Dying of Thirst Hurts Like Hell

June 2014 It was a hot day and I was lost in Grand Staircase Escalade National Monument for a whole day, 8 hours of it without water.  This is what I learned about dying of thirst. Note at the time I was pushing 60 so I probably deteriorated faster than most younger people would.

I was between jobs as an IT architect and decided to take a trip to see Devils tower in Wyoming (of Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind fame).  I was stopping at any site which caught my fancy along the way.  Grand Staircase Escalade sounded cool mostly because it had slot canyons and I had always wanted to see some.  So I decided to burn a day checking it out.

I stopped by the ranger station to get information in the morning.  They were helpful but did not give me any warnings that there were no trail markings in the area where I was headed.  I have hiked a great deal over the years but never had I hiked where there were no clear trail markings.  Besides the slot canyons they suggested that I check out an area with some great hoodoos.  I didn’t know what a hoodoo was but it sounded cool so I stopped there first.

After the hoodoo area my next stop was the slot canyon area. To get there I had to drive about 20 miles on washboard dirt roads. It was more like surfing than driving really. I arrived at the slot canyon area parking lot a little before 10 AM well vibrated from the road. Then I grabbed a bottle of water from the case I carried in the car and headed into the main canyon that serves as the entrance to the canyon area and started exploring. There were quite a few people in the area.

It was a warm dry day. My first mistake was not paying enough attention to the location of the entrance canyon’s exit. The second was not noticing the lack of signs. There were no trail or other signs in that area. I assumed it would be like most parks I had visited…nope different animal.

It was a great area with lots of exciting features. I climbed through several slot canyons. My water ran out just before noon but I didn’t think much about it. I had a whole case of water in the car where I assumed I could quickly return whenever I wanted. At one point I passed and greeted some fellow adventurers from England I thought judging by their accent. They saw I was out of water and offered me a swig of theirs which I took but kept it small to be polite.

Around one o’clock is when things started to get weird from my point of view. I started to get thirsty and began to look at my surroundings more carefully. The first thing I noticed that everyone had left. I mean everyone was gone. It felt like they just disappeared but it did make sense since it was getting pretty hot, easily in the 90’s with no clouds.

The next thing I noticed was the lack of signs, particularly exit signs. I also noticed that there was no cell reception which has been true in most national parks I have visited. Seems like that would be an obvious safety feature for the parks to have. I looked around and I could see the parking lot way off in the distance, maybe a mile or mile and a half away. So I thought ‘ok, no problem’ I’m not lost, which in a way I wasn’t. The problem was that there were several slot canyons between me and the parking lot. These canyons are 20 or more feet deep with vertical walls and crisscross the area. I was starting to feel a little worried and was getting very thirsty.

I began to panic and became too active. I would walk along the edge of the canyons looking to see if they were the exit canyon but I couldn’t find the entrance to any of them. As I became more thirsty my mind began to consider just jumping into one. This would have ended in serious injury or death and fortunately part of me still new that. I think those thoughts were when I started to realize that I was fading fast.

The next thing that started was leg cramps. In the past I’d had lots of cramps in my calves but these were in my large thigh mussels. I have seldom in my life felt such pain. The only way to stave them off was to keep my legs perfectly straight all the time. Even a slight bend would start a new wave of cramping. So now I was walking around like C3PO. That is when I realized another problem with thirst, mobility becomes impaired early on. Not something they tell you in the movies.

Eventually I was too hot, cramped and exhausted to continue burning energy like I had been. Fortunately there were some low trees where I could crawl under to get some shade. I started a cycle of resting under one or another of them for longer and longer periods. When mobile I was searching for routes I had not yet tried to find the way out for shorter and shorter active times. In my brain fog I started to realize I was sometimes not really looking at different routes but the same ones over and over.

This was also the time when I started to call for help. I am a very self reliant person and have never called for help since I was a child so you can imagine how scared I was becoming. I would lay under a tree and holler, to no avail. Also hollering with a dry throat is not pleasant.

At one point I tried chewing some of the needles from a tree to get some moisture going but they were dry and bitter and didn’t help. I was also worried that they could make me sick.

The afternoon wore on like this. At one point I considered biting my arm so I could drink my blood. Seriously it became a sort of fantasy. I also urinated into my empty drinking bottle because I had read that you can safely drink urine. It was so thick and gross that I couldn’t do it and didn’t see how it would help much.

