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'Death By GPS' Increasing In America's Wilderness
An anonymous reader writes "Every year, more and more Americans are dying in deserts and wildernesses because they rely on their GPS units (and, to some degree, their cellphones) to always be accurate. The Sacramento Bee quotes Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan: 'It's what I'm beginning to call death by GPS ... People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.'"
Come on, folks, you're traveling between Portland OR and Las Vegas NV, and your GPS says the most direct route is over some gravel Forest Service road in the Eastern Oregon mountains... In the winter... You take it? Really?
Your GPS takes you down some deserted desert road that peters away into sand in the mifddle of Death Valley... Really?
There's not much you can do about MORONS, one way or another, they may kill themselves.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
GPS is just a theory. I subscribe to Intelligent Directionism.
He'd hold two sticks up to the sun, determine his location and time to destination ... then eat a few grubs and squeeze a shot of water from some animal dung.
If you actually talk like this in person, then you are probably the most disgusting, insufferable asshole that anyone around you has ever met.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim
this story haunts me. because i could have done this. any of us could
and for those of you assholes talking about the darwin awards or death by stupidity: i think arrogant hubris is a pretty good candidate gene for being weeded from the homo sapiens gene pool. when stories like these arise, there's two types of people: those who feel saddened at a pointless death, aka, human beings, and those who think that the occasion is an opportunity to trumpet how smart they are, aka, assholes with an ego problem and lacking empathy
you're so fucking smart and immune to tragedy, huh? until a tragedy happens to you or yours. try showing some basic simple respect for the dead, asswipes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When we told the operator that he was well outside the marked channels and that he had struck a rock that's clearly marked on all navigation charts, he simply replied, "Well my GPS told me to turn left here."
I grew up living on a rocky point with reefs offshore in an area with 16 foot tides, and every couple of years my father and brother and I would rescue boaters who'd run aground. This was back when LORAN was still pretty new and GPS undreamed of, but the universal feature of people who hit the rocks was that the only navigation aid on board was--at best--a road map.
A big part of the problem is that people are simply ignorant. If you didn't grow up in an area or haven't lived there for a long time it can be hard to appreciate the risks. And most people grow up in urban or suburban areas that effectively have no (natural) risks at all. People like that simply don't know enough to appreciate that the landscape and climate can kill them if they don't take the appropriate precautions. GPS is just an enabling device that helps that ignorance get them killed: it creates an illusion of safety and certainty that they might otherwise not have, although according to the article people were plenty able to get into trouble without it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Any competent navigator knows to treat GPS as a tool for verifying where you are. Period.
Unless all other means of verification (visual, compass, sextant, RDF, depth sounder, radar, LORAN, dead reckoning) are unavailable, you should never rely on GPS alone.
Boaters should be particularly suspicious of GPS devices which instruct them to "take next exit right after overpass".
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
So if you're up there on those wintery roads and bored out of your mind, try this: Drive your OnStar equipped vehicle to the middle of a large frozen lake. Press the button. Continue driving in straight lines, occasionally stopping to make square left and right hand turns. Talk to the nice lady from India (or Southern California) who has never seen ice in any amount larger than a water pitcher, and tell her you're kind of lost.
John
I concur, but I'd also argue that certain gadgets also suppress ones danger instinct, which is highly relevant in the cases presented by the article. The stranded drivers all sensed they were making the wrong move leading up to their incidents, but they failed to act on it because they allowed the gadget pre-empted or overrode their instincts. These weren't necessarily unintelligent people, they simply trusted the technology more than their instincts which lead to a series of poor choices.
As much as I'd love to crack jokes about Darwinism in these cases, I can look back on my life and find several instances where my reliance on a product/gadget/technology got me into trouble. I imagine most people could find similar moments somewhere in their past. The difference is that those mistakes weren't as serious, didn't get publicized and they likely didn't occur in Death Valley.
The article is a little unfair; to be fair it would have to subtract people saved by GPS.
Frankly, people have always gotten lost, dating right back to at least the time Moses wandered for 40 years in the Sinai. Surely GPS has also gotten people out of trouble. The question is, what's the net effect?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You understand that getting stuck in a snowdrift doesn't require a lot of snow to be on the road... right?
Ground clearance on a lot of vehicles can be measured in inches. Skidding and getting stuck in a drift 6-12 inches deep is easy to do with front wheel drive. I've seen people skid off I-90 in northwestern Pennsylvania in snowy conditions, and get stuck in drifts while driving a hundred yards behind a snow plow / sand truck. I-90 is a major interstate, and the road was about as clear as it's going to get in snowy conditions.
The real danger would be that, on a seasonal road, it may be very difficult to find any assistance to get yourself hauled *out* of the snowbank.
I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, our leader told us to ignore any advice you might have heard about finding your way back to civilization if you are lost. If somebody, somewhere, has some remote clue as to where you might be (and thinks to have someone search), you are 100% better off not going anywhere. You probably are not as lost as you think, and are likely not far from where you were trying to be. The best way for somebody to find you is for you not to go even farther away.
Yes, by moving you may, by dumb luck, blunder back to where you need to be, but you are far more likely to simply end up getting more lost and hard to find.
And never, ever, abandon your car if you are lost. It contains all sorts of useful resources and is rather larger (and easier to find) than you wandering about the woods alone, passed out under a tree. It contains a conveniently large tank of liquid firestarter, and if you carry a couple of basic tools, a large amount of nice insulation in the form of your seat cushions and carpeting. In the heat, the underside is perfectly good shade (if a little cramped.)