Perceptions change greatly when lost or stressed due to conditions. Once I was backpacking with a group and ran out of water. In my dehydrated state I went from a fast up front hiker to the laggard in the back trying to keep up. First time it ever happened to me and I learned a lot from it. Now I watch for signs of dehydration in myself and fellow hikers.

Although in retrospect, we were never in real trouble (providing we didn’t panic)we did not know that at the time. We were scared shitless.

Its a story with several morals:

1) Be prepared,
2) Trust your instruments
3) Don’t panic.
4) Things have a way of going to pieces when you least expect it.

Pymatuning

I had decided to try my hand at some winter camping, so I asked my colleague, Jim, if he would like to join me. Jim was from Western Pennsylvania, and had just graduated from Penn State, so I felt he knew the lay of the land and it might be useful to have someone with me with a little local knowledge. Jim thought it was a great idea, and suggested a suitable place, Pymatuning Reservoir, on the Ohio border near Lake Erie. He had never been there, but he’d heard it was pretty wild country, but with some primitive camping facilities. In late November, it was not likely to be very crowded over the long weekend. It wasn’t a very long drive from Pittsburgh, but the going was slow over the mountain roads and by the time we got there it was almost dark. We set up our tent and got a good night’s sleep. We had plans for a long hike in the morning, after sleeping late and a leisurely cattleman’s breakfast cooked over an open fire.

The morning was cold, clear and windy, just above freezing, a beautiful Pennsylvania fall day. We had planned our hike the night before, using a small scale map; it hadn’t shown much detail, but we had a good idea where we were going. There would be a short stroll down a well-maintained trail leading out of the parking lot/campground that eventually connected to a 6-mile hiking trail shaped roughly like an equilateral triangle. It was pretty rough country, heavy deciduous forest over maturely dissected terrain, lots of valleys, ridges, and several hundred feet of relief. It would take us within several miles of the Reservoir, a huge narrow lake that stretched for miles, and if we had time and could find a way down off the ridges, we might even take a short side trip and check that out too. We packed a lunch and hit the trail about noon, with every intention of getting back well before dark. We definitely had the place all to ourselves, there had been no other cars in the parking lot and we saw no one on the trail the whole day. After leaving camp there was a twenty minute hike to the trailhead, marked by a generic park service sign pointing the way, and when we got there we decided to do the triangle counter-clockwise.

Penn’s Woods in the fall can be quite desolate, except for an occasional evergreen shrub, the trees were bare of leaves and there was absolutely no sign of wildlife, no game, no birds, no insects, nothing. The forest was dead, and only our experience told us that come springtime this would be a riot of green and wildflowers and scurrying creatures and the sound of leaves in the wind high above a luxuriant and impenetrable undergrowth. The ground was blanketed with a thick compost of brown, decomposing leaves completely covering the forest floor and the trail. Our path was discernible only by the absence of big trees, thanks to the effort of some long-forgotten CCC gang four decades earlier. The trail was not heavily used, there were a lot of hibernating saplings rooted in the middle of it, but the path was not hard to follow, off to the side the trunks were colossal and more closely spaced. Over our heads the bare branches creaked and groaned in the wind and an unceasing rattle of countless twigs rubbing together merged into a hiss just barely audible over the sound of the wind. The single relief from the monotony came from a scattering of boulders, about the size of automobiles, that punctuated the ocean of brown with islets of gray, mossy stone. The only color came from the lichens that grew on these rocks, oranges, greens and pale blues, and after a year of Pittsburgh, it was color enough for me. Jim, a geologist by training, declared the boulders to be strangers to the region, left there by the receding glaciers thousands of years ago.

The hiking trail roughly girdled the high ground occupied by the parking lot at one edge, its builders having thoughtfully planned it so it stayed mostly along the ridges, and only occasionally dipping into the hollows that drained it. Still, the path alternated between steep climbs and equally challenging downslopes, both hard on the ankles and calves. We were both well prepared, stout hiking boots, jeans and thick sweaters and watch caps. Our jackets came off early and we stuffed them into our backpacks to keep from getting our underclothes damp with sweat–better to be dry and chilled than cold and wet. I had the additional advantage of a hiking stick, a tough, straight oak sapling as long as I was tall, that I had cut a few years earlier in a Tennessee forest very much like this one. It’s very useful to have a third leg to help keep your balance in rough country, and held out in front of one, it helps break a path through the undergrowth.

