Kids who go missing in the wilderness often react in distinctly different ways from adults – and sometimes the most childlike, instinctive efforts produce lifesaving results.
“There’s a pattern,” said Laurence Gonzales, author of “Deep Survival” and other works on the science of human behavior. “Children under the age of about 6 or 7 tend to do better than older kids. They don’t have the sense that they’re lost and have to get to someplace, so they tend to not move around so much.”
When 8-year-old Evan Thompson wandered away from a campsite in the southern Colorado mountains last weekend, he may have walked for several miles before rescuers found him virtually unharmed on Tuesday.
And while his constant movement made him more difficult to find, he did exhibit some instinctive behaviors that almost certainly helped his cause. He reportedly huddled by a tree at night and drank standing water from a drainage – he termed it “gross” – when he got thirsty.
“Kids tend to do things that are good for them,” said Gonzales, based in Evanston, Ill. “If they’re thirsty, they’ll drink out of a mud puddle. If they’re cold, they’ll crawl into a log or cover themselves.”
But as children get older and develop more adult ideas about the world, those instinctive strategies tend to be replaced by problem-solving efforts that go to the opposite extreme of best practices.
They take off without direction. They try to re-orient themselves. They panic and run themselves to exhaustion.
Adults inexperienced in wilderness survival aren’t immune to faulty decision-making. In fact, the most common missing hikers are males between ages of 18 and 29 from an urban area, said Howard Paul, spokesman for the Colorado Search and Rescue Board.
Rescuers on Thursday located a 48-year-old Louisiana man who’d been missing since last Sunday in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The anxious adventure of Terry Harlon, like the search for Evan, ended well.
“What adults will do is not think they’re lost and go marching in the wrong direction forever,” said Jake Jones, director of wilderness pursuit and staff adviser for the Western State College Mountain Rescue Team.
Some key elements to becoming an easy target for searchers are to stay put, make yourself visible and stay near places rescue teams would be likely to look – near water, trails and roads.
Kenneth Hill, a professor of psychology at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, has spent two decades studying the behavior of individuals lost in the wilderness.
His research shows that of all the “lost person” groups – including hunters, hikers and fishermen – kids seem to travel the farthest. And sometimes, they outrun their rescuers.
“Often, when you look at these searches, you see that they were not extended far enough, and that’s the reason the child was not found sooner than they are,” Hill said. “People underestimate them.”
Experts offer a variety of advice to instill in kids before taking them into wilderness areas. Some recommend carrying loud whistles they can use if they get lost.
Others instruct children to “hug a tree,” as a means of finding a relatively sheltered area that will keep them in one place.
Hill said it is important for supervising adults to remind kids that, if they get lost, they should stay where they are so searchers can find them.
