Some serious questions for which I would appreciate some serious answers:
• Why do people risk their lives by hiking in the Arizona desert in the middle of summer?
I’m not talking about the people who have lived here for a long time and have enough sense to hike early in the morning or late in the afternoon, making sure to dress properly and to have too much water with them. I’m talking about the twenty-something German tourist who died on Camelback Mountain in Phoenix in 110-degree heat after polishing off the one (!) bottle of water he had taken along. Or the 65-year-old woman who died a couple weeks ago while hiking in Pinal County. (Richard Pryor’s character, Mudbone, once said “You don’t get to be old being no fool!” Apparently, there are exceptions.)
I’ll admit I’m not much of a hiker. It combines walking (which is boring), constantly looking down at the dirt path (which is extra-boring), and getting scratches on your legs from sharp bushes (which is boring and painful). I have lots of friends who absolutely swear by hiking and, well, all I can say is different strokes.
This is not to say that I don’t appreciate Nature. There’s nothing like stepping outside of a hot, sweaty gym just in time to see a magnificent Tucson sunset … and then going back in to play one more game.
It’s terrible for people to die needlessly this way, but I have to wonder what they were thinking when they set out.
• On that same topic, is there a Stupid Hiker’s Law and if not, why not?
On the news a few weeks ago, they showed how local Search and Rescue personnel had gone to aid of a guy who got lost on the Catalinas. He was out of water and in pretty bad shape. But then they showed him on the screen. He had no hat and was wearing a tank top and sandals! You’re supposed to rescue that dude?!
In all seriousness, I believe that everybody should get rescued. But if their plight is their own doing, I think there should be consequences. The Search and Rescue people often risk their own lives and expend lots of resources (helicopters, land vehicles, man-hours) to rescue others. If a hiker gets in trouble because he/she did something stupid (fail to properly prepare, getting off the path, not telling others where they were going, etc.), they should have to pay for the cost of their rescue.
• Why does almost every wildfire that pops up in the West have to be fought? Why not just let some of them burn?
Without sounding like some kind of pyro (which I am not), I have read several books on the subject. (Two of the best are The Big Burn, about the worst fire in U.S. history, the 1910 conflagration that devastated much of Idaho; and Fire On The Mountain, about the 1994 South Canyon fire in Colorado that took the lives of 14 firefighters.) What I’ve learned is that most of these fires are natural phenomena and mankind may be doing more harm than good in the long run by putting them out.
I certainly understand fighting a fire that threatens a town or a city. But if somebody builds a cabin out in the woods, they have to know that, sooner or later, those woods are going to catch fire. I’m not sure it’s society’s responsibility to risk lives and drain resources to fight that particular fire.
After three firefighters tragically died in Washington last week, I saw a really cool handwritten sign attached to the front of a house that had been evacuated. It read “Dear Firefighters, This is only a house. Please Stay Safe.”
• With all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over the proposed nuclear deal with Iran, I have yet to hear even one person ask the most basic question: Where is it written that we (the United States) get to determine which countries get nuclear weapons and which ones don’t? To me, it’s like the U.S. telling Albania, “You can’t have television. We invented television and we don’t want anybody else to have it.”
The nuclear Pandora’s Box was opened 70 years ago and that lid is never going to close. The physics and mechanics of such a device are so straightforward that a halfway-decent high-school student should be able to come up with a workable design. Obviously, the biggest hurdle is obtaining (or, in the case of Iran, creating) the fissionable material.
Not long after the U.S. built the first bombs, the Soviets soon had the secrets through espionage and then the U.S. gave them to England and France. (The CIA then helped Israel get The Bomb back in the 1960s.)
It would be a NeoCon’s wet dream if the U.S. were the only nation with nuclear weapons. But such is not the case. We worry about Iran but think nothing of the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power. Then there’s the fact that Pakistan, with a government that’s shakier than a cheerleader at a charter school, hates India, which also has nukes.
It’s way too late to think about closing that barn door, plus it seems just a tad arrogant on the part of our country to even think about doing so.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2015.
Sure glad you don’t do food reviews. I’d quit eating.
Well Tom, we get to tell nations what they can and can’t do when they have threatened that they want to destroy us. ie “Tom, my goal is to burn your house down.” Are you going to defend my right to have a Molotov cocktail and sit in front of your house. We have friends in the middle east, particularly Israel.
