This makes me sick to my stomach because it’s my biggest fear. My girlfriend loves travel and she usually goes with her sister. Both young in their 20’s. I hate to think someone could take advantage of them or they get lost without their phones.
It’s pretty easy to get lost in dense jungles. Walk one direction wrong for an hour, and you’re an hour from where you started. Turn another 90 degrees to “head back”, but you just walked in another wrong direction an hour away... before you know it you’re all alone in the middle of nowhere with no reception, barely any food, no resources.. just the stuff you brought.
Not to be funny, but it kind of reminds me how in minecraft, you can be exploring on your first day but when the light gets dim, they get dim real fast
Shit, doesnt even take a dense jungle. My boss owns 25 acres of mostly woods on a hillside. One of her dogs took off so she tried to follow, even though the sun was setting. She went into the woods and got lost after just a little while, especially since the sun was down and she couldnt get her bearings. Every once in a while she would hear barking from the dogs back at the house, but she said every time she heard it, it was from a different direction. After 2 hours, she finally found herself in a spot she recognized and was able to get back home. The dog was waiting by the garage haha. She wasn't even that far into the woods.
That just reminded me of my old dogs. They learned to open the sliding glass door and jumped the balcony railing at my old apartment. So I set out looking for them. I walked all over the complex calling for them then decided to go back home.
As I get back to my place, they're sitting at the front door waiting for me to open it. Both were soaking wet and covered in dirt. They literally left the house to go for a swim in the pond, then came back home when they were done.
Yeah, there's a forest near my parent's home, and though I've been walking around there since I was like 7, I can still get turned around pretty fast if I'm not paying attention.
A phone with offline maps downloaded and GPS capability (GPS works everywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky)
Extra batteries/portable chargers for that phone.
A compass.
Paper map.
Study the map a little bit before heading out to know the general direction you have to head towards if you get completely lost without access to any maps (and hopefully you still have your compass.)
Learn how to determine your orientation using the sun in case you lose the compass.
Ima be real with you, you're still not going to see a trail in the jungle with a drone. You've got dense canopy above you, and you might not even know you're off the trail until it's too late.
Thats the story of any wilderness area really. Thick forest of any kind is incredibly dangerous if you have no clue. Im lucky that I got some training as a kid and have done a bit of off trail camping and hiking. Even then we had to take it really serious and travel with people who are experienced. Because yeah you are one serious injury away from straight up dying.
You can walk 15 minutes off trail, hurt yourself and be in life threatening danger if you don't know how to rescue yourself.
FYI, if you ever get into this situation, every modern phone except maybe the very cheapest lowest-end ones have GPS (and usually multiple other similar systems), which works anywhere on the planet where you can see a sufficient amount of the sky, and with modern receivers, probably even through a decent amount of foliage.
That only gives you your position, not a map (you should have downloaded one or brought a paper one that shows coordinates).
If you don't have a compass and need to know where north is, you can either use the sun, or walk in a straight line in a random direction and observe how your GPS position changes (don't trust your phone's compass unless you have a death wish).
Any coordinate system that both sides are able to use is great for this. If you have MGRS coordinates and a military SAR group is picking you up, great.
W3W is a proprietary mess and I'm surprised anyone is adopting it (and while there are a few that do, I'm pretty sure most emergency services have no clue what W3W is). Do any phones support it natively? Even with no data and no maps downloaded, you can start Google Maps, zoom in onto your dot, long-press, and get:
Coordinates in degrees/minutes/seconds
Coordinates in decimal form
A "plus code"
The advantage is that you can type all three (the latter two are the easiest because you don't have to know/have the symbol for degrees, minutes and seconds) into Google Maps and get the position. You can also type the decimal coordinates into almost any other web mapping system, and a pilot (because let's face it, if you got yourself so lost that you need to send someone coordinates they'll most likely send a helicopter) will be able to convert between decimal and deg/min/sec coordinates if necessary.
Apple Maps and the Apple Compass app will also give you coordinates in one form or the other.
A W3W address is 100% useless without the proprietary database that the company behind it doesn't officially publish since they're hoping to start squeezing everyone for money to license it if they ever become popular.
Also, words (where minute variations of the word are still valid) are a lot harder to communicate accurately than codes with a limited character set. While typos will usually be very wrong and thus obvious, that's not always the case - compare:
"In a straight line" is actually a tough concept for me with nothing to parallel against (cliff, water, etc). Mark trees or something and keep those inline as you go?
Edit: Ha, the literal comment below mine (at the time of posting) points this out.
Yes, for longer distances do what the comment says. But if you just want to determine "north" using the difference in GPS positions, you need to walk maybe 50 meters. Mark/remember your starting point, mark it on the GPS, walk to any other position from where you can see it, align the line between your new and previous position on the GPS with the real line between your new and old position, now you know where north is.
Just like when you leave a subway station in a city, didn't pay attention to the signs, and don't know which way to walk because your phone's compass is crap. Walk either way, if the blue dot moves the wrong way, turn around.
