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I also recall Uncle Floyd telling me that the Orcas could easily sink the cabin cruiser if they had a mind to!

From media reporting he seemed to have gone further up the mountain. Don't know if that was trying to get a cell signal or not. There is way too much reliance on cell phones for navigation now. I was using the GPS map function in mine to get to the Clatsup County Fairgrounds in Astoria. It directed me to turn off on a road to sort of take a shortcut. The road was paved and named so I figured the route was good. But it led us to a gravel road then onto logging roads before I finally found a place wide enough to turn around. Some might have continued on and gotten stuck. Happens in the winter when mountain roads are closed for the winter. Someone died in Southern Oregon Mountains when their family got stuck in the snow on closed roads. The guy tried to walk out and froze to death. I have had the phone try to get me to turn off on a road that did not exist. There was not so much as a trail there. You really cannot trust them.

It was at the edge of the lahar about a mile from the trailhead picture that I found what looked like a grave formed by rocks that were unnaturally stacked. It was about 4 by 12 feet and rectangular in shape. The shape was what got me over to look at it. Rectangular is unnatural in the area. At one end was a rock stack that looked very much like a bird. Nature could not have left the stones balanced like that. I examined it, took pictures, and had the feeling I should leave the area. I posted the pictures on the forum. I do not have the original pictures because I lost most of my pictures when my computer was hacked. When I was looking for the above picture I found a picture I had taken from the air at one point that seems to show the gravesite. I don't know the time relationship of the picture to my finding. The next spring I went back to the area looking for the suspected grave. It was not there. It was near a very large down tree that had been basically sandblasted by the pyroclastic flow. The winter snows and runoff seemed to have either washed it away or the cliffside fell on it. The embankment washes away more each year and trees fall over when the embankment is eroded. Since BF frequent the area, and the mountain in the area is composed of deep ash fall, I like to climb up along that embankment and hope to find the skeleton of some hapless BF that got caught in a previous eruption hundreds of years ago. For those that do not know, Mt St Helens is the most active of the Cascade volcanoes. It was erupting when Lewis and Clark did their trek to and from the West Coast. Most of the eruptions are ash producing events that have the potential to kill anything caught in the ashfall. It was a pretty conical mountain until the 1980 explosion.

I would have said that about his footwear but I got dumped in this Forum for saying that Crocks are unsuitable footwear for field work. Doing solo hiking without sturdy hiking shoes without ankle support you are subject to potentially devastating injury should you sprain an ankle or worse. The higher in the mountains the more unfriendly the terrain. From the news reports, other than dehydration his most serious problems were that his feet were a mess. You are quite right that he was lucky to have been found. Most outcomes of someone missing over 3 or 4 days is they are never found because they die and are consumed by scavengers. He had intended to visit the lahar overlook, which is SE of the Mountain and probably expected just a short hike from his car. . How he ended up on the SW side is beyond me. Could be a case of his cell phone leading him off on logging roads. I have to say the forest service roads in that area are poorly marked. In the Gifford Pinchot on the East side they are not only poorly marked but some of the roads have been renumbered and what few signs that are there, may have the old signage. Or the signs are all shot up by shooters shooting at them. You should possess and know how to read a map. Also in this day and age people have stopped wearing watches because they all have cell phones with the time. With a watch and the sun, there is no reason not to know directions. Even a compass can be a problem in areas with iron deposits. I had a thought that might help find someone who is lost in a known area. Usually they are turned around and simply do not know which way to go to find other humans. The guy said he never saw another person the whole time he was lost. At night the searches are stopped unless they have cell phone contact with the lost person. Seems like if searchers could put up a large red weather balloon on a 500 ft tether with a LED light inside, the balloon could be seen day or night and someone could see it for miles. At least that would give them a direction to travel to find their way out.

This otter knows what to do! Get out of the water!

You are right. One night about three years ago a "Footing friend" and I were camped in a south AR BF area. I slept in the cab of my truck about 20 yards from his camper. Light rain was predicted for that night, so I water-proofed the microphone and amplifier and listened. (I had two plastic ice chests in the bed of my truck.) A light rain started about 11 PM and he went to sleep snoring loudly. About one thirty I heard a dead limb crunch a few yards away. A few minutes later something pushed through the ring of brush surrounding the small camp site and walked to the back of the truck, and picked up one of the ice boxes. Apparently the weigh of the box and contents, plus the rain coated handle caused the BF to lose his grip and the box fell back into the truck bed. Of course, I had turned my head and was looking through the back window. I was seeing just a large black animal froze for a few seconds. But the noise awakened my Bud in the camper. When his snoring stopped, the BF wheeled, made a long leap to the edge of the brush and crashed through the thick woods and out of hearing. My friend called me on his two-way radio and asked me, "What made all the noise?" I just asked him to guess. The Booger's foot print impressions from the point where he had jumped and several yards into the woods were still visible at daylight. (Leaving some cheap steaks or pork chops on a secondary second grill while you are "snoring" in BF country will bring them in, unless there is a game camera in their view.) Of course that practice is frowned upon by some, and illegal in some places.

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies’ territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.” - Edward Abbey