Later in the afternoon I was at the point where walking more than a few steps would have me breathing hard and I could feel my heart pounding.

This is gross so you may want to skip this paragraph if your are squeamish. At some point I felt a bowel movement coming on strong. There was no avoiding it. Of course I had no toilet paper or paper of any king. I could not squat because of the cramps. So I hobbled around for awhile and finally found a dead branch that stuck up at about ass height. I pulled down my pants and just kind of leaned back on it with my butt hanging in the air on the other side. After the deed I was so embarrassed and felt demeaned even though there was no one to see. There was nothing to wipe with so I had to sacrifice my underwear. Not sure what I did with it but some poor sole may have come across some disgusting party favors while hiking the next day.

Eventually evening was starting to come on. I had been out there for a little under 9 hours. I was becoming very worried about having to spend the night in the open. I really really did not want that to happen. I love to visit the outdoors but snakes and carnivores are something I only want to chance across while awake.

I knew I was down to my last physical energy and hence my last chance to get out of the park on my own. I sat under one of the trees and really started to study my surroundings more calmly than I had been. There were little piles of rocks around that I assumed people made to mark something significant, at least in some cases. As I studied I started to get a feel for the lay of the land and the positions and directions of the slot canyons.

I was walking along one canyon that seemed larger than the others and started to notice many footprints in the sand at the bottom. I decided to roll the dice and assume that was the way out. It was scary to choose one canyon to bet on because of my physical condition and because some lead in the wrong direction. Many of the canyons also had obstructions, big boulders ect. and I would not be able to climb over them in my condition.

I followed the edge of my chosen canyon and finally came to the spot where it emptied out at ground level. With hope in my heart I started walking/staggering though it. It was shady down there so I thought if it was the wrong one at least it might be a better place to spend the night than up on the surface would be.

As I went on I saw a couple of features that I thought were familiar from my trip in that morning. The canyon was about a mile long and by the time I got to the end I could see that it was the right one. I can’t express how relieved I was!

At the bottom of the cliff leading up to the parking lot I ran into a man and his two young sons heading into the area for an evening hike. It was so great to see other people. They were all wearing camelbacks full of precious water and could see that I was in a bad way and so offered me a drink. The water was pure heaven for my parched mouth but I only took a couple of swallows because I’m proud and have trouble accepting help from others. Anyway it tasted great but about one step beyond them my mouth was completely dry again.

Now all that I faced was the switchback path up to the car park about 100 feet above me. I was such a mess at this point that I would literally take 5 or 6 steps and have to stop to catch my breath and wait for my heart to stop pounding. In this manner I finally made it to the parking lot and the case of water in my car.

As I staggered single mindedly across the lot toward my car I ran into a park ranger. He said they were just getting ready to go search for me. The people from England who had given me a drink in the morning had reported that they thought I might be in trouble. I guess when I didn’t turn up toward evening they decided they better find me. This was an after the fact relief knowing that I wouldn’t have been out there all night even if I wouldn’t have found my own way out. Just for a capper they told me a guy about my age had died out there in the same way a year before.

When I got to my car I immediately drank 8 bottles of water, one after the other. The water was hot from sitting in the car all day and probably the best I have ever tasted. After a half hour or so the cramps eased off enough that I could carefully drive. I drove the 20 miles back to the road and another 5 or so to the town I was staying in. I stopped and bought 2 huge bottles of Gatorade and some gas station food and took it all back to my hotel.

I fell asleep almost immediately, just happy to be alive. Every few minutes a cramp would hit and I would have to get out of bed and work it out. Around one in the morning the cramps finally ceased.

Since I survived, I am kind of glad for the experience. I learned a lot about what dehydration and heat exhaustion can do to a person and how fast it can happen. I also gained a new respect for being careful when trails are not marked and for traveling alone, which I still do most of the time.

There were no obvious long term health effects. I do think something came loose in my chest because there was kind of a tick sometimes when I breathed but my doctor didn’t think it was something to worry about. Also for about a year afterward, I would be going along and suddenly feel like my plug had been pulled. Almost like I was headed toward passing out but it would pass and I never actually went unconscious. All in all I feel very lucky to this day and am happy to have more years to explore the world and be with my family.

The next day I stopped in Salt Lake city and bought a camel back and two half gallon jugs of water which I always kept in the car from then on.