https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...
In Europe almost all hiking trails are close to civilization and well-marked. If you expect the same in America you're in for a surprise.
I've read in other articles that the father was expecting a rope to be pre-anchored which makes me dubious of their level of preparedness.
> Typically, he said, there's a rope going through climbing carabiners that have been bolted into the rocks.
> "This time, the rope was gone," Whitson told CNN.
If you know there is a rappel: Bring. Your. Own. Gear. Trusting a rope that is left exposed and potentially not well cared for is dangerous in and of itself, but to be aware of a gear requirement and just walk out in the wilderness expecting gear to be there (and in usable condition) is flabbergasting.
I am glad this mistake wasn't fatal though.
“here’s who is going, this is our license plate, this is our gear, this is how much food we have, here’s a very rough itinerary; if i don’t update this email by such and such a time, contact the following SAR groups...”
It's convenient because it makes me shake my gear down, too.
If I were doing things where I didn't expect other hikers around I would upgrade that PLB to an inReach.
Beautiful place to hike and camp, and if that's not your thing then check out the Tassajara zen center.
I wrote a trip recap here: https://roymurdock.com/blogs/2019/0722ventana.php
i'm guessing satellite locator beacons (such as resqlink, spot or in-reach) don't work very well in canyons. you'd need a much more monster antenna and transmitter.
[0] http://ropewiki.com/Arroyo_Seco_Gorge_(Los_Padres) [1] http://www.teamsk.org/arroyo/seco.html
It does work, but only when a satellite happens to be in the right position. This basically means you have to queue up a message and it will get sent in 5-50 min.
Here is HN snapshot from 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080105031416/https://news.ycomb...
The top submissions is "Obama's Victory Speech". I don't think it's very technological, at least in common sense.
Probably the only very true HN existed in 2007, for several month. Well, these were good times..
(c) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, should be in FAQ too ;-)
How many IRC channels have you hung out in? Every channel I've ever been in with any sort of community has stuff like this pop up pretty regularly (things that may be "off-topic" by some definition, but are interesting, and spark some interesting conversation).
Channels where there are hard and fast rules about keeping the discussion strictly "on-topic" don't tend to be channels I hang out in. The same would be true for HN.
Any IRC channel I've been to that develops into a community spends 90+% time talking about everything else except the topic it's ostensibly about. It's weird from the POV of the newcomers, but for old-timers, most of the on-topic things were talked about to death many times over already.
If all you have is a cell phone with no battery or no reception, you can't get help, you can't hail rides etc.
I could see this being an easy trap to be caught out by if you had limited exposure to conditions in the area, or even if you had checked weather conditions and missed a rainfall upstream while out hiking. While they might be ashamed of needing a rescue, they thankfully made a smart choice and this is a cool story rather than a search for bodies.
Photos of the camping spot a few hours swim down from waterfall: https://photos.app.goo.gl/kgMRunAAVZ9ogJnP7
I'll add photos of the waterfall to that link later.
Do you know this of assumed? Sounds difficult for sure, but is it possible?
I mean, if you had no way forward and had two options:
1) turn around
2) throw a bottle into the waterfall and hope
I would turn around (unless as you said, is actually impossible, but I haven't been able to find anything definitive on this)
It’s only $300 and it can transmit SOS both to low orbit satellites and to rescue copters, and it has shelf life of five years (no need to charge).
What you are thinking of are the SPOT & inReach units--those have subscription fees but provide you text messaging while off the grid. PLBs are single-shot HELP messages, they can't be customized. (Are you simply stranded like these guys, non-threatening injury that keeps you from getting yourself out, or is it a major issue--say, the guy here last year that keeled over on top of Hell Hill. It probably wouldn't have made a difference but the hour it took to get help certainly wasn't good.)
> Whitson, his 13-year-old son and girlfriend, Krystal Ramirez, had decided to spend Father's Day weekend backpacking the Arroyo Seco River.
It took me longer to parse this sentence than I should perhaps admit to. The first couple of reads lead me to believe his son and girlfriend were the same person.
> Whitson, his 13-year-old son, and girlfriend Krystal Ramirez had decided to spend Father's Day weekend backpacking...
