As part of my job, related to activities at China Lake Naval Weapon Station, I've worked on a test range in Coso, about 45 miles northwest of the area mentioned in the article. I've also been down to Trona and Searle Lake. I can't imagine going off pavement in that area without experience and training.
As a further illustration of how remote this area is, the safety briefing for the range mentions two important points: 1) if you are injured and it's not life threatening, it will take 3-4 hours to get you to a hospital. Someone has to drive you off the range to meet the ambulance just east of Coso Junction since there's no way an ambulance can get into the range. The terrain is to rugged. Coso Junction is also about an hour north of Ridgrecrest/China Lake. 2) if you are seriously injured, the only way out is on a helicopter. It takes about 25 minutes to get a helicopter up to the range.
This area is starkly beautiful and there's a lot of interesting things to see and do, but it is absolutely deadly. You can't go in unprepared.
I find this sort of story super scary because I come from a similarly big country with vast expanses of nothing. I know of an elderly couple who a couple of years ago died of a heat stroke after they got lost on their way and took a different route, which led them to a dirt road in the middle of a desert (Salinas Grandes in Córdoba, Argentina).
https://www.lacapital.com.ar/informacion-gral/un-matrimonio-...
And they had cellphones. They asked for directions. They simply were confused, took the wrong route, their signal disappeared and they ran out of gas.
I live in the town where they came from. There are definitely mountains here, even more frightening ones than in the Death Valley. The Saxon Switzerland mountain climbers even defined the rules of modern rock climbing. Their problem was the desert, they were more afraid of the rocks than the desert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Switzerland_climbing_reg...
"That sort of treatment is typical of the level of professionalism I’ve experienced from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office. And I have taken away a very valuable lesson from it all. If I ever find myself in a dire situation in the backcountry of Inyo County and require rescue, I would crawl on bloody hands and knees over miles of jagged rock until I reached either the Kern or San Bernardino County lines. Then, and only then, would I set off my Personal Locator Beacon or SPOT device. A person needs to do everything possible to maximize survival…."
There was a period of several years when this sort of thing (weird content people put up because it was stuff they were personally very passionate and knowledgeable about) was more or less most of the what the internet was. I think about that sometimes.
There are very similar sites like the one posted still going on about missing people in hard to search areas. I will try to get my friend who's into it to provide a link.
That one had the coverage in the NYT Magazine as well. I wonder in that case did the guy get abducted or some similar victim of crime. Turns out that wandering off alone in the uninhabited desert actually can be dangerous.
It's still worth your time to read it. I read the article when it was originally posted and I am still struck how, in the wrong environment, you can be two small decisions away from disaster.
I agree, it's very easy to underestimate a place like Death Valley. I was there this winter, so while I did not experience the blistering heat, I was absolutely taken in by the sheer scale and hostility of the place (I'm from the Netherlands and we simply have nothing to compare it to).
Driving around on main roads during the day, you can drive for hours and only occasionally run into other people. Leave the main roads unprepared and you may end up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS
Even main roads are not a guarantee for a good experience. We stayed in the park a bit too long and wanted to avoid driving out in the dark via the steep winding roads near Panamint Springs on the way out by taking the 178 to Ridgecrest. Driving 70 miles of pothole-riddled desert road in pitch black with not a soul nearby was not fun. And this is a California state route that we researched in advance.
It always has potholes. Have been there several times and you can tell they patch it but the heavy excavation vehicles and the temperature probably play a big part. City folk underestimate what true darkness really is, and each time I have been we always have the same thought as you but you get so captivated in this unique environment that you just don't want to leave!
Also for folks not familiar with USA roads, you can be on a State Highway, US Highway, or even the Interstate system and still be pothole ridden. Every state has jokes about their roads being the worst and the neighboring being the best (and they all think they are unique). Just the nature of roadways and government management.
> City folk underestimate what true darkness really is
In the Netherlands, no matter how far you go from major cities, it is never as dark as in the middle of the desert. I enjoyed some beautiful views of the Milky Way, with thousands of stars normally hidden by light pollution, but then quickly got back into the safety of the car ;)
On reading the article I had the same thought... I've driven (as a tourist in a hire car) up the road that they were ultimately trying to get to if they had made it over the pass, heading round to the north of death valley and then down Badwater road on the eastern side of Death Valley.
It didn't seem to be a stupid thing to do, we had lots of water in the car, we stuck to paved roads and although we probably only met one other car on the way north, once in death valley there was occasional traffic.
There have been several times when I've set off down dirt tracks in unsuitable vehicles for a bit of an adventure, and so far haven't come unstuck, but it's always been in western europe and not somewhere like this.
So maybe I'm just like the germans in this situation...
But then I looked at the map and started scouting around at where they had decided to go...
It may have been a couple of small decisions that led to disaster once they were up there, but the larger decision to head off up a 40 mile sandy/rocky dirt track to get over the very imposing mountains in the desert in July was the one that it was obvious (from my point of view) not to take.
Relative to Western Europe, everything from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is in the Mojave Desert. The desert is the size of Portugal. Death Valley National Park itself is an uninhabited region 1/3 the size of Switzerland. Even if it wasn't desert, and even if it wasn't mountainous, getting stranded there would be life threatening. But of course there are mountains and desert and heat.