Our map of the region generalized the trail only as a little triangle, about an inch on a side. But at a human scale, the path wound and turned, taking advantage of the shape of the land, both for ease of initial construction and to prevent subsequent erosion. The mapped contours were too far apart to give much of an idea of anything but the most general shape of the terrain. Overhead, an occasional glimpse of the sun gave us some hint of our direction of travel, but it soon became obvious that our general heading was only the average of a baffling collection of serpentines and switchbacks. As long as the trail was clear, and we stayed on it, we couldn’t get lost, but we only had a vague notion of where on the trail we were. As the day wore on, an overcast gradually developed, and soon we realized that we really wouldn’t know when we rounded the points of the triangle, our only plan was to simply stay on the trail, make the circuit, and get off again when we found the trailhead sign. We were stopping frequently to enjoy the sights, but we estimated that even at our leisurely pace we would have more than enough time to get back before dark. When we stopped for lunch and consulted our map, we decided we were about halfway round the triangle. The trail was still plainly visible, and no other trails crossed it, so there was no chance of losing our way, but we resolved that if it should become hard to follow, or if it broke up into a maze of secondary paths leading God knows where, it would be probably wiser to turn around and retrace our steps than to try and continue. We realized we were at roughly the halfway point, but there was more than enough daylight left, so we decided to press on.

As the day wore on and we gradually tired, the weather began to deteriorate. The overcast became complete, and soon began to ominously darken. There would be snow tonight, or worse, sleet. Without discussing it, we picked up the pace and silently and efficiently kept moving, now at a brisk march. I knew that Jim was doing the same calculations in his head that I was, we were less than two hours from camp, and we had more than three hours of daylight, plenty of time…if nothing went wrong. But what if the trail suddenly disappeared in a tangle of undergrowth, or it started branching and bifurcating and we were forced to turn back the way we came? It would be dark before we hit the trailhead, and could we follow the trail in the dark? As we walked silently the sound of the wind became more noticeable, or was it just our anxiety? And it was getting dark fast, the sky was black, there was a lot of moisture in those clouds. Our feet hurt and the temperature was dropping fast, the woods suddenly became very menacing.

Suddenly, the storm hit, a blast of wind and a moderate drizzle, not the downpour that I feared, but we had no guarantee it would not get worse. At least the rain was not freezing, but it forced us to stop and put on our jackets, just to keep our sweaters dry. Snow would have been preferable. Ironically, we both would have preferred to delay donning our coats, our brisk pace was keeping us warm enough and we both knew how important it was to keep our clothes dry, from sweat as well as rain. Especially if it really got ugly and then we were forced to turn around when only a mile or so from our destination. We walked ahead, grimly determined to get through while there was still light. I did a quick mental inventory of our resources. In my pack was a folded four by eight plastic tarp and a few feet of line, it might be possible to rig up some sort of a lean-to or other shelter with it. I had a knife, flashlight, cigarette lighter, a cheap compass, and a clean shirt and a spare pair of socks. Jim had his knife, his geologist’s hammer and a Bruton compass. The latter would be useless in the dark, it was a fine instrument but it did not have a phosphor card like mine did. He also carried our remaining food, two candy bars, a small can of deviled ham and one of Vienna sausages. We were adequately dressed for the time being, but it could go down to zero tonight, our parkas and long johns were back in the car with the sleeping bags. Things could be worse, but we were still not out of trouble.

Could it be? Yes, yes! There it was! The trailhead sign, just ahead, on the left hand side of the path, the rustic brown-painted wood rectangle with the yellow lettering and the arrow naming the destination and indicating its direction. The trail back to the campground went off to our right. Jim and I could not help trading smiles as we saw it, and we made the turn, now at a more moderate pace. We began talking again, joking about our close call. The wind blew harder and the drizzle turned to a light rain, but we were at most twenty minutes from camp and there was plenty of light to see the trail. We would be cooking dinner by the time it got dark.

