I Hate Dialysis Message Board
Off-Topic => Off-Topic: Talk about anything you want. => Topic started by: okarol on August 06, 2008, 12:46:38 PM
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Yikes... Chris... check your GPS! ???
Convoy rescued after GPS led them to Utah cliff
Tue Aug 5, 9:27 PM ET
A GPS device led a convoy of tourists astray, finally stranding them on the edge of a sheer cliff.
With little food or water, the group of 10 children and 16 adults from California had to spend a night in their cars deep inside the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
They used a global positioning device to plot out a backcountry route Saturday from Bryce Canyon National Park to the Grand Canyon.
But the device couldn't tell how rough the roads were. One vehicle got stuck in soft sand, two others ran low on fuel. And the device offered suggestions that led them onto the wrong dirt roads, which ended at a series of cliffs.
The group was so lost it couldn't figure out how to backtrack and started to panic. Kids were crying, and one infant was sick with fever, according to a member of the party.
"It was a nightmare — the vacation from hell," Daniel Cohen, back home safely in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "That's a story I will tell my kids. For now, I don't want anybody to know about it."
From Grosvenor Arch, where the travelers stopped, they should have taken the better-traveled Cottonwood Canyon Road. Instead, they took Four Mile Bench Road, which takes a meandering southeasterly path. Chief Deputy Tracy Glover said the convoy took one wrong turn after another onto a succession of lesser dirt paths that are barely passable in the best of weather. They finally ended so some 25 miles from Grosvenor Arch near Tibbet Canyon.
"They just kept driving and driving and driving," Glover told the AP.
Cohen said the group had no idea it was setting off in the wrong direction.
"A friend with navigation device said we should go that way, and we all went that went," he said. "I had no clue where we were, I can tell you that. But the next day when we saw the airplane, we were jumping."
Glover said a GPS device is no substitute for good judgment or detailed topographical maps.
"People can start down a nice, graded dirt road and it can soon turn into boulders and deep washes, but they continue driving instead of turning around. I don't understand it," Glover told The Salt Lake Tribune. "The shortest way is not always the quickest way."
It took a lot of back-and-forth cell phone calls, but sheriff's deputies were able to find the group Sunday and lead them back out to Cannonville.
It wasn't the first time Staircase visitors have wandered into near oblivion. Dozens have been stranded since the monument was created in 1996, often with the false encouragement of a GPS device, said Bureau of Land Management spokesman Larry Crutchfield.
A group of Belgium tourists had to lick condensation off their minivan's windshield for water after being stranded on Four Mile Bench in May 2007. Riders on all-terrain vehicles stumbled across the group.
In the same country in early March 2003, a South African man living in London and his Quincy, Mass., girlfriend were stranded for six days by a powerful snowstorm.
Rachel Crowley, 27, died four miles after setting out from their buried rental Jeep. A cattle rancher found George Metcalfe, 27, staggering 15 miles away on Four Mile Bench Road. He survived.
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This is scary! It could have been us! We could have ended up in the Lake and the GPS would have told us to turn right!
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I'll have to read this one later. I have to work on new wireless system now. I have put it off most of the day. I saw the title and expected ssomeone to make a smart :sir ken; comment :rofl; :rofl; :rofl;
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Just like John Henry and his hammer I proved the GPS electronics unreliable, good thing I was there or we would still be making U turns... :rofl;
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This is scary! It could have been us! We could have ended up in the Lake and the GPS would have told us to turn right!
You can make a right turn on a lake !
How do you think the ZION piligamists got to Texas . They had GBS and were looking for Colorado. :boxing;
Katonsdad
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You would not believe how lost IHD members can be with two GPS and maps! It "Mandy" told us to turn right, we would all turn right. I guess we just trust each other that much. :rofl;
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Remember the story of the lemurs. All follow the first one off of the cliff. Or is it the lemurs that do that? That would be lemmings that jump over the cliff en masse.
The cartoon says: This interesting.
Well are you coming or not?
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Kitkatz told us it was 5 minutes from El Cortez to the Olive Garden. Our entourage did it in 30 minutes! Now, I will say, we didn't have a GPS, but we will follow each other right off that cliff!!
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My question with these kinds of stories is this...where does common sense come in? If I was told by the GPS to turn towards a cliff while I was in Yosemite I would have said to myself "Self, you don't really want to do that. Driving off that is a cliff that will send you to your certain doom. Just keep going straight for now." And I would have listened to myself.
As someone said on another forum I frequent. Darwin is getting slack!!!
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Note to self.........don't believe everything the nice GPS person tells you...good thing I don't have one. I use Mapquest and it sucks sometimes.
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One thing I've learned with mine is to ask for the quickest route, not the shortest - the shortest will take you cross country down little lanes etc, quickest may be a longer route but on better roads and (touching wood here) mine has never got me lost. I wish I hadn't typed that as I can see it being 'famous last words' as I go off with TomTom never to be seen again :waving;
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Ummm,
Out of all those people, no one decided to bring a map also :urcrazy;
If I was going to drive that far, I would have a back up plan. At least we had TWO GPS units and probably a map in my back seat and some sort of experience driving in Chicago beforehand.
Vegas here we come :rofl;
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Christy had a map. Funny, i am so used to yahoo mapping, I never think of getting one!
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my sister and her husband are working at the Grand Canyon
they work 3 off 4; work 4 off 3
and they get their RV there for free
a couple of kids who graducated from high school went there on a trip
one got to close to the edge and fell and of course, did not survive
another lady commited suicide and they found her four days later
and an infant was killed in a car wreck
last summer they worked some place where there were lots of bears