Hiker missing for 17 days in Maui forest found

May 26, 2019 10:41 AM

In a remarkable turn of events Friday, a 35-year-old hiker whose disappearance more than two weeks ago in a Maui nature preserve triggered a massive search and garnered national headlines was found alive and in relatively good health TW: one photo of injuries
posted by gryphonlover (29 comments total)

(Warning: video autoplays with sound)
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 10:48 AM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Sorry, it didn’t do that for me! Thanks.
posted by gryphonlover at 10:53 AM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

On the one hand, she made some spectacularly bad decisions to get herself in that predicament. (She went on a solo hike without her phone. She left the trail. When she realized she was lost, she just kept going in some random direction that her gut told her was right, which turned out to be entirely wrong.) On the other hand, I can't even imagine the resourcefulness and resilience it took her to stay alive for two weeks in those circumstances. So yay for happy endings.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:55 AM on May 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

Exactly. Bad decisions and good luck and solid resourcefulness, all together.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:06 AM on May 26, 2019

Always take luck over skill and preparation.

The problem is, your luck isn't in your control, whereas the other two are.
posted by Naberius at 11:10 AM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

I don't know: it sounds to me like she had some really bad luck. I can't quite figure out exactly how she lost her shoes, but that was some terrible luck, regardless of how it happened.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:27 AM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

She had gone out for a 3 mile run. I wonder if she started out barefoot?
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:07 PM on May 26, 2019

I can't quite figure out exactly how she lost her shoes.

She lost her shoes in a flash flood.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 12:20 PM on May 26, 2019

She fell down into a ravine with a waterfall and a pool, and she broke her leg. She was found and she did her best, they did their best to find her. What a great story. We don't have to have our smart phones on us all the time, to be smart or unlucky, or lucky.
posted by Oyéah at 12:23 PM on May 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

I read somewhere that "following your gut" generally ends with you walking in circles, due to the Earth's rotation. I'm glad she's alive, but I wish people would take simple precautions because rescuers often put their own lives on the line to find lost people.
posted by emjaybee at 12:27 PM on May 26, 2019 [11 favorites]

She lost her shoes in a flash flood.

Have not yet read the article but I really love how her rescuers look like they too might have been lost in a forest for 17 days, or more accurately, that they'd love to be lost in a forest for 17 days.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:51 PM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I am so happy for her family. What they must have suffered these past two weeks.
posted by Orlop at 1:17 PM on May 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Searches normally start the next day, or even the same day, if the person involved left sufficient notice of when they were going to be back. If you are going to save a lost hiker the probability window narrows drastically with every passing day.

I'm not a local so I couldn't say what the scale of search or publicity was compared to other missing persons, but the fact the search started immediately is unlikely to be racially linked.
posted by tavella at 3:48 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

not to hobbyhorse into the thread but rarely are any official searches ever conducted at all for missing indigenous people, much less within a day of them being reported missing. like it or not, race is always a factor.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:59 PM on May 26, 2019 [20 favorites]

For hiking search and rescue?
posted by tavella at 4:04 PM on May 26, 2019

Hiker doesn't come back from a hike, and the very next day a massive search starts that garners national headlines and all?

They found her car with her wallet, keys, and phone in it. It was pretty clear that something had gone terribly wrong, although it wasn't clear whether she was lost or whether she'd been abducted. There are a lot of factors at play here, including that her parents seem to have put substantial resources into searching for her. (The local government called off the official search because they were convinced they weren't going to find her. The people who found her were her friends, but they were also presumably hoping to claim the $50,000 reward that her parents were offering.) There is a lot of inequality at work in all missing person stories, including this one.

Some people have pointed out that there's currently another hiker missing in Maui: Noah Mina. He was reported missing on May 20th, and news reports seem to suggest that rescue teams started searching that day. So it does sound like it's standard to search for missing hikers, regardless of whether they're white women.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:09 PM on May 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

Oh, the fact that her parents had the money to continue the search is undoubtedly racially linked in our society, but if you disappear while hiking in an park or preserve that has an active S&R group, and you leave sufficient notice of your expected return, they are going to start looking for within 24 hours of that point, and it's frankly kind of an insult to people who do extremely good and difficult work to imply they vet names or check social media for markers to identify who they are going to bother to go after.
posted by tavella at 4:53 PM on May 26, 2019 [22 favorites]

Some people have pointed out that there's currently another hiker missing in Maui: Noah Mina. He was reported missing on May 20th, and news reports seem to suggest that rescue teams started searching that day. So it does sound like it's standard to search for missing hikers, regardless of whether they're white women.

