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National Park Service Says Tech Is Enabling Stupidity
theodp writes "The National Park Service is finding technology to be a double-edged sword. While new technologies can and do save lives, the NPS is also finding that unseasoned hikers and campers are now boldly going where they never would have gone before, counting on cellphones, GPS, and SPOT devices to bail them out if they get into trouble. Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"
A bill for a helicopter may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to afford to go there the next year.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is not a new problem. In the area I live, there are plenty of mountains that, while looking outwardly benign, kill a number of people (experienced or not) each year. Because of their proximity to a number of major cities, relatively short hikes to the summit (day trips), and extremely changeable weather (70 F and sunny to zero visibility, freezing temperatures, and gale-force winds in an hour), lots of inexperienced hikers get way in over their heads.
Their recourse? Not to plan carefully and accordingly. Not to travel with more experienced and better-equipped friends or guides. Not to heed the signs at treeline warning of the numerous weather-related dangers. Not to stick to less dangerous ascents in the region. Not to bag it when the weather turns sour. Nope, just whip out the cellphone and call in a rescue.
It's one thing if you take a fall due to dumb luck, it's another thing to get soaked, freezing, and lost due to, well, being dumb.
It did get bad enough that the state legislature passed a law a number of years back that, if you need rescue because you were stupid or inadequately prepared for the hike, you can get charged for the rescue costs. This is typically upwards of a few tens out thousands of dollars.
Ten years ago when I was hiking in Glacier National Park, we heard a whistle. Now back then a whistle was something you used to summon help. My friend and I hurried down the trail looking for whoever was in trouble. It turned out it was a stupid lady with her two small children making sure that the bears were scared away. Nothing has really changed with people, their whistle can just be heard at even greater distances. Park rangers have the ability to issue tickets for this sort of behavior, no reason they shouldn't.
One simple solution is to make it clear that if you activate an emergency beacon or request 911 assistance, you _WILL_ be taken back to park facilities. If you read TFA, you'll see that most of the complaints are regarding people requesting guides or supplies, but not wanting to cut their trip short. (The other accounts are of morons with digital cameras, who are no different than morons with film cameras, and seem to be used simply to fill out the article.)
In short, one rescue per trip. You can go out, but if we need to come get you, you can't go out again. (Exceptions could be made for animal attacks or physical injuries.)
Here's another idea. Permit anyone to go up the mountain, but don't provide them rescue services if they don't get the insurance first. I'm tired of all this protecting people from themselves, crap. Let's just protect society from people. Meanwhile, preventing poor people from hiking is not a good solution. Those mountains belong to everyone... and carrion eaters need food, too. Won't someone think of the animals?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I got here as fast as I could and—oh, that's the problem? You're clearly in over your head, buddy. This service is intended for real emergencies only. Nevertheless, try "Technology isn't teh problem, it's stupid people that are the problem. I live in a mountainous area and etc, etc..." Make something up or really stretch the truth, but just be sure the anecdote emphasizes someone's stupidity from your clearly superior vantage point.
Thereby ensuring that only those who can afford this kind of small-pool high-risk insurance are permitted to use the parks. Not an idea I can get behind.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And thus the American frontier was closed forever. Having a family gathering in park just outside of town that happens to be wooded and have a small lake? $450 for six hours of indemnity covering no more than twelve people. Cant pay it? Stay out of the park.
The National Parks are America's greatest natural treasures, but they come with the downside of the unpredictability of nature and the inherent hazards thereof. Regulate medicine, regulate markets, but let wilderness be wilderness. Park Rangers should hand out copies of Nash's "Wilderness and the American Mind" the way Gideons hand out the Bible to hotels.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
We rescue these morons.
Honestly, Evolution is getting reversed because we save the "stupid" from getting killed. The news covers the death of a moron as "a tragedy" instead of , "and there's at least another idiot we dont have to deal with anymore"
Our society encourages Stupidity because the risk of death is reduced or removed. Let these idiots die, leave their bodies there as a warning to others.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, we had to learn to read topographical maps and use a compass. Maybe we had a cell phone, maybe not. hand-held GPS was kind of expensive and not particularly advanced. Besides, GPS needs batteries and adds weight.
