Always File A Flight Plan
My dad, a pilot for 30 years, would insist that I leave an itinerary of where I was going and when I was expected back. During high school, I assumed this was motivated by the same pesky intrusiveness and control that denied me free rein in many other aspects of my life. I’m sure there was some of that. But later, I noticed the same request/requirement, even when he couldn’t control or monitor what I was doing — e.g., during a summer when I was in Europe.
“What are your checkpoints?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, as you move around Europe, you’ll stop in certain cities on certain dates, right?” he prompted. “Well, give me that list.”
“Why do you need that?”
“So I know where to start looking if you don’t show up.”
I knew he meant it, because when he and Mom took a trip, he often sent or gave me his planned itinerary with a note — “here’s our flight plan.”
I read a story in today’s Merc about a woman who slipped off a trail in the Santa Cruz mountains into a ravine she couldn’t climb out of. She stayed there 6 days until some volunteers found her. The sheriff’s department refused to search because “there was no starting point, like a car parked at a trailhead.”
She should have filed a flight plan with someone.
Collins left her home on Hihn Street Nov. 28 for what she thought would be a 2 ½ hour hike in Fall Creek. While on an unmarked “uphill, technical” trail near Lost Camp that she had not often traversed, she lost her footing.
“I just slipped into a ravine that had water. I tried to pull myself up but I was exhausting myself,” Collins said.
Thick branches covered a slippery forest floor with a stream close by, she said. An active hiker and biker, she tried to pull herself up.
…
“I had to get back up the trail but I couldn’t get back up,” Collins said. “I didn’t have the upper body strength.”
Collins said she tried several times to get out after her afternoon fall, but as darkness approached in the canopied forest about 3:30 p.m., she decided she was wasting energy and would wait for help.