Ever lost your way in the wilderness? In 2021, nearly 3,400 people got lost in a US national park. In the 2000s, a researcher named Robert Koester gathered and analyzed data on the behaviors of different types of people, from children to experienced hikers, who’ve wandered and gotten lost in the wild. In what direction do they go? How do geographic features and different terrains influence their movements? In this piece for Undark, Sarah Scoles reports on the growing science of “lost person behavior,” which in turn can inform the strategies of search-and-rescue missions.
His decision to follow the drainage, and then stay near a stream, fits with Koester’s hiker profile. That means the search managers could have had a good idea that they might find him here, and so made plans to search the area: “Hikers are guided by terrain to other linear features,” Koester wrote. Of all find locations, linear features like streams account for the largest percentage of hikers. In this category, people tend to go downhill too, as Read did.
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