Speaking Ill of the Dead (again)

[howeird]

I'm sorry he's dead. I'm much, much more sorry for his widow and children. And for all the people whose hopes were raised way beyond reasonable expectations by stupid media coverage.

When I heard they had burned the tires, I lost all hope. That's just plain dumb - I drove that road last April and it's a forest. Even green wet wood is easier to burn than a tire. And there would have been plenty of dry kindling under the snow, if they had thought to dig a little.

And what kind of idiot takes off on a trip through the mountains without flares?

Someone at Cnet called him a hero, but a hero doesn't abandon his family to go trekking into unknown woods unprepared. They say he had two lighters with him, but there apparently was no evidence he tried to use them.

Kudos to the rescue people who thought to track a cell phone ack signal in an area where there is no service.

This story shows how desperate we are for happy endings. And how completely out of proportion the media can blow up a story. To paraphrase Rick in Casablanca, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of four little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Comments

[howeird]

The reports I saw said they burned the tires to keep warm, after the gas ran out (they kept the car running for warmth - also not a brilliant idea, what with carbon monoxide).

I've been there a couple of times, is why I'm so rude about all this. I've gotten stuck in the snow on logging roads in WA and OR and had my transmission die during a blizzard when I was en route to cover a house fire for a newspaper I was working for in the Cascades. This was before cell phones. I always carried a sleeping bag, a couple of road flares and local maps. And knowing that a car cigarette lighter will work off a very low battery without having to turn on the ignition helped me out of one jam.

I'm not McGuyver or any kind of Great Outdoorsman, but I'm still here.