I heard NPR mention that many online maps show the shortest route from Gold Beach, Oregon, to Grants Pass, Oregon. This route heads through the heart of the mountains and is a lovely trip in the summertime.

It is deadly (as in never plowed) in the wintertime. But I went to about 6-7 mapping sites and asked for directions and only Mapquest, OregonLive, and Rand McNally gave me the alternate route down to Crescent City, California.

How careful are you in plotting trips online?

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Keeper of the Jabberwock

Is this where the family that's been on the news got lost? The mother and two kids were rescued after nine days but the dad tried to hike out and, last I heard, has not been found.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Found dead actually. Not sure if it is that area though.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Yes, it is. They were found on the mountainous stretch of the road.

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Keeper of the Jabberwock

What a terribly sad story. I'm sure that the conventional wisdom is to stay with the vehicle, but after about a week James Kim could really have had no reasonable expectation of rescue. He tried to hike out to save his family but they've survived and he did not. My heart goes out.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Then why wouldn't it be closed to traffic?

Yes, the general opinion among law enforcement and search & rescue teams out here in the West is to stay with the car. If you can't back out with the car or dive out with the car, you sure aren't going to be able to walk out unless you know for sure you are only one or two miles from a main highway or town.

People can freeze overnight in just one night, after just two or three miles of walking, when they are tired and outside the car and trying to sleep on the ground or under a tree.

People can last as long as a month inside a car. Plus, family members will usually call emergency teams to go search for the car. A car is easier to see from the air than a person on the ground. That's how they found the wife and kids.

If you are in a dangerous situation where you might die due to cold and lack of food, you will generally last many days longer while in a car. Plus you can burn your tires for signal fires, use road flares to signal SOS at night, burn the whole car when you see search helicopters looking around. If necessary, start a forest fire with road flares.

Keep an emergency bag of supplies inside the trunk of the car at all times if you do driving in the mountains or the desert, including extra packaged food, candy, and other stuff, road flares too. Also hand-crank flashlights and a hand-crack emergency radio. Cell phones have saved a lot of people out here in the West. Many people fall off cliffs and get lost overnight, and they are within range of a cell phone tower and some help direct search teams to their locations. Call and tell family members when you turn off main highways onto rural roads. Let friends know where you are if you take an unusual route, especially in the mountains in winter and in the desert in the summer.

Not always a good idea:

never trust a computer. I just looked on google map at the area you mentioned. Did they really try to cut across those mountains to go from Gold Beach to Grants Pass?

I always check the map of the area out myself when I travel. That mostly means now that I am checking the work of the websites, but I most certainly wont go on a trip just off of a websites directions without looking at the lay of the land first

You can't even trust the paper maps. I can point out an error on a Rand McNally map that has the alternate route from Bangor to Fredericton on the wrong side a river.

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And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

This could end up being a bigger problem when more cars begin to have GPS as an option. At least when you look it up online, there is a chance that you could see the road winds back and forth up one side of a mountain. With a GPS, there is a goo chance it will decide that's the best way to go because it's 1 mile shorter than going around. People with no knowlegde of the land, and little common sense may not realize the problem until it's too late.

"But this is the way the car told me to go."

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

As a trained Geographer I may have an edge; but my recommendation would be never to blindly follow the directions of a piece of software. The best things to do to stay out of trouble are to bone up on the area in which you are traveling, and be prepared to be lost. Kinda like insurance, always have it, and hope you never need it.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

The Kim family was apparently in an area that had no coverage but it was triangulation of a faint signal that led to the family being rescued.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Do you know if the signal was coming from their car or from a cell phone?

Cell phone.

Kim's wife, Kati, 30, and their daughters Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months, were rescued Monday as they were leaving their car to find help themelves. She told officers that the couple made a wrong turn and became stuck in the snow nearly two weeks before. They used their car heater until they ran out of gas, then burned tires to stay warm and attract attention. With only a few jars of baby food and limited supplies, Kati Kim nursed both children.

The key to finding them, police said, was a "ping" from one of the family's cell phones that helped narrow down their location.

Note the emphasis. It could have been much worse.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

I can't help thinking of The Simpsons episode:

"eeerm we're on a road....surface appears to be asphalt....erm....erm we're passing underneath the sun nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnow"

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I wonder if they tried to use the phone while inside the car? That would cut down on its range.