Been a week, huh? Lemme know when the national news coverage happens.
posted by kafziel at 7:32 PM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Here in Hawaii, we take missing hikers very seriously no matter who they are. Our search and rescue teams have a ton of experience extracting people dangerous situations and - sadly- in removing bodies at their own peril. We are not without racial issues in Hawaii (the way Micronesians are treated, for example, is often shameful), but when it comes to search and rescue on trails or in the water, our teams are on the job as soon as they're called on. It's one of the things that I'm most proud of about our state (and I'm proud of a whole lot).

Regarding hiking, many people I know run trails as light as they can out here and it didn't seem that unusual to me that she left all her stuff behind. It is strongly discouraged (most official trails have the standard "bring a phone/bring water/tell somebody where you're hiking" signs) but it's definitely not unusual. You hike the same trail enough and it's easy to forget they can be unforgiving if you screw up (or as conditions change). Out here, most hikers I've spoken to have had either a "there but for the grace of God..." or a "that could have happened to my friend..." attitude. So, it's agreed she should have brought her stuff, but it's also agreed that most of us local hikers are in no position to throw stones.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:49 AM on May 27, 2019 [12 favorites]

I remember once being kind of lost with a friend in woods in a State park.......we had tried to take a shortcut to where we were going to camp, and ended up bushwhacking through rhododendron thickets. When we came out of that, we were tired and it was getting late. We knew what region of the map we were in, where the creek fork where we were trying to camp was, and we had a compass. QE fucking D, right? We go South, and we will reach the water, and then we follow it, and we will not be lost anymore. But he insisted that an entirely different direction "felt right", and we had to have it out, as I entirely refused to give any credit to this form of navigational epistemology. And I was right to do so - it's crap. It's self-delusion to think that you have some magical power of knowing the right way to go, or that your successful experiences following your intuitions in your personal life generalize to a situation like the one where you are lost in the woods and it's almost dark.
posted by thelonius at 6:18 AM on May 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

So, can someone explain those foot injuries to me? Sunburn plus weeping blisters?
posted by RedEmma at 7:02 AM on May 27, 2019

At some point early in her ordeal, she took her shoes off, and they were then swept away in a flash flood. After that, she was walking around barefoot. She got cuts on her feet, and they got infected.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:17 AM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

> it's frankly kind of an insult to people who do extremely good and difficult work to imply they vet names or check social media for markers to identify who they are going to bother to go after

The official S&R was called off after three days, and then it was privately funded. It's not an insult to acknowledge that she was found because her "friends and family... raised enough funds for their own search on land and in the air."
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:18 AM on May 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yes? My first reply was to a now-deleted comment saying that the only reason the search started the next day was because it was a white woman. I noted that is standard procedure for all wilderness S&R teams: if they can establish that you meant to be back at a certain time, they'll start searching within 24 hours, because the survival rate has a steep dropoff curve; if they don't find you within a day or three, it's likely they won't find you alive at all.

My second reply was to a claim that no one looks for indigenous women, and I clarified that while that may be true for the general society, I don't know of any history with S&R groups where they look at the park register or whatever and go 'well, that name sounds non-white, we aren't going to bother to look for them despite the fact they were supposed to be back yesterday.' The fact that her family had the money to continue to search after the S&R window closed, absolutely racially linked since very few PoC families will have the sort of capital to splash out 50K. But the initial search was standard and would have happened for anyone of any race or sex in the same circumstances. And in fact someone linked a PoC man that had disappeared after her where the search started the same day.

Basically, they struck me as inaccurate and cheapshot replies for karma against a system that is truly admirable, and by building the ethos of 'we look for them all' does a really good job of overcoming the structural racism of its individual parts. Many S&R volunteers are drawn from groups that on average are not terribly open-minded (law enforcement, hunters) and even if they weren't there'd be racists among them. So it's a guide for how a system can be built that overcomes those issues and works for all people, and it disappoints me to see that blindly dissed.
posted by tavella at 10:56 AM on May 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

I think this is about the huge national news this became. Like, I'm in Massachusetts and heard about this hiker nonstop for the last 17 days. I have not seen the same coverage for indigenous people who have gone missing.
posted by TwoStride at 5:33 PM on May 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Let's not set this up like it needs to be a fight? People can agree that un-investigated disappearances of indigenous women happen horrifyingly often; that there are obvious unjust racial and social-class reasons why well-off white women get reported on breathlessly and have private search resources; while also agreeing it's good this woman was found and that wilderness SAR is worthy thing. We can talk about all these aspects separately without treating one like it's a diminishment of the other.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 5:52 PM on May 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

It's hard to just sit still with the realization that you are now likely to be the target of a search and rescue situation but damn if that isn't the best way to make sure you get out of the woods alive.

Posts like this remind me that I have so many things to teach my kids in hopes of them being wise and safe people in this world we all share.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:56 AM on May 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Noah Mina's body has been found.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:40 PM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]

.
posted by tavella at 1:42 PM on May 30, 2019