Last month two men and their teenage sons tackled one of the world’s most unforgiving summertime hikes: the Grand Canyon’s parched and searing Royal Arch Loop. Along with bedrolls and freeze-dried food, the inexperienced backpackers carried a personal locator beacon — just in case.
In the span of three days, the group pushed the panic button three times, mobilizing helicopters for dangerous, lifesaving rescues inside the steep canyon walls.
What was that emergency? The water they had found to quench their thirst “tasted salty.”
Oh God, please tell me they were bitch slapped. I beg of you...
No such luck.
If they had not been toting the device that works like Onstar for hikers, “we would have never attempted this hike,” one of them said after the third rescue crew forced them to board their chopper. It’s a growing problem facing the men and women who risk their lives when they believe others are in danger of losing theirs. [emphasis added]
Why are people, who obviously have an inflated self-regard and a lack of survival skill one would normally associate with Thurston Howell III, doing wilderness hiking in the first place? Is the problem really that they are "yuppies"? Well, the article gives us a different interpretation although it may not realize it.
Rescue officials are deciding whether to start keeping statistics on the problem, but the incidents have become so frequent that the head of California’s Search and Rescue operation has a name for the devices: Yuppie 911.
“Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken,” says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. “With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn’t have been in in the first place.” [emphasis added]
Hmmm...risky behavior being encouraged by the knowledge the government will bail your ass out when things go ass-over-tea-kettle. Where have we seen that before? Here is the moral hazard being transported to our National Parks in all its glory, and all of us are paying for the extraction of these nitwits who can't find Evian on the trail, or those morons who, every damn year, go climbing mountains as bad weather is closing in. The attitude obviously is something along the lines of "I'll do what I wan't. Daddy big government will take care of me."
I'm sorry but we ought to stop this completely, by not saving their sorry asses. The advantages (for us non-nitwits) would be numerous:
1) We could dramatically lower the number of nitwits in the country as they succumb to exposure as a direct result of their own stupidity;
2) We would save all the money spent trying to save these morons, which could be used for real conservation purposes;
3) We wouldn't have to worry about responders being killed in rescue attempts;
4) As the nitwits die off or are finally scared off from such adventures, those people who enjoy the outdoors (and can take care of themselves as they know what they are doing) can revel in the solitude of their pursuits for a change;
5) Those same people would also benefit financially as I'd let them freely plunder any nitwit corpses they find out in the wild.
Looks like a win-win solution to me.
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