Posted on 01/16/2008 1:04:09 PM PST by Squidpup
GOVERNMENT CAMP -- A chance encounter with a plastic bottle early Tuesday helped two lost climbers find their way off the lower flanks of Mount Hood after a night spent huddled in a hastily built snow cave.
The bottle, apparently left by someone playing an adventure game, held map coordinates giving their precise location. And the two Portland men spotted it just as searchers called their cell phones -- which they mistakenly believed had stopped working for good the night before.
"That was something," said 27-year-old Justin Votos, still marveling at the turn of events an hour after he and 28-year-old Matthew Pitts walked to safety with the help of volunteers from Portland Mountain Rescue and the Air Force Reserve's 304th Rescue Squadron.
A classic Mount Hood whiteout -- howling winds and zero visibility -- had stymied a summit attempt for the pair Monday afternoon. Votos, a wildlife biologist, and Pitts, a waiter, turned around after reaching roughly the 10,000-foot elevation on the 11,245-foot mountain.
It was, both men would say later, the worst weather either had experienced. Snow and ice, Pitts said, blasted their faces. Their map blew away in the wind.
Rocky Henderson, an experienced searcher and volunteer with Portland Mountain Rescue, said the climbers' intended route was the Leuthold Couloir, the second most popular route up the mountain's west side.
The route is considered the "trash chute" of the mountain, said veteran climber Steve Rollins, a volunteer with Portland Mountain Rescue. He said couloirs act like funnels or large gullies coming off the mountain. Debris, ice, rocks and other hazards tend to roll through the couloir. That's why Rollins said it's better to travel light and move swiftly when moving along the route, as Votos and Pitts said they were.
He said winter climbing is not necessarily more dangerous than climbing in May or June, the busiest time on the mountain.
"When it's cold all day, there is less danger of rock and ice fall," he said. "It can be a cakewalk to the summit. Climbers can ski in to the climbing routes and ski out."
Votos and Pitts didn't get a cakewalk. They were scheduled to return to the Timberline Ski Area parking lot by 3 p.m. Monday, but it became clear as they climbed higher that they weren't going to make it.
One of them called his girlfriend on a cell phone. She, in turn, called the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office around 7 p.m., and the agency organized the search effort. But because of the weather and the conditions, the search could only seriously begin at daylight Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the two made their way down to 6,000 feet -- the elevation of Timberline Lodge -- and began looking for the ski area's lights.
When that failed, they followed the fall line, heading south in an effort to find the highway, avoiding the often-fatal mistake of stumbling into the steep dangers of nearby Zigzag Canyon. At about 5,000 feet elevation, they built a snow cave.
They had neither a GPS unit nor a mountain locator unit, which Rollins said was a mistake. He also said they should have carried a shovel for avalanche rescue or building a snow cave and they erred by misjudging the time they'd have before bad weather rolled in.
The pair accepted responsibility afterward. "That's what got us in trouble," Votos said.
But the two also did things right, Rollins said. They turned around rather than attempting to force the summit climb, they had a compass and did what he called "a reasonable job" navigating in whiteout conditions, and they kept a positive attitude, which rescue veterans say "makes a huge difference."
Eventually, after sleeping several hours, the men rose at 5 a.m. Tuesday and set off again, steering down the mountain with headlamps. Their cell phones, they believed, were dead.
"If we had had a GPS (and a map), we probably would have been a lot better off," Pitts said.
By daybreak, they were only about a mile from the highway, north of the Enid Lake Trailhead.
"We knew enough about where we were to make the right decisions and not get killed," Pitts said. "We had a rough idea about where we were going."
About 8:30 a.m., a bit off the trail, they spotted a twig with red tape on it, marking a water bottle hanging in a tree. The bottle contained the location's coordinates, apparently left there as part of a "geocaching" contest in which participants follow GPS coordinates to remote, far-flung locations.
As the two moved toward the geocache site, Pitts' cell phone suddenly rang. It was the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office on the line.
Dr. Ross Fleischman, an emergency room physician and member of Portland Mountain Rescue, was one of the four searchers who then hiked in to retrieve the two, escorting them to a Sno-Park near Government Camp. They emerged from the woods shortly after 11 a.m.
"Having the coordinates was huge," he said. "We were able to walk right up to them, warm them up, get them some snowshoes and walk them out."
I just got a gps last spring and had fun geochaching with my family this last summer. Picked up a traveling bug I need to plant somewhere else, pronto.
Just on the off chance that we might need it, I carried a simple GPS on a car trip up the Oregon coast just after that very bad storm in early December. We also had a cell phone, a two-meter ham handheld, and a fifty-watt capable two-meter ham mobile transceiver. We might have gotten stranded but I was pretty confident that I could summon help and tell them where we were.
OK, I will have a stab at it.
Cell-phone based geolocation uses triangulation based on the cell phone being able to be seen by more than one cell tower. They are accurate in places like a city, to within 50 or 100 feet.
In such a remote area, there would not be the overlap of cell towers needed to triangulate the position. GPS is a different beast, uses satellites in orbit, and is accurate down to about 3 feet or less.
A cellphone doesn’t have a GPS receiver (for picking up location signals from GPS satellites) unless it is specifically built into the telephone. Adding GPS usually adds significantly to the cellphone’s cost. Further, a GPS receiver doesn't emit a signal (to triangulate on), it just receives ones that are already in the air and computes its location using timing differences from the multiple satellites it “sees” overhead. GPS is superior to the cellphone triangulation method because the likelihood of getting three or more GPS satellite signals is very high due to the extensive coverage in geosynchronous orbits around the Earth and because the calculation algorithm used in determining location is fairly precise.
Pitt said their cellphones didn’t have the GPS capability. Since he was one of the two lost hikers, maybe you should believe him.
Cool. Geekiness saves lives.
GPS satellites are not in geosynchronous orbits, they are in low Earth polar orbits, and their accuracy is not as good as triangulating from cell towers can potentially be. A few years ago a special geosynchronous WAAS satellite was added that sends out a correction signal. This information is computed by land stations that know their exact location and compare it to their GPS calculated location, which is usually in error. The gravity of the Earth is not uniform and the GPS satellite positions vary constantly from their predicted positions.
Rather than just timing signals a system could be implemented to measure the phase of a radio wave when it hits. This would improve the accuracy down to a tiny fraction of an inch. Some very precise surveying equipment uses this technique.
Thanks for correcting me on that. I was thinking of television and radio communications satellites which are in geosychronous orbits.
The last message I ever got from a bottle said "you're the disco king, ask her to dance..."
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