The Israelis are not our friends, they are our customers. They buy a lot of weapons from us because they are paranoid… and just a little Imperialistic. They share many of our Nationalist Fantasies… like “big walls will protect us” and “God wants us to have all this land”. But since we give them most of the money to buy those weapons and technology, the relationship seems more codependent than friendly. Maybe they are our allies, because they nearly always vote with us at the UN…
Cascabel, everyone has an opinion….
Punishing people for doing stupid things just adds insult to injury. Charging a person for being rescued because they made a bad or uninformed decision is truly mean spirited and accomplishes nothing by punishing someone for making a mistake. This isn’t Catholic school where you get hit with a ruler every time you get an answer wrong. Real life and death situations should not be treated so callously. If you have a car accident because you ran a red light, and your child dies as a result, do you really think the proper thing to do is to charge you with murder? How about a little compassion?
Why do we try to prevent others from creating nukes? We have international agreements to do so. Google Nuclear Threat Initiative. That should answer your question.
My Most Honourable Tom, the Forest Service does indeed let many fires burn to clear out old dead brush and buffelgrass, as long as they’re not endangering property. It let two fires we had in the Pusch Ridge area burn themselves out for this reason, and also because they were in remote areas. Same for that recent fire near Corona De Tucson, even though it had to fight the northern flank because it was getting too close to homes. To be sure, rain helped all these fires from getting out way out of hand. Many fires –especially small ones — in remote parts of Arizona are managed, not fought, “to accomplish resource objectives,” as the FS likes to say.
Here’s an interesting fact, via the Wildfire Today blog: “Only natural ignitions may be managed for resource benefit objectives,” said Holly Kleindienst, the Kaibab’s [National Forest] deputy fire staff officer. “Human caused starts must be suppressed according to the Forest Service’s 2009 Guidance for Implementation. From 1970 to present, lightning accounts for about 75% of the 150 wildfires that start on the Kaibab each year. Our supporting Forest Plan, and community support, coupled with plenty of lightning are the reason that the Kaibab has been able to treat an average of 11,000 acres per year with lightning caused wildfires since 2003,” she continued.”
There is a Stupid Hikers law only it gets enforced when people are talking to their maker and get scolded for being out in the hot sun with no water!! LOL!!
Those of us who spent our impressionable, formative years in the dry Southwest know the score: if you’re going to hike for more than a mile, take at least a cup of water for every mile you intend to hike. Hydrate an hour before you take off. Double up on water based on temps over 85 and/or the humidity makes it _feel_ like 85. Altitude also dehydrates. Make allowances for that, too. Wear a cap or, better yet, a light hat. And sunscreen. If the weather climbs over 105, don’t bother. Go bowling…
If that amount of water doesn’t suit you, don’t hike. Or take very short hikes.
If you insist on hiking in the desert, wear long pants. Or risk serious brush scratches and cuts. It’s par for the course. Always wear the most comfortable walking shoes you can afford and good socks. Take a compass or a cell phone. Let at least three people know where you’re going and when you expect to come back. Call them up when you return.
I’ve got a friend who runs in the Boston Marathon every year; while training, he ended up in the ER on an IV a few years back on a particularly humid day. That same day, I merely cramped all over…
The desert has killed some good, but careless, people. As has unacknowledged and/or denied climate change
Be safe, be well.
Climate change has not killed anybody, but the ignorant and uninformed are dropping like flies. It seems funny the effort we put into trying to educate for prevention, when we can’t even get people to quit smoking. I have accepted the fact that it will happen to a small percentage.
Had an old cowboy tell me that when you hike the desert, fry up some bacon and take it with you cold.
When I questioned how that could help, he said, “you’d be amazed at the things you can trade bacon for.”
It’s the other white meat. I do it every time!
What decides what country gets nukes is called the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_th…
Signatories that don’t have nukes on the date the treaty was signed agree to give up possessing nukes. In exchange they are allowed to use nukes for peaceful uses-like energy. Iran is a signatory. That’s why they insist their nuclear infrastructure is for producing energy-not nukes. Whether that’s true or not is what is currently being debated.
What do you have against cheerleaders at charter schools? Pig!
I would LOVE to see a Stupid Hiker’s Law in our area! With the invention of cell phones, it seems that common sense for hiking in the desert (and many other things) has gone out the window. Even experienced hikers have become careless. We have a stupid driver’s law, bring on the stupid driver’s law!