The term "ping" is interesting. Do you know if some cell phones send out regular "pings" even if they are not being used?

Based on the interference I've detected from idle phones they send out some kind of periodic signal. I had to stop leaving one phone by a certain monitor because of the interference.

Plus the phone has to know how many bars to display. It can't just guess, has to send out a signal and find out.

How about this?

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.48.html#subj5

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Here’s a CBS story about it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...r=HOME_2232874

It says it involved tracking a ping signal from the phone which was in response to the phone receiving a text message.

Here is some more information about it.

http://news.com.com/Turning+cell+pho...3-6140794.html

Well,I'm probably gonna get a lot of people mad at me for bein' insensitive,but here's my take on the situation...

It wasn't bad maps,or that they didn't have cellphone coverage in that area,it was that he made some very bad decisions,the 1st bein' that he drove into the mountains in the winter,in an totally unsuitable car (the pics I've seen show a small,possibly 2-door car,I don't know what it is) & continued driving when the storm hit,then when they ran out of food,he decided to walk out,in inadequate clothing & he didn't even stay on the road!

I do feel sorry for him & his family,it's a tragedy,but it was totally avoidable one.

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"An armed man is a citizen
An unarmed man is a subject"

Robert A. Heinlein

Just out of curiosity, when you're lost in the mountains like that, how do you find food and water (when your food and water runs out), and how do you keep yourself from going stir crazy from boredom while rescuers are looking for you?

- Maha Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

The Warp Point, my new geek culture blog.

If you get stuck in the snow, water really shouldn't be an issue. Food depends a lot on where you are. In hunter's safety we learned an incredibly cruel, but effective way to kill a deer, moose, elk with a knife or razor blade and some salt. Other critters may be around as well. For the boredom, well, I think it depends on the person. Some will pass the time by crying a lot, some will build snowmen, some will just sit an enjoy the silence. I think it's only the ones that really focus on having nothing to do that will be bothered by it.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I want to hear about how to bring down meat with a razor blade and some salt. I think that is valuable information. If it's too gruesome, PM me.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

PM sent

I think it's too over the top for this forum. It's also untested (cause I don't want to go to prison and it's really nasty). It was passed on in a class for hunters, by a state Fish and game officer, so I'd like to think there is something to it. This same peron told us how to make solar stills, and that pond scum can be dried and made into a broth. I know the stills work.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

So long as you have a good knife and the ability to make fire, winter is quite survivable. that's the hard minimum, though. Every other bit of survival gear you have after that improves your situation.

A small metal pot lets you melt/boil snow to give you safe drinking water. Don't just drink snow, however, unless you have no other choice. Drinking snow leeches body heat very quickly, and there is particulate matter in the snow. My father demonstrated that when I was a kid. We took a bucketfull of snow from the middle of the yard (undisturbed snow), and melted it in the workshop. You'd be surprised how many bugs we'd found in the water, including a few critters I'd never seen before or since.

A shovel and/or one of those moulds with which you can make snow bricks gives you a number of shelter options beyond the basic lean-to. Cars don't retain all that much heat, compared to a snow shelter like an igloo. And your gasoline is better used as a signaling commodity than as a source of heat, assuming you have a container and something to siphon it with.

A fair sized spool of twine, a hatchet and some patience will let you make home brew snowshoes, or even an ewok village complete with semaphor tower if you really do have that sort of time on your hands. Or, if you retained that gasoline, you can make a bonfire tower, and get it lit in a hurry with the gas (and a thrown match).

And what a great time to be exercising your second amendment rights. With a decent rifle (and rationning the ammo), that knife, and some firemaking skills, you can hunt or signal.

And all of this "hardware", plus spare dry clothes and a good winter sleeping bag, will fit in a single man-portable knapsack. With enough room left over for a deck of cards.

__________________
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Tog, I wouldn't mind the details of that too if you don't mind. Options, even exotic ones, aren't bad things to have.

I tend to rely on fishing brook trout for nutrition (or at least I did when we were "survival" camping). There are brooks everywhere, and the brook trout around here will practically crawl up the bank on their tails and fins to get at your bait. Rough-cooking them is pretty simple, too. They're light enough to just impale them on a stick and hold them over a fire like a marshmallow, if you're not carrying a pan.

__________________
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.