But it was completely dark and and three quarters of an hour later and still there was no camp, no car, just woods and wind and the rustle of the leaves under our boots was gone, replaced by our tread on wet dead vegetation. Something was awry. When we finally stopped because we could no longer see the path, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong. The fear of an hour earlier had slowly come back as the minutes on the trail dragged on, compounded now by the realization that we did not have any idea where we were, and we had no clue as to how we had gotten there. Was the map all wrong, and because of the twists and turns we didn’t realize it? Could there have been some fork that we had somehow missed on the way out? Could we have somehow wandered off the main path and stumbled onto an unmapped trail, could some vandal have moved the sign? We didn’t think so. But we didn’t know what to believe any more. There was no answer, no solution, no reason for this to have happened: we had done everything right. We were completely disoriented and hopelessly lost, my feet were hurting terribly and for the first time that day I suddenly felt very cold.

It was clear that there was no point in following the path any further, even if it was the right one, which it most certainly wasn’t, we couldn’t see it in the dark anyway and the flashlight batteries wouldn’t last for an hour of continuous use in this temperature. We decided to stop and rest and take stock of our situation. Another long look at the map convinced us that we were east of the lake, and west of the north-south road leading to the campground, we hadn’t been walking long enough to be anywhere else. If we went east we would have to cross the road, west, the lake. No matter how badly turned around we were, if we could walk a straight line we would have to hit one or the other. The lake sounded appealing, it would be mostly downhill, and even in total darkness if we just kept heading down slope the drainage would eventually get us to water, although maybe not by the most direct route. Unfortunately, this time of year the resorts and cabins by the lake would be deserted, and the edge of the lake might be an impenetrable marsh, not a pleasant beach. The other alternative made more sense, as long as we headed east, we would have to reach the road eventually. But whether we hit it north or south of our camp was anybody’s guess. We might have miles more to walk only to learn later we turned the wrong way. Besides, even in the near blackness, we could see looming to the east, through the trees, an enormous mountain, something neither of us had remembered seeing on the way out. If we followed our compasses out of the woods it looked like we were going to have to climb it, going around it might only get us lost.

We checked each other’s packs and organized our gear for the trek. I made sure my compass would always be stored in my button- down jacket pocket when not in use, and my flashlight was in an inside pocket so it would stay warm. It would be used only to look at the compass or to help gather firewood if we had to bivouac for the night. Hopefully, the batteries would last till daybreak if we didn’t use it too frequently. We would be going off-trail, cross-country, so it was bound to be pretty rough, and we set a set of rules so that we would not lose each other in the dark, we were to keep together and talk continuously to keep track of each other , as well as keep our spirits up. Before putting Jim’s Bruton away, we checked it with the light to make sure both compasses were in agreement. We took a careful bearing with mine, and stepped off the edge of the world.

It wasn’t as bad off the trail as we had first expected, we had to walk gingerly to avoid tripping on tree roots, but there was enough of a dim glow from the sky to avoid major obstacles like tree trunks and boulders. We took turns taking point, the man in front had to be very careful not to run into shrubs, and the man behind not to get hit by a whipping branch. I realized almost immediately I had forgotten my walking stick where we had stopped to get our bearings, but I wasn’t about to go back and try and find it in the dark. The wind and the driving rain, now starting to freeze, were getting worse, but we were able to maintain about half the pace we had on the trail in daylight. Every few hundred feet we stopped and took a compass bearing to make sure we were still headed east, and every few stops it was necessary to briefly shine the light on the compass to reenergize the phosphor, a procedure we quickly learned to do with our eyes closed to preserve our night vision. Unless we had guessed totally wrong, we suspected we had been walking in a roughly southerly direction, parallel to the road and way from our camp, before we struck out cross-country. We calculated it would take us at least a couple of hours to reach it, and then perhaps another hour going north on the road before we found the car.

Logic and reason are all very fine, but the mountain in front of was getting bigger, or at least it seemed to be doing so. It was a black featureless mass, dimly visible in silhouette against an almost-as-black sky beyond. It was not supposed to be there, and we both commented on how we could possibly have missed it; we almost had ourselves convinced it only looked big, that it was a trick of the light, and that it wouldn’t take us all night to climb it. In the meantime, our easterly course was sending us down into a vast depression, further and further from the trail system, a hole we would eventually have to climb back out of…somehow, this didn’t feel at all like the terrain we had walked through that morning. The fear started getting to us, and we even wasted precious time and battery power checking the compass from a distance, well away from our bodies, in case there was some metal in our clothing that was interfering with it. I remember I asked Jim if there was any possibility that iron-bearing minerals might be in the surrounding rocks and if this might affect it, he answered that he had never heard of such a thing before, but that it might be possible. For a moment, the apprehension got so bad we almost considered abandoning our plan and heading down-slope, back to the lake, but we knew that would add hours to our hike, and it might not help us at all, we might wind up hemmed in some cul-de-sac and then hit by a blizzard. In the end we decided we had no choice but to trust our instruments. We continued east, by compass, but was the flashlight slightly dimmer now, or was I just imagining it?

