From UnDark, January 22:
By analyzing reports of people who got off-track, researchers are advancing the science of “lost person behavior.”
On May 5, 2023, a 19-year-old hiker named Matthew Read headed out on a roughly 12-mile trek in an underpopulated part of Glacier National Park in Montana. Read, a chemical engineering student, had stopped in Glacier while driving home to Michigan, and the pine-surrounded path he embarked on was known for its big views of the Livingston Range, a set of jagged peaks to the east.
He would get a longer look at them than he anticipated.
By Sunday, two days later, the young hiker had yet to return. That afternoon, national park rangers started a ground search; that night, a helicopter team scanned from above. The rangers, though, were thwarted by a lack of clues, the chopper by meteorology: Clouds hung low, fog obscured the view.
That Monday, the search team grew to 30 people, and included the U.S. Border Patrol and Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, along with search dogs. It would expand to the North Valley and Flathead search and rescue, or SAR, teams.
In situations like this, a subfield of science can help those SAR teams know where to start — and how a college kid lost in big bear country might behave. It’s called, appropriately, lost person behavior.
The study expanded in the 2000s, with a researcher named Robert Koester. In 2008, Koester compiled, analyzed, and published data on how different types of people behave when wandering the wilderness — and how to find them. His work has become foundational to the field of lost person behavior, and a cornerstone of how SAR teams plan missions to find people who have wandered off the beaten path.
While it’s hard to come by solid numbers because there is no mandatory centralized place where SAR teams must file reports, in 2021, nearly 3,400 people needed help getting out of the wilderness in U.S. national parks alone (a minority of the land where people need rescue).
In the 16 years since Koester’s initial work, he and other researchers have added nuance, filled in gaps in the initial framework, and built new technological tools. But moving new research out of the ivory tower and into the outback isn’t simple: When searchers are seeking a kid who wandered from camp in mountain lion country or an alpinist unconscious in an avalanche, trying a new tactic isn’t often at the top of the priority list.
But in a field where even minutes matter, efficient search tactics can mean the difference between life and death. Those high stakes inspire researchers to travel farther down the path, following the data where it forks.
Systematic searches largely trace back to World War II, when spotter planes would use grid searching to detect German U-boats.
Around the late 20th century, SAR professionals in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia were formally reporting land-based rescue missions, pulling out statistics on things like why people had become lost, and for how long. The most influential of these professionals was a researcher named William Syrotuck, who analyzed a few hundred cases total, wrote up the results in book form, and represented the first attempt to sort lost people into categories (children, hunters, hikers, elderly persons), take stock of their collective actions separately, and chart how far they tended to wander.
The statistics on lost people didn’t come from large sample sizes, and so their behavior profiles weren’t quite cemented until Koester came along....
....MUCH MORE