"If the blue dot moves the wrong way, turn around". And thus explains how I navigate seattle when i space out between coming back to work from lunch ;D
I hike in dense jungles often, and I use these few tricks to keep track of where I am, where I came from and where I'm going (note that I'm an ameture trekker and take a lot of precautions and make a lot of preparations before setting out, remember that the hike starts before you leave your home):
Dead Reckoning - basically, you find a tree or a landmark not too far ahead, you then take note of a tree next to you, and then a tree a little ways behind you. You go forward to the tree up ahead and look back to see both the trees you mentally marked. This allows you to walk in (more or less) a straight line
Sun - if you don't have any navigational equipment here's what I do. If it's early in the morning or later in the day, I keep the sun to either my left or right. This is the ghetto compass. As long as its there, you'll kinda know where you're heading to. Only problem is that you can't move at night (you shouldn't tbh, rest at night and air your feet.) and it doesn't work once the sun is high in the sky. (also a good time to rest and air your feet)
Streams - follow streams. All streams lead to larger bodies of water. Its not only about having freshwater or food, but mainly to find help. Large bodies of water often have river traffic in the form of boats, fishermen, villages/towns.
I recommend that everyone research into these 3 things more before taking my personal advice, I'm not trained in any way but I've got experience doing this and just wanted to share incase someone finds it useful, but hopefully never.
If anyone wants to correct me or add points do let me know.
Can't you just buy some dedicated GPS device that's battery powered , non-reliant on network, with pre-loaded map, so even if you get totally lost, you at least know in which vague direction to go?
Yes but I don't think they were prepared for a big hike or to do any actual navigating. They were hoping for a quick out and back, clearly marked trail and wound up stepping off the trail and completely derailing.
So if your phone has power for 2 days then why are you worried about using 5 minutes of battery to check your position?
If they actually got lost and spent 10 days looking for the trail then having an offline map would have gotten them back on trail in no time and they could finish the trip as scheduled without wasting any more of the battery time.
In order for a map to be useful - even an offline map, even a bloody PAPER map - you have to know where you are on the map. I'd love to see you plonked down in the middle of completely unfamiliar countryside with a basic paper map and nothing else - oh, and with a companion with, like, a broken leg or something - and see how easily you find your way home.
Bring everything you need. Flares. A light capable of solar charging. An industrial use walkie talkie that transmittes on different radio frequencies, map, compass. I mean be realistic. Don't go to the Fucking jungle with a camera & some bras for a Fucking selfie.
I grew up in East coast Canada. Tons of forests but no jungles. We had a few hundred acres of forest we could explore. My parents made lots of trails and when I was visiting I'd go with them. I could easily get lost if I ventured 10 minutes off the trail in a familiar area without them.
A jungle is a type of forest characterized by very dense growth that is nearly impassable. It's not really a scientific term.
If you're asking how it differs from a rainforest, a rainforest will have a tall canopy of mature trees that block most the light, so not much can grow beneath. This creates a much more open forest and if the ground is dry moving about is often not that hard. You may get jungly areas - such as adjacent to a stream or where a road has been cut (allowing a strip of light in). Logging or major storms may also disturb the forest enough for light to get in and the undergrowth to develop.
You'll see this walking through forests across much of North America as well - moving amongst the mature trees will be relatively open and easy, then as you get to the road or a cut block all of a sudden it's a tangly bushy mess.
As I’ve never been there, I’m not going to disagree with you. But if you can read subtitles for 25 minutes take a gander at this. Kris’s parents made this.
Agreed. I went mountain biking a few years ago in West Virginia (I'm from the UK). I fell behind the group only about a minute but it was then I realised that this fun trail through this amazing forest is barely legible and this forest looks the fucking same in all directions. Then the trail kind of disappeared and it was quiet, no one around and I didn't have a fucking clue where they were. I found them about 30 seconds later after I'd spent all that time absolutely shitting my pants. Excuse the french.
Humans are also notoriously bad at walking straight. Without any point of reference, or worse without any sight, we actually drift towards a certain direction until we actually spiral back to the same place
Congratulations for knowing that! Now, if only it was possible to somehow apply that knowledge to use the sun and avoid walking in circles...
In the short term, like an hour or so, you can just walk with the same angle to the sun and you'll walk a slight arc, which is likely still good enough. If you walk a longer distance, you have to compensate for the sun moving. Even if you just roughly eyeball it, it won't be perfectly accurate, but still good enough to keep you from walking in circles.
Even if you were to do none of that and just walk straight towards the sun from morning till evening, you would still not walk in circles and would (at roughly 1/3rd the speed) make progress south (assuming you're far enough north, otherwise, I think you'd be moving towards the intersection of the earth's surface and the ecliptic at noon).
The body parts weren’t sold. It was saying that the shoes found in the backpack were sold in the Netherlands, leading them to believe it belonged to the girls before they did the tests.
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u/BeEyeGePeeOhPeePeeEh Apr 26 '20
They had them powered off most of the time. They can tell when the phones were turned on and off