost, take the opportunity to tap into the better human qualities, i.e. our powers of deduction and animalistic instinct for self-preservation. Bring water, food, and an extra layer of clothes. Don't just look for landmarks and terrain features, take their measure, too. If a pretty, snowy mountain slope is tilted steeply and bereft of trees, it's an avalanche zone. Hiking amongst big, dead trees on a windy day is wilderness Jenga. So think, dammit, think.

A few years ago I took a solo tour of the Tatoosh Range in Rainier National Park. I ambled aimlessly, and tangled myself in thick underbrush on the wrong side of a ridge. The skies wept and my fingers grew numb. It seemed I had two choices: to brainstorm my way out or to fashion a nice deathbed pillow from D.B. Cooper's wormy skull. I figured that parallel valleys all drained to the same place, so I tramped downstream along a creek until it emptied into a river adjacent to an unfamiliar trail. My sense of direction urged me to go right, and eventually I made a grotesque circle back to my original trailhead.

If you have the good sense to get lost in the daytime, use the sun. Even overcast skies glow a little brighter in one direction. Consider it east or west, depending on the time of day. Factor in the time of year, also—that brighter shade of pale in the sky will trend southward around the winter solstice and northward in June and July. The sun is the only star I trust. Some say you can navigate by the south-pointing triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair, but it's hard enough to find one star, let alone three.

The way I see it, getting lost provides unexpected relief from the sometimes tedious "eat-recreate-eat-sleep" routine of a camping trip. Veer off-trail and you might stumble upon a bulbous porcini, a 500-year-old Incan mummy, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You camp in order to reconnect with the wild, right? So go ahead and ramble. Remember, the beaten path, by its very nature, is beat.

"Your circadian rhythm becomes skewed, personal hygiene is a challenge, and after a week anybody will start to miss the sun and wide open spaces."

Outside correspondent Rob Story profiled the ski-filmmeisters of Teton Gravity Research in the November 1999 issue.