We were at the bottom of the depression now, and we could hear a stream rushing by in the dark. This was totally unexpected, we had seen no sign of water on our hike out, the trail had stuck to the ridges. A hurried look at the map showed many streams…it could have been any one of them. A quick recce of the creek with the light showed it too wide to jump across, but not very deep, We waded across, knee deep in near freezing water, realizing almost immediately we should have stripped before going in to keep our clothes dry. But we were in a hurry now, we were scared, and we were starting to make mistakes. Still, our fatigue seemed to have evaporated, we didn’t feel the cold, we were running on adrenaline now, and it seemed wise to take advantage of it while we still could. When the exhaustion finally came, we would build a fire, warm up, dry off, and eat our remaining rations. We would then wrap ourselves up in the tarp and share our body heat till morning. My wrist watch told me it was still relatively early in the evening, it was a long time to sunrise.

On the other side of the creek, the ground rose up, it was an uphill climb now, made even more difficult by the thickets of bottomland shrubbery, and in the background the mountain still loomed, it didn’t seem any closer. We had hoped we would be able to hear traffic on the road, but there were no cars going to the lake this time of year, and the howl of the wind would have drowned it out anyway. The rain turned to sleet, then snow flurries, it wasn’t blizzard weather, but it was going to be an awful night. We walked on, stopping every now and then to take a compass bearing, and resigned ourselves to it all. We were rapidly tiring now, stumbling over rocks and roots, both of us starting to shiver from our fording of the stream. I was wondering which one of us would give in first and wondering if we would be able to start a fire with everything so damp when we saw the headlights; off in the distance, through the trees, a lone car on the road, it couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards ahead and the last few were the hardest. The road was built up off the land, well drained with a deep swale, and the shoulders were slick with water and ice. It took us a a while to scramble up the slippery slope to reach the pavement. The mysterious mountain was still to the east of us, much further away than we had originally estimated.

It was two-lane blacktop, full of potholes, the basic Pennsylvania road, but it was flat and smooth, and we still had a lot of walking to do, over an hour as it turned out. Fortunately, we guessed correctly, we turned north at the road and eventually, we found the turn-off to the campground, our car and supplies, and our tent and down sleeping bags. We didn’t bother to cook, but we made some hot tea and sandwiches, stripped down, dried off, and went to sleep.

The next day, we went back out on the trail, trying to reconstruct what had gone wrong. We took the path back to the sign, turned left this time, and walked a half mile or so to another trail intersection with an identical sign! The day before we had turned here instead of proceeding for just a few more minutes to where we needed to go. This trail came up from the south and intersected the triangle trail and it was not on our map. We followed it for a few minutes until I recovered my hiking stick, marking the spot where we had gone cross-country. From there we used the compass and retraced our desperate slog of the night before, finding all sorts of evidence of our passing, a footprint here, an uprooted shrub there, the occasional cigarette butt and gum wrapper. We found the stream, and where we forded it, and we discovered that the creek came out of a hole in the ground, traveled about a hundred feet, and then went back underground again. We had managed to cross it at the only place where it ran on the surface. By the road, we saw the desperate marks in the mud where Jim and I had scrambled up the slimy slope on all fours. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite as far as it had the night before.

After that it was a quick pace back to the road and we soon found the correct trailhead. The rest of that trip I spent time comparing my position with the map and found the altitude function to be the best feature of the GPS.

Now that the phones have better mapping capabilities I rarely find myself in a bind, but the lesson was learned well and I started being more situationally aware when on the trail.

If you have a GPS, you don’t need your elevation, you’ve already got a position. As for getting your altitude from a watch, I presume that is done barometrically, How far off could you be if your local weather is temporarily affected by a high or low pressure air mass?