The root cause, to me, was normal complacency. Looking at a map and not taking the words "Death Valley" seriously. Seeing 500km from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and planning like it's Berlin to Munich. Everything else in the tragedy stems from that. We all do it. Looking at the bottle with a skull and crossbones and doubting it's seriousness because day to day our lives don't include bottles of poison. We're conditioned assume Death Valley is ironic branding by a tourist board based our everyday media experience.
Interpreting the tragedy as a series of small mistakes is attractive. But the article's story is all about not making the fundamental mistake of taking Death Valley lightly...and even then it's full of near disasters where the experienced search and rescue operators almost take it too lightly and come closer to the envelope than intended simply because 99% reliable isn't 100%, because of the weather, and because there's no one around.
> It didn't seem to be a stupid thing...we stuck to paved roads
It doesn't sound like you did anything stupid. You didn't go even remotely close to where the German's went in this case. They went into areas on roads that nobody would normally tackle without a serious 4x4 and a backup plan. They went down the westside unpaved road up to Warm Springs Camp and the Geologists Stone Cabin. The thing reading it that surprised me is that they tried this in a station wagon, not a 4x4, and never got the sense to turn around, and then from the Stone Cabin they went waaaay into serious offroad territory trying to drive down the wash.
That's pretty normal for Europeans. 4x4 are rare and roads are often in worse conditions in mountainous areas that even some Fiat Punto can climb without any major issues. Most US folks would freak out without a proper Explorer or similar. It's like when in Germany you regularly see females driving 130MPH on the highway on their way back from shopping; it would freak you out but it's totally fine over there. So my guess is that those Germans just took it as a typical overcautious American thing and did it the same way they would do it in Austrian Alps or Canary Islands. Their main mistake was not to turn back, but again, moving forward and extreme resilience to pain is one of their national attributes anyway.
This is not at all my experience. I'm an American living in Germany who pretty regularly goes to the Alps, the roads are nothing remarkable. The amount of infrastructure built in the Alps is remarkable, but Americans are not going to bat an eye at the road conditions in the mountains of Europe, nor are they comparable to what people are talking about here.
That's true if you are a tourist in Alps, but as a native you'd know some really dodgy mountain roads that your clunker could climb without much trouble, but no American would ever attempt them without a proper 4x4 and life insurance. There is also a factor of underestimating distances due to latitude differences, i.e. Europe is drawn much larger and US much smaller than it should be in comparison, so looking at a map is very deceiving.
Death Valley has over 600 miles of off road track which are meant for 4x4 vehicles. Of course these people could have stuck to paved roads and stayed safe but I think they underestimated what off road truly is.
Driving off road is an American cultural thing and roads and deliberately maintained for those enthusiasts. These were not the first Europeans to underestimate driving in USA.
Looks like a very long read. Given that I'm at work now, I won't be able to read this until tonight or this weekend.
Could someone be so kind as to give a 2-3 sentence summary? Looks like some German tourists got lost in the desert, and the author tried to track them down or retrace their steps?
That’s basically it. Absolutely amazing story to be honest. This guy pieces together their tracks with very little info in a ridiculously huge chunk of uninhabited land near Death Valley. Truly a needle in a haystack story.
Some visiting tourists got stuck in Death Valley without enough water or food, and they tried to walk out but it's a vast, hot, dry place. No one could find their bodies for a long time. It's a great story, I remember reading it before.
From reading the story, the crucial mistake might have been made when their van got stuck: instead of trying to walk back to a shelter with spring water supply they knew about because they had been there on their way out, they walked deeper into the desert trying to reach a military area where they hoped to find soldiers. They walked way beyond the point of no return and didn't find soldiers.
Read this some years ago but it's still a fascinating story. Having visited DVNP several times, I can certainly attest to the desolation of the landscape but I was there in winter and early spring and I certainly wasn't in areas like these. The pictures actually do the area justice. But to take two small children into such an area during summer with absolutely no preparation is simply criminal. What were these people thinking? It's good the families of the victims received some closure but it goes to show how making simple mistakes can easily lead to disastrous results.
> But we were impressed with one amazing fact: To reach this spot required them to have hiked 8 or 9 miles over rough terrain, in street shoes, in July. In my mind they had earned a lot of respect for this accomplishment. This was a tough group.
People will do extraordinary things fighting for their lives and for their children's lives.
As an avid Death Valley fan I have been to the place several dozen times in last 4 years. I have only driven (on road and off road) and never dared to hike for more than 1 hour.
Deserts are a very deceptive places where the danger is never apparent.I have met many people who have underestimate the desert and what it can do to you.
As a further illustration of how remote this area is, the safety briefing for the range mentions two important points: 1) if you are injured and it's not life threatening, it will take 3-4 hours to get you to a hospital. Someone has to drive you off the range to meet the ambulance just east of Coso Junction since there's no way an ambulance can get into the range. The terrain is to rugged. Coso Junction is also about an hour north of Ridgrecrest/China Lake. 2) if you are seriously injured, the only way out is on a helicopter. It takes about 25 minutes to get a helicopter up to the range.
This area is starkly beautiful and there's a lot of interesting things to see and do, but it is absolutely deadly. You can't go in unprepared.