In my experience, police are tipped by the family of missing people that the victim was a frequent visitor of the preserve. The police ask for access, but aren’t really equipped to survey / don’t have maps, so we join in person. I get the vibe that as folks contemplate killing themselves in a natural area, they visit it more frequently leading up to the event, so it’s kind of obvious. I mean, humans don’t disappear. If it’s a normal person, hiding somewhere, they are either at a friend’s house, the bar, or in the woods.
The other category of people are the ones who just kill themselves in the parking lot or guest areas. Truly, these people can fuck right off. Its a horrible thing to come to work and find a dead body hanging off the observation tower.
We manage less than 100k acres, the longest public trails here are probably only 15 miles long, and we have maybe 3 million people nearby. So, people don’t usually die by accident on ours, at leat not in mysterious ways. Distressed hikers are usually found by other hikers before dying. Most accidental deaths I’ve seen have been drowning due to swimming in undesignated areas.
Reflecting on this response, our police might just be better funded than more rural land management areas. Like, the last search i was involved in was extensive and prolonged. On BLM land way out there, maybe people do disappear, but working in environmental lands management has taught me that truly empty natural land doesn’t really exist in most places with reasonably sized populations. Chances are, if you walked out there, someone else will too, at least in public lands.
Oh, yeah. What your descrbing isn’t what I meant at all by the wilderness. I was talking like, actual wilderness. Not even managed necessarily. If you don’t want to be found there shouldn’t be a parking lot or a visitor center to the area you go. That should be obvious. I’m talking like literally just drive out into the middle of a national forest until the roads end and then just start walking. If there are trails your in the wrong area.
If you are curious about the disappearances tho you should look into Missing 411 (fair warning there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it). The missing people are real, but people get weird about it if you look at the wrong corners of the internet lol.
At the risk of being a contrarian, even that scenario of driving into a national park until you can’t drive and then walking is probably a guarantee of you being found. National parks are managed land and they’re pretty popular. You’re also leaving your car behind, either on a designated access road or a fire lane which makes finding you more of an inevitability than anything else.
Part of what I do for work are wildlife surveys. People tend to steal the cameras or the SD cards. Something I’ve noticed is that when I look for places to put cameras, specifically to avoid capturing humans, I still get humans on them, or the cameras are sometimes tampered with. I think this is a sort of confirmation bias. Anywhere you or I go, someone else is likely to go. Even if we’re trying to hide, we still have shared common biases.
The least likely places for humans to go are the ones selected at random via GIS on a map. I select 10 random points in the management unit then i rule out the obvious bad ones that intersect with an access road or some kind of facility. The trouble with these points is that they tend to be really hard to access.
But you know what? I do think this is kind of splitting hairs. Obviously there are always remote areas, and a determined person could hike for many hundreds of miles.
I think the bigger factor in “disappearing”, whether it’s for some nefarious reason such as suicide or not, is how well known you are. Are there people who are motivated to find you? Are the local police well funded? Are there land management staff here willing to look for you? How many years will your spouse, parent, child look for closure? I think for most affluent people, enough of these factors align to make them easy to find. Those most capable of disappearing are those who have nobody. Unprivileged people, who don’t have the support structure that they need. This sort of person can disappear even in a well populated area. Where I live, there are many road signs warning of human trafficking. I suppose human trafficking is probably the leading cause of true disappearance, since the victims often fall into that category of person who has nobody.
Yeah I guess my perspective is scewed by being one of those people. I pretty much have no one that knows what I do day to day. There are people who might wonder where I went and call the cops when I don’t show up to certain places but they’d have literally 0 leads unless I was stupid enough to leave a digital paper trail or something.
Yeah. I guess I’m a bit used to it? It seems normal to me. I’ve been like this for over a decade now. Just working, getting by, and minding my own business. I have a cat. It doesn’t bother me a whole lot like you might imagine. But even as a kid all my interactions with other people were pretty negative. So I kind of associated other people with being hurt and saw getting to be alone as an escape. I see myself as like a modern version of the hermit who lives in the woods.
Edit: To be clear by saying yes to estranged I mean like I keep them at arms length. I see them from time to time. But I don’t tell them anything, and I don’t trust them. I mostly just interact with them to be polite.
Your asking a lot of a depressed person. I don’t think I could ever be in the mood to kill myself after hiking out a couple of miles, but I love nature. Maybe it would work for someone else.
You don’t do it on the trail dude. Do you know how many people go missing and are never found in national parks every year? Look up Missing 411. If you think somoene is just gonna stumble across you then you have no concept of how vast these lands are. We’re talking about pure wilderness that is hundreds of miles across.
That legitimately doesn’t exist where I live :(
My best attempt to not get found would probably be either breaking into one of the old unused mines in the mountains that are kind of near me or off myself at sea and hope that my corpse wouldn’t get swept to the coast.
Js people go missing hiking all the time its much simpler to just hike out into the wilderness and do it there. They’re not gonna find you.
As someone who’s underpaid to work in a nature preserve, please don’t do this. So many of my coworkers have ptsd from finding / cleaning up bodies.
