Trail Safe: Averting Threatening Human Behavior in the Outdoors by Michael Bane

Ah, the backcountry. The woods, the forest, the hills, the mountains, the pristine air — all the elements of nature converge to create our concept of the outdoors. We have extracted joy from the outdoors throughout history, and its endless beauty has inspired music, literature, philosophy, and poetry in every era. Despite humanity's historical love of the outdoors, the backcountry has another side to it, a menacing side. I had occasion not too long ago to engage in some Recreation on the Middle Ages. During my studies, I was struck by the way in which our medieval ancestors viewed the dark woods. Overwhelmingly, the places we think of today as the backcountry were viewed as haunts of evil, home to all manner of man — eating beasts (real and imagined), as well as to men who were themselves little better than beasts. A walk in the woods inspired fear, a dread that death — or perhaps something worse — waited just around the next tree. Think about this medieval nursery rhyme:

"Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf,

The big, bad wolf,

The big, bad wolf?"

As we begin a new millennium, I sense a little of that medieval fear creeping back into the dark woods. This time, the fear is generated not by the big, bad wolf or by other assorted creatures of nightmare or legend. Instead, it originates from the creatures that populate our new nightmares and latest urban legends: our fellow human beings who choose us as prey. It is indeed an irony that, for those of us who fled urban America for the safe and peaceful solitude of trails, back roads, and wild places, we wound up bringing along with us the very things we fled.

I believe, however, that the most fearsome things we now bring with us to the wild places are not our predators themselves, but the fear of the predators, the fear of the unknown. That thought was brought home to me after the 1999 murders of three women near California's Yosemite National Park. Following the murders, the media focused heavily on stories about the rise of crime in the backcountry. Some stories were true and informative, while others, though true, left out some facts. For example, though the murdered women were kidnapped just outside a national park, they were kidnapped from their hotel room, not from a campsite. Such details lead to misconceptions by the public about what is actually occurring and what they should be prepared for.

Is the number of crimes in the backcountry on the increase?

	How Safe Are You? Do you stay alert for potential human threats in the backcountry? Do you know how to deal with dangerous situations? Tell us what you do.

But is there a crime wave going on in the backcountry?

Absolutely not. As an illustration, take the Appalachian Trail along the eastern spine of America. Three to four million hikers per year walk portions of the Trail, yet just nine murders have occurred in 22 years. That's about a week's worth of murders in any large urban area. The aforementioned murders of the women (and of a subsequently discovered fourth victim) near Yosemite made national headlines precisely because they happened near a famous national park. However, they actually were not backcountry crimes.

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About the Author: In more than 20 years of professional journalism, Michael Bane's trips and stories have been chronicled in such magazines as Men's Journal, Men's Fitness, National Geographic Adventure, and Esquire. As a speaker, Bane has addressed audiences in the United States and Canada on topics of risk and risk management, as well as functioning in chaos systems. The author of Over the Edge: A Regular Guy's Odyssey In Extreme Sports (Wilderness Press, January 2000), Bane now applies his concepts of intuition, awareness, and fear to the great outdoors in Trail Safe. He is presently training for the Markleeville, CA,"Death Ride," a 122-mile, 16,000-foot-elevation-gain bicycle ride.

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