Wait, there’s more. Some people said why didn’t the reporting party call his cell phone so he would recognize the number. Because the reporting party was the owner of the hotel.
This hiker was not very considerate of other people. He had to know people would be looking for him.
I read this earlier today and joked about it with some friends. I can relate to not answering the phone
True enough, but most of my hiking has been long distance thru-hiking, where I am gone for weeks at a time, never sure of how long it will take (and mostly on the east coast where one is never more than a days hike from a road except in parts of Maine.)
Yeah, exactly. If I was lost and knew people were expecting me, I would still assume most calls I got were robocalls, and I’d really not want to waste my precious phone battery answering them. The thing that differentiates real calls from scam calls is that real calls leave a message (the scam calls sometimes do too, but if they don’t leave a message, it’s a guaranteed scam). But I have to listen to the message to know that.
This resulted in my mother once getting a call from… her own number. She’s so hip to this strategy (it started happening every day) that seeing her own prefix in an incoming call is now a guarantee she won’t answer the phone. So I’m not sure how this strategy still is working for scammers…
My cell service doesn’t have caller id, for example. I can only see the (ostensible) location the call is coming from, not who it is unless it’s a number in my address book.
I wouldn’t assume the hotel I was staying in would call for a rescue if I was later than expected.
Maybe he was too busy monologuing about his lone struggle with nature to take the calls?
I haven’t had this happen yet. I have only met one other person in meat space with the same prefix as my phone number, so I never answer those (it’s an old Sprint exchange c. 1999).
I once got a call from 000-000-0000. I did not answer that.
There is something to be said for having a cell number with an area code that is completely unrelated to where I live or where the people I want to talk to live. Any calls from that neck of the woods are obvious garbage.
Two things:
An empty vehicle at a trail head is also going to arouse suspicion from other hikers or rangers.
In this case, the hotel seemed to know where he was heading(they were the ones that notified the authorities), so he must have left word at the hotel.
Interesting. That wasn’t in the blurb here at BB, nor in the screenshot BB posted, nor in the blurb I posted earlier on The Facepalm. If true, then yeah.
Same. But that’s me, and that’s my family and friends. Their joke is that I take a firemaking kit, fishing line, and an emergency blanket to check the mail at the end of the drive.
I find a lot of stories here are copy and pastes from other sources. I usually head to the source to try and find more information if it interests me. In this case I thought it odd that they wouldn’t have texted or left a message so I went to the Lake County Search and Rescue Facebook page and looked through the comments on the post that was in the screenshot of the BB post.
That’s where I found their response to the question about texts.
Maybe if you had not been so slap-dash with your car’s warranty, you wouldn’t be in this pickle 
I’ve read several articles about this and the headline is misleading. Somebody grew concerned when he hadn’t gotten back by 8pm, and they sent out a search party at 10pm. He was missing two hours when they sent out a search party. He was on trails and didn’t consider himself that lost. He walked through the night and made his own way out. He had no reason to think anyone was looking for him.
It’s unclear who reported him missing. Friends or family back at a campsite or cabin, or did a ranger find his car?
If he did have friends or family waiting for him, it’s unclear why he didn’t call or text.
But for myself, my phone’s battery wouldn’t last 24 hours in the woods. I’d have had it turned off so if it did get to be an emergency I could call someone.
But then, in this century, I’d have had my handheld GPS with extra batteries and a recorded location of my car.
All will be reviled in the comments above you.
Anyhoo, not all who wander are lost.
I posted above. The owner of the hotel he was staying at reported him overdue. Search and rescue said the hotel owner reported him missing when he didn’t return as scheduled. At the very least he should have called the hotel if he changed plans. If he didn’t have signal to notify, all the more reason the hotel owner did the right thing.
I’m beginning to see the logic that led the hiker to get lost in the first place.
Sometime recently my iphone asked me whether I want to send calls from numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail. There are also do not disturb and focus modes which could prevent notifications for text messages.
Many people leave their cell phones on vibrate these days all the time. I often miss vibrations when I am moving my body physically. He could have had his phone somewhere he couldn’t feel them, like in his pack.
It seems that the source of the ‘because unknown caller’ element is pure speculation on the part of the searchers. There is no explanation offered for missing the text messages because that isn’t a provocative story. It is disturbing to see how many articles and headlines repeat that without verification.