Do you know if those are this phenomenon vs just like people dying by accident out there? I imagine a lot of people just die by accident on hikes too.
In my experience, police are tipped by the family of missing people that the victim was a frequent visitor of the preserve. The police ask for access, but aren’t really equipped to survey / don’t have maps, so we join in person. I get the vibe that as folks contemplate killing themselves in a natural area, they visit it more frequently leading up to the event, so it’s kind of obvious. I mean, humans don’t disappear. If it’s a normal person, hiding somewhere, they are either at a friend’s house, the bar, or in the woods.
The other category of people are the ones who just kill themselves in the parking lot or guest areas. Truly, these people can fuck right off. Its a horrible thing to come to work and find a dead body hanging off the observation tower.
We manage less than 100k acres, the longest public trails here are probably only 15 miles long, and we have maybe 3 million people nearby. So, people don’t usually die by accident on ours, at leat not in mysterious ways. Distressed hikers are usually found by other hikers before dying. Most accidental deaths I’ve seen have been drowning due to swimming in undesignated areas.
Reflecting on this response, our police might just be better funded than more rural land management areas. Like, the last search i was involved in was extensive and prolonged. On BLM land way out there, maybe people do disappear, but working in environmental lands management has taught me that truly empty natural land doesn’t really exist in most places with reasonably sized populations. Chances are, if you walked out there, someone else will too, at least in public lands.
Oh, yeah. What your descrbing isn’t what I meant at all by the wilderness. I was talking like, actual wilderness. Not even managed necessarily. If you don’t want to be found there shouldn’t be a parking lot or a visitor center to the area you go. That should be obvious. I’m talking like literally just drive out into the middle of a national forest until the roads end and then just start walking. If there are trails your in the wrong area.
If you are curious about the disappearances tho you should look into Missing 411 (fair warning there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it). The missing people are real, but people get weird about it if you look at the wrong corners of the internet lol.
At the risk of being a contrarian, even that scenario of driving into a national park until you can’t drive and then walking is probably a guarantee of you being found. National parks are managed land and they’re pretty popular. You’re also leaving your car behind, either on a designated access road or a fire lane which makes finding you more of an inevitability than anything else.
Part of what I do for work are wildlife surveys. People tend to steal the cameras or the SD cards. Something I’ve noticed is that when I look for places to put cameras, specifically to avoid capturing humans, I still get humans on them, or the cameras are sometimes tampered with. I think this is a sort of confirmation bias. Anywhere you or I go, someone else is likely to go. Even if we’re trying to hide, we still have shared common biases.
The least likely places for humans to go are the ones selected at random via GIS on a map. I select 10 random points in the management unit then i rule out the obvious bad ones that intersect with an access road or some kind of facility. The trouble with these points is that they tend to be really hard to access.
But you know what? I do think this is kind of splitting hairs. Obviously there are always remote areas, and a determined person could hike for many hundreds of miles.
I think the bigger factor in “disappearing”, whether it’s for some nefarious reason such as suicide or not, is how well known you are. Are there people who are motivated to find you? Are the local police well funded? Are there land management staff here willing to look for you? How many years will your spouse, parent, child look for closure? I think for most affluent people, enough of these factors align to make them easy to find. Those most capable of disappearing are those who have nobody. Unprivileged people, who don’t have the support structure that they need. This sort of person can disappear even in a well populated area. Where I live, there are many road signs warning of human trafficking. I suppose human trafficking is probably the leading cause of true disappearance, since the victims often fall into that category of person who has nobody.
Yeah I guess my perspective is scewed by being one of those people. I pretty much have no one that knows what I do day to day. There are people who might wonder where I went and call the cops when I don’t show up to certain places but they’d have literally 0 leads unless I was stupid enough to leave a digital paper trail or something.
Really? I mean, not to pry, that’s a difficult situation to be in. Are you completely estranged from your family?
Yeah. I guess I’m a bit used to it? It seems normal to me. I’ve been like this for over a decade now. Just working, getting by, and minding my own business. I have a cat. It doesn’t bother me a whole lot like you might imagine. But even as a kid all my interactions with other people were pretty negative. So I kind of associated other people with being hurt and saw getting to be alone as an escape. I see myself as like a modern version of the hermit who lives in the woods.
Edit: To be clear by saying yes to estranged I mean like I keep them at arms length. I see them from time to time. But I don’t tell them anything, and I don’t trust them. I mostly just interact with them to be polite.
Your asking a lot of a depressed person. I don’t think I could ever be in the mood to kill myself after hiking out a couple of miles, but I love nature. Maybe it would work for someone else.
Isn’t that a good thing then? They won’t kill themselves because they’ll change their mind on the hike. Problem solved.
Other than the next hiker who you are traumatizing
You don’t do it on the trail dude. Do you know how many people go missing and are never found in national parks every year? Look up Missing 411. If you think somoene is just gonna stumble across you then you have no concept of how vast these lands are. We’re talking about pure wilderness that is hundreds of miles across.
That legitimately doesn’t exist where I live :( My best attempt to not get found would probably be either breaking into one of the old unused mines in the mountains that are kind of near me or off myself at sea and hope that my corpse wouldn’t get swept to the coast.