Intersting! I know that in the contiguous USA, you will never be more than 20 miles from a road no matter where you are, but have no idea how far one can drive from a town.
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(Assuming nothing kills you in nature)
Edit: Wait, no. You could be extremely unlucky and be walking parallel to the closest road, lol.
Nerd snipe 2. Same without a compass or any sense of direction. Assume you can accurately make a 90 degree turn and count steps
Weather is the only likely natural hazard outside polar bear country (and to a lesser extent grizzly country because grizzlies are less likely to see you as food). And if you are in polar bear country weather is extreme.
But as the saying goes “there is no bad weather just poor clothing choices.”
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Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
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eg: Lost while bore running- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7065113/How-two-boy...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/horrific-desert-death-parent...
Anyone doing the same kind of work today (bore maintenance in extremely remote Australian desert) likely has a Personal Locator Beacon-which can be used to transmit your location to the authorities in an emergency via satellite. Dramatically increases the odds of being rescued promptly if stranded.
> likely has
Yeah, mostly the case but certainly not all .. had they been available at the time it'd be unlikely that pair would have been given an EPIRB given the run down economic state of the pastoral station then.
If you want an EPIRB success story for those that are routinely well prepared, there's this tale from the Gunbarrel network:
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc
Even today people disappear every year or so on these roads .. some are found, others aren't.
Another factor: currently satellite-based SMS is becoming increasingly available - I just got a message from Telstra the other day telling me it had been enabled on my service (using Starlink direct-to-cell). In years to come it is going to become ever more mainstream. So even if you don’t have an emergency beacon, so long as you have a sufficiently recent mobile phone…
Communication is only part of the issue here.
In the above linked recent incident the police when contacted couldn't make it out from Kalgoorlie (despite an initial indication) and handed off to a station owner who was able to make a 600 km+ round trip across a broken road to resupply water.
That was lucky, and luck doesn't always land.
An archeologist would walk down a gradient until they find a stream and therefore a fluvial network to a human settlement.
Your answer gets me killed.
Compasses are pretty useless without a map or a terrestrial view of some sort, as all you can do with them is shoot a bearing relative to magnetic north, or if your compass includes a declination adjustment a bearing to true north, provided you know the declination beforehand. It's often printed on topographical maps for this reason.
If you're on top of something then you can use the compass to get somewhere you can do dead reckoning. Usually there's little landmarks every 10 or 20 feet that you can stay on a bearing to. But if you can't see any topography from where you're at you'll have to infer it somehow. So another strategy might be to head uphill if you can ascertain there will be some kind of view there.
A lot of what you'd do depends on the terrain you find yourself in.
Not really. Statistically, the things that most often kill people lost in the wilderness are exposure and following that, accidents that outright kill or weaken the body's ability to deal with the weather and thus accelerate exposure effects. You do not need freezing temperatures to die of exposure. Even being exposed to mild cold, but continuously, and particularly if wet or partly submerged in water, will eventually bring your body down to hypothermic temperatures.
Hunger is barely a factor because you can go without food for an exceptionally long time before you weaken severely, let alone die, and though we need water to live quite soon, it's rarely impossible to find unless you're in a very arid place. In either case, if the weather is bad and you're under-dressed, that's what will kill you well before you need to worry about dropping from hunger or even thirst.
As for wild animals, they're your single lowest worry, despite being the things that tend to most scare people about the wilderness (thank our ancient hunter/gatherer instincts for this, since they led to us not immediately fearing things we'd adapted ourselves to handling well, like weather and sources of nutrition, but continuing to fear the things we couldn't easily control, like lurking beasts).
Generally, you'd have to be incredibly unlucky to be the victim of something like a bear or puma attack and forget completely about attacks from any other animal, since they're nearly unheard of.
Just to be clear, with most of the above i'm referring to North America or at least to some sort of northern or southern temperate region that may include deserts, forests, prairies, etc, and not tropical conditions or wildlife.
In tropical conditions, and especially jungles, the calculus changes quite a bit, with exposure being less of a risk (though one can be surprised by unexpected cold, as has happened to me in outright jungles deep inside central America where you wouldn't fucking expect to feel really cold, but holy shit!.) Certain kinds of wildlife also become much more of a danger in tropical places, though with few exceptions, the really problematic ones won't be the big predators. Instead you can genuinely worry about smaller things that sting or bite with venom.
Edited for way too many spelling mistakes.
The latter - pick a direction, walk in a straight line.
If they don’t and someone dies as a result, they are going to have an awful lot of explaining to do at the coronial inquiry, it isn’t going to end well for them
Of course I realise in this 1986 tragedy the coronial findings (whatever they were) seem to have made very little impact - but again, I think standards and expectations today are different from what they were almost 40 years ago
That's just my opinion, of course, from working in such environs.
Ideally (hear me out) SMS messaging via Starlink won't operate in large swathes of the Murchison in any case, assuming Musk and other operators carry through on vague promises to turn ground|orbit comms off over Radio Quiet Zones for Radio and Microwave astronomy.
Further, I'm not sure you're grasping the practicalities of sending search and rescue teams to remote locations even when messages get through. Naturally emergency authorities want the best outcomes and make the best efforts they can.
In reality resources have to be available and not directed elsewhere at the time, sufficient to the task (eg: able to land or drop aid that can be used at the correct location ) and numerous other problems that crop up in every post mortem of such incidents from well before the 1980s all the way through until today as people still die in the outback despite your thoughts about standards and expectations.
Forty years ago we prepped to go deep into areas and to have backup on standby (of our own and not "the authorities"). Today it's the same.