UBC: McCarter, Lost!

[truepenny]

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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Comments

[sovay]

the likelihood that children will actually evade searchers.

How do you correct for that, if you're running a search for children and want to find them?

[truepenny]

I honestly have no idea.

McCarter and Koester talk about building fires at night in cases where you think the lost person is afraid of the searchers, but I don't know how often that actually works.