National Geographic ADVENTURE

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Lightning Victim Likely Saved By Wet Clothing

In the News: Doctors are amazed that a Minnesota man survived being struck by lighning last Friday while trying to save his outdoor furniture. Though the bolt zapped the metal button on his baseball cap and and the steel tips of his work boots, his wet clothing may have prevented the jolt from traveling through his body.

Analysis: This is a classic case of failure to 1) be mindfully aware of your surroundings and 2) do a risk-reward loop.

Mindfully aware: I am about to go out in a lightning storm. Bad idea in any case. But an even worse idea while wearing metal. Time to reconsider.

Risk-reward loop: Question: What do I stand to gain? Answer: Dry furniture or perhaps a gazebo that isn't bent up by wind. Question: What do I stand to lose? Answer: My life. Seems like a clear choice.

Honeymoon SCUBA Murder? (And How to Find a Trustworthy Dive Buddy)

Text by Andrew Burmon

In 1911, the 150-passenger steamer Yongala sank for unknown reasons near the Great Barrier Reef. In 2003, an American honeymooner named Tina Watson inexplicably blacked out and drowned while diving the wreck. Now one of the shipwreck's mysteries may be solved.

On June 20, Queensland Police issued a warrant for the arrest of David "Gabe" Watson, a diver from Helene, Alabama, Watson stands accused of murdering his wife Tina while the pair dove the Yongala. (Read more about the investigation >>)

As Watson faces the possibility of free trip back to Australia courtesy of the 1974 U.S. Australian Extradition Treaty, the grim honeymoon story has served as a reminder to dive enthusiasts everywhere that dive buddies should be chosen carefully. To help you find a perfect—or at least non-homicidal—SCUBA partner, we've compiled a guide to the five best dive-buddy matchmaking websites.

1) Facebook.com
Of course Facebook has a dive buddy application! With the most thorough diver profiles, the easiest interface, and probably the largest number of users, the Facebook Dive Buddy Application is the online place for divers to see and be stalked by people they don't know.

2) DiveBuddy.com
A social networking site for the amphibiously inclined. Allows users to check out each other's experience levels, specialties, and, of course, relationship status.

3) ScubaMatch.com
While slightly less streamlined than DiveBuddy and a little bit (water)buggy, ScubaMatch does an excellent job of documenting its users' credentials and experience.

4) FindaDiveBuddy.net
A small but well-organized networking site that reads sort of like the neoprene personal pages.

5) ScubaYellowPages.com
Not so much a networking site as a list of divers from various areas, the ScubaYellowPages include the contact information for around 100 divers in England, the United States, and beyond.

Lost Outward Bound Kids Found in California Backcounty

Text by Editor John Rasmus

Update:  The Associated Press just reported that the nine kids and two guides lost in the Sierra Nevada have been found! Details of what exactly happened are unknown at this point.

This case of the missing Outward Bound group in California is baffling. I can't remember an instance when such a large group—nearly a dozen teenage kids and their two guides—simply disappeared in the backcountry. By the time you read this they will probably be safe and sound, with some simple explanation along the lines of "we got really, really lost."  But in the meantime, there are a lot of kids wandering around somewhere in the Sierra Nevada backcountry. 

There are two ways of looking at the fact of such a large group being lost. On the one hand, whatever happened—bad falls, extreme conditions, etc.—they have each other to help, and they will be more visible to search parties. On the other hand, when things go bad in such large numbers, they can go really bad—the kind of "accident cascade" that our Deep Survival columnist, Laurence Gonzales, writes about: someone gets lost; others go out to find them, and they get lost. Before long, if good judgement doesn't prevail quickly, things are spiraling downward. If you add in things like hypothermia, dehydration, or other conditions that can affect the judgement of more than one person, it can be a huge challenge for the leaders in charge.

I'm not going to speculate—I have no idea what really happened. I may just feel a little jittery because 1) we ran a story, "A Death at Outward Bound," about what can go wrong in just such situations in Adventure last year. And 2) my 15-year-old daughter is about to embark on a backpacking trip with a dozen kids and fairly young leaders in the Colorado Rockies in a couple of weeks.

Deep Survival By Laurence Gonzales#4 The Dangers of the Vacation Mindset

The unconscious conclusion we draw is that our little corner of the world is safe. Our culture of plenty keeps us permanently in a vacation state of mind.

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival
Illustration by Dan Page

Last summer I traveled to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The house I rented was on the dunes above the beach, and I could sit and write and listen to the surf thundering beneath my window as the constant wind blew the tops off the waves. Out on the deck I’d watch the pelicans, big and prehistoric-looking, wheel around their circuit from south to north and back again. In the angled light of afternoon, pods of dolphins leapt and dove, and children played in the waves while I fretted about rip currents carrying them out to sea.

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Deep Survival By Laurence Gonzales#3 Emotional Connections

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival

I once worked on an assignment for this magazine with a photographer named Mark Gamba. Mark was an avid steep creek boater. He and I were knocking around on an Army base in Oregon, watching helicopters take off and land, when he told me a story about getting caught in a strainer. A strainer is a tree that’s fallen across a river, creating a network of branches that can trap paddlers. Once someone is sucked into the branches, it’s a pretty dodgy business to get out. Mark was pinned, and each time he managed to pull himself up, he caught a breath and was sucked under again. The endgame was obvious: The exertion would eventually exhaust him. Then he’d drown.
I asked what he did next.