Hiking with a map and compass and no "please, come get me!" beacon is like programming in C or Assembler. You're closer to the metal and have to have a deeper understanding of what you're actually doing. Going out with GPS is like jumping right in with a language like Ruby which makes things really easy at first... until the first time you forget to properly define a base case for a recursive function and hit a stack error message.
The tools are great, but are always going to work way better for people who understand the basic principles of what's being automated for them, and have some "old school" experience to fall back on when necessary. Easy tools that take all the hard work out of a lot of necessary tasks lead to a false sense of security.
As with programming, where high-level, dynamic languages make it much easier for people who might otherwise not take the time to learn to program do so, going "here's a GPS... and this rescue beacon!" encourages people who probably don't really want to learn how to tie proper knots go out in the woods, get themselves in way over their head, and then basically hit that stack error. But, never having had to address memory by hand, they don't really know what that means or what to do about it.
I go hiking fairly regularly, and I don't even own any of that stuff. You can get USGS topo quads easily enough, and a good compass. Sturdy boots, balanced pack, and my leatherman. Carry enough water and some spare granola bars in case I get out farther than I had really planned. If I'm in the woods, its 'cause I don't want to be attached to the computer anymore. But maybe thats because I work surrounded by them all day.
The $450 came out of my ass. The problem is the holy grail of "Marginal cost = Marginal Revenue" that every student of economics is taught to chase. Unfortunately such equilibrium as well as the cool graphs seldom exist in real markets with the Kantian level of absolutism in which the texts lionize them. The other problem is the aversion generally felt to allowing preventable deaths to occur. As a result agencies have to navigate a fussy middle ground, and market solutions often fail in problems constructed outside of specific market friendly environments.
The best solution to this problem would involve education, but considering as an American my nation's failings decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King to provide equality of opportunity to primary and secondary education the only reasonable solution to wilderness stupidity is to continue to allow people to dare to be stupid while offering compassionate and occasionally billable solutions to consequences of stupidity..
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Cheaper an even more profitable idea is to publish all the stupid people rescue stories. If a person is rescued from their own stupidity they give up any rights to profits made from their story on the mountain or whatever and the park services can rake in the dough. Name and shame them on a TV show and/or YouTube. This will have the added effect of educating the public to be less stupid as well since the entertainment can also be edutainment at the same time.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Start charging a fee for services. Set the rates make sure they are known in advance. Outsource to a private company to provide the service (can't have emergency personnel tied up on a catering run). Done and done
Brilliant. Outsource to a single private company. Grant a monopoly. You can choose to die or to go bankrupt.
Oh, no, wait... outsource to multiple companies so that service suffers, maintenance on resque equipment is reduced, the pilots are underpaid and you have to agree to the terms first (stay only in open places, on paved paths and within 500 meters of the coffee house).
While I agree that everyone who gets into trouble in national parks is basically asking for it (nobody lives there, everybody entered by free will), a big improvement can simply be made by warnings that the rangers can't always resque you. It's not so much the gadgets which make people trust that they get resqued, it's the fact that they don't know that the rangers will let you actually sit it out for a night if it's not so serious.
Get an alarm number with someone answering the phone who judges how serious the siuation is.
I am 50ish and pilot. I learned to fly when I was 17 flew for a bit (10 years ish), then had a family. I then decided to return to flying. I went back for some more training. The differences.
1st time: My instructor was an OLD WWII vet. A mean cuss that ALWAYS was trying to get me lost. I live in Central Alberta where land marks are few, its flat, and water lines can vary greatly from the charts. We used a map covered in wax paper, a pencil with 1" marks cut in to it and a watch. I never did get lost.
