UBC: Koester, Lost Person Behavior

Lost Person Behavior: A Search and Rescue Guide on Where to Look for Land, Air, and Water by Robert J. Koester

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yes, I bought myself this book for my birthday because of the number of times David Paulides cites it. As I suspected, he cites it badly and misleadlingly.

Koester is, on his own merits, fascinating. I could never do Search and Rescue myself--my OCD means I would work myself into a nervous breakdown in very short order--but if you do, or are interested in, SAR and haven't read it, I recommend it highly. I learned a great deal about how lost people behave and about how you go about the daunting task of finding them. The part about using probability theory to decide where to search, how that works and how you balance it with human assessment, is freaking brilliant--and I mean that not about Koester only, but about everyone who runs this kind of endeavor, who makes these kinds of judgment calls in the field.

Five stars for those who are interested in the subject matter.



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UBC: McCarter, Lost!

Lost!: A Ranger's Journal of Search and Rescue by Dwight McCarter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is another book I only found because of David Paulides, who uses it because of the strange disappearances of Dennis Martin (never found) and Geoff Hague (eventually found, but much too late). It's from a micropress, which is still going strong, rather to my surprise. It is, as it happens, signed, which as an unexpected bit of lagniappe made me ridiculously happy.

McCarter's a good writer, clear and vivid, and I learned a lot of things about Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about Search & Rescue, about tracking, about bears. (I had not known that bears bury their kills to let them "ripen" before eating them.) Like Koester, he mentions the likelihood that children will actually evade searchers. He discusses paradoxical undressing in a way that makes it make sense (one of the late stages of hypothermia includes the sensation that your hands and feet are burning, so you get rid of mittens and boots and start shedding the rest of your clothes), and also the strange trails of abandoned equipment that hypothermic hikers leave behind them as their fatigue gets worse and worse and they become helplessly more irrational. (Once again, a lot of Paulides' OMG SO MYSTERIOUS MUST BE SASQUATCH/ALIENS/LEMURIANS could be dispensed with if he'd actually use the information in the books he cites.)

Dennis Martin is still a mystery though.

This book is exactly what it is, neither more nor less. If you're interested in SAR or the Smokies (he sidebars all sorts of interesting tidbits about plane crashes and old mines and old logging camps and all sorts of things I had no idea those mountains were hiding) or what it's like to be a backcountry ranger, it's totally worth reading.



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