“I thought of my son,” he said. “I wanted to see him again.” And with one last surge of adrenaline, he vaulted up and over the log.

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Illustration by Dan Page

Deep Survival: Brain Vs. Gadget

On a solo backpacking trip this winter, reader Nate Freund was stranded high on California's Ontario Peak during a snowstorm. Read his story, then see Deep Survival author Laurence Gonzales's analysis of the situation.

Submitted by Reader Nate Freund
After reading your article "Folk Wisdom" in National Geographic ADVENTURE [April 2008], I was inspired to write to the author whose concepts played a critical role in my survival.

On January 22, 2008, I set out for a solo backpacking trip to summit Ontario Peak of the Cucamonga Wilderness. I was rescued by Search and Rescue forces from the San Bernardino Mountains after a U.S. Air Force satellite detected my distress signal from my Personal Locator Beacon. It was the first successful rescue of this kind in California--one initiated from a legitimate activation of a personal EPIRP carried by a recreational hiker.

I had spent months staring into the snow-capped mountain range from the Claremont roads as I drove to school everyday. My third attempt to summit this season began on a clear Sunday morning. After hiking a mile above the city, I set up camp on top of Big Horn Peak. I woke up the next morning to see clouds covered everything below me.

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Alive Survivors Look Back

It's one of the 20th century's greatest survival epics: A plane crashes high in the Andes leaving 32 people stranded with little food except the bodies of the dead. As even that supply dwindles, three survivors embark on an impossible journey to find help.

This timeless survival story spurred the book and film Alive. In April 2006, we published Contributing Editor James Vlahos's account of the first retracing of the escape route used in 1972 by Uruguayan rugby players Roberto Canessa, Nando Parrado, and Antonio Vizintín two months after their Fairchild 571 crashed in the Andes. Online, see a 3-D escape route map, photo gallery, and, most poignant, hear audio from the survivors themselves as they reflect on their ordeal.

“I was seeing how my friends were melting and vanishing and getting weaker. The fuselage was getting very depressing and miserable," says Canessa. "I felt it was much more pure to die walking in the snow… . I had the idea that I would walk to the last bit of energy that I had." (Listen to the audio clip >>)

These remarkable people had the clarity of mind and perseverance to survive the most unbelievable circumstances. Their actions embody the "rules of survival" that Laurence Gonzales defines in his new Deep Survival column. It's worth listening to their insights.

Deep Survival: #2 Folk Wisdom

FOLK WISDOM
By Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival

One of the most respected psychologists of our time is Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard and the author of numerous books on human behavior and evolutionary biology. Pinker says that our brains contain a “baloney-generator” that offers up explanations of our behavior. Often those explanations have nothing to do with reality. They’re simply the stories we tell ourselves that help us get around in the world. “The conscious mind,” he says, “is a spin doctor.”

Joseph LeDoux, an author and neuroscientist at New York University, demonstrated that “people normally do all sorts of things for reasons they are not consciously aware of . . .” and that “[o]ne of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story.” LeDoux and Pinker confirm a long line of research going back to William James concerning how well we can know ourselves and how that knowledge—or lack of it—influences the decisions we make. The results aren’t encouraging. “If the human mind is a formal logic machine,” LeDoux adds, “it is a pretty poor one.”

Research in neuroscience confirms that we turn experience into stories—simple narratives about what we’re doing and why—and then use those stories to explain our past behavior and to shape what we do in the future. The most useful stories have emotional impact. And emotions, scientists have learned, are immensely important in helping us to act. Because we are human and have language, we not only generate our own stories, we also acquire them from others through legends, books, movies, and songs. Sometimes, if we are paying attention, we even acquire them from school. When our narratives reflect the world as it really is, we do well. When they don’t, we find ourselves in trouble.
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Deep Survival #1: Gut Instincts

By Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the book Deep Survival

(Editor's Note: This is the first Deep Survival column by award-winning writer Laurence Gonzales. Send in your survival stories and questions in the comment area below and Gonzales will give his feedback.)























FATALLY FALSE POSITIVES
On December 6, 1988, Todd Frankiewicz was on Tincan Mountain in Alaska, making his comeback as a top-notch skier. The previous summer, a serious auto accident had left him hospitalized, and after months of rehabilitation, he felt ready. The day before, he had gone to city hall for a license to marry his girlfriend of nine years, Jenny Zimmerman.

That weekend the Anchorage Daily News ran headlines warning of avalanches. But Frankiewicz had skied Turnagain Pass before and took reasonable precautions, first discussing the danger with Zimmerman and then calling Doug Fesler, a friend and one of the top avalanche experts in the area. As Fesler’s wife, Jill Fredston, wrote in Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches, “Todd asked careful, intelligent questions.” Significantly, “he’d never before phoned us at home to ask for a personal update.” Fesler told him to “avoid steep north-facing slopes like the plague.”
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