2nd time (25 yrs later): Modern aircraft, Cessna 172 instead of the 1947 fleet canuck. GPS as well as compass. Instruct must have been all of 6 or 7 (really about 25ish). Nice young kid, good skilled pilot. We went up for a refresher check out flight. Did a stall, spin, slow flight etc. (Oh yeah, he did smile at my knee board with the wax paper and pencil). At the end of the flight he said lets head for home and I banked the aircraft while he punched in the coords on the GPS. By the time he was done, I was already on the heading. He was mildly impressed.
We went for coffee and discussed the differences in our training. We both admitted that I could use some more training using the GPS. However he offered his time in trade get some more experience with my flight computer (plastic slide rule for headings and wind for the non pilots) and knee board. He recognized that if he ever did loose his GPS for what ever reason, a manual system might be good to know.
I look at all of the technology available to today's hikers, boaters (I have my skippers papers too), and pilots that forget about the mark I computer sitting on our shoulders. It provides a false sense of security. Everything is fine in the perfect scenario, but for many of these adventures, emergencies arise, not because of a real act of god but a lack of planning. When diving we say "Plan the dive, dive the plan". This should be applied to all "adventures" but we live in a society where the quick adventure is what we are after and fewer a learning how to plan and be prepared. We are quick to pass on the responsibility to technology or experts, knowing that we can sue if they fail.
The only answer I can see is passing on the expenses of rescues to the rescuees. Legit or otherwise. Might be a good thing to take out adventure insurance... The more training you have, the less the insurance would be...
Actually, the NPS has dealt with this before. A lot. For a series of examples of REALLY stupid people, go check out Death in Yellowstone. Here's the oblig Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
My wife picked this up when we were there on our Honeymoon (there, Grand Teton, and RMNP). There are countless examples of reeeeeally stupid people. The lady who fed a black bear and got her t*ts ripped off when the bear used her as an accidental scratching post? Check. The guy who jumped into the boiling hot geothermal pool to save his dog and his skin fell off after he got out? Check. The countless people who go hiking through grizzly country, forget to wear bear bells, don't take pepper spray with them, don't walk and talk loudly with a partner, and keep their smelly food in an unsealed cooler inside their tent not only get themselves et, but get bears killed too, whose only crime was responding to instinct (okay, okay... there are plenty of examples of bears gone wild who attacked when people did everything right, and just have to be put down).
Accidents happen, and the tech is there for a reason. There are also plenty of cases where natural selection does its job. The NPS isn't going to stop every case of natural selection, simply because it can't. They'll try, because the park rangers do NOT want anyone to die on their watch. They deal with stupidity a lot, but they're not going to let someone die just because they didn't know what they were doing. It's exasperating to them, I'm sure, but they are dedicated to saving lives and preventing injuries.
I'm a long time back country camper and hiker (meaning I carry my own tent/bag etc on my back). One of my favorite routes in Yosemite is to take a route in which I camp at the base of halfdome and then finish in the valley. The best part is that I don't encounter the crowds until I'm 75% done.
The last 25% is along the main tail between half-dome and the valley. This passes by the major water falls which people do a simple day hike to. While most people doing a day hike to half dome start at dark, I've seen more than my share of "dumb hikers" who are dressed in jeans/doc martins/sneakers or other non-hiking apparel and in their hand was a bottle of water (the kind you get for a few bucks at the supermarket, not a camelbak and ample supplies). I think they only see the pictures of the cables and forget that it's 14miles miles round trip and 5k feet of elevation gain.
I've had more than one occasion where some unprepared day hiker has asked me for water/food/help. I had one woman ask me for water and I when I told her that the water that I had in my camelbak was filtered (I have a portable pump/filter) from a local stream, she refused to take it.
I agree with the article, GPS and electronics haven't made people more stupid, the devices have enabled more stupid people to do things whereby they are critically dependent on the device. I never hike without a paper map. Why? Maps don't need batteries, and still work when wet and dirty.
On a side note, people that leave food in their cars in Yosemite should not only be fined, but they themselves should be fed to the bears.