What happens when your pre-trip training goes no further than Central Park.
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Back before there were cell phones, tourists here (even on populous Oahu) would regularly run into problems from underestimating the dangers, eg hikers straying off the trail in the rainforest and getting thoroughly lost for days around half a mile from the interstate. Our mountains and forests look friendlier and easier than they are.
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I too, have run afoul of the ban on the “M” word.
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Guessing you never had the experience of being lost in remote mountain terrain. A smartphone is sometimes helpful but even when it works, which is not always, it cannot magically teleport you to safety.
Yeah, but if we’re talking about me rather than that guy, I’m a compulsive over-planning detail freak.
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Huh. Both incidents were in the Humphreys Trail area, which looks like a nasty switchback down a pretty steep slope that dead-ends in the middle. I don’t know if he was lost the first time so much as facing a ~500’ foot hard climb back to the ridge road at 11,800’, and then the hike back along it, at 7 pm, half-a-hour past sundown with full dark coming on.
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Even if he had a GPS map, if he was off the trail the a map may not be sufficient for him to know the best way to get to that trail - trying to go in a straight line from where you are to where you want to go can get you killed.
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I think I see what he was trying to do. If you wave the little man over the map, there’s a skinny walking trail route that continues the Humphreys Trail, winding down eventually to the lift bases and trail heads.
It looks like a really nice trail in September! In March, with snow obscuring it, it’d be easy to lose it or fall on the covered fields of scree and junk. I guess he did both.
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Wow. I hiked 114 miles through Az when I was younger, and crossed roads I think 3 or 4 times total. (we did make sure to have water bags, and planned never to be more than 1 day’s hike from water).
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Yes, clearly. 
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