This article was originally featured on Undark.
On May 5, 2023, a 19-year-old hiker named Matthew Read headed out on a roughly 12-mile trek in an underpopulated part of Glacier National Park in Montana. Read, a chemical engineering student, had stopped in Glacier while driving home to Michigan, and the pine-surrounded path he embarked on was known for its big views of the Livingston Range, a set of jagged peaks to the east.
He would get a longer look at them than he anticipated.
By Sunday, two days later, the young hiker had yet to return. That afternoon, national park rangers started a ground search; that night, a helicopter team scanned from above. The rangers, though, were thwarted by a lack of clues, the chopper by meteorology: Clouds hung low, fog obscured the view.
That Monday, the search team grew to 30 people, and included the U.S. Border Patrol and Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, along with search dogs. It would expand to the North Valley and Flathead search and rescue, or SAR, teams.
In situations like this, a subfield of science can help those SAR teams know where to start—and how a college kid lost in big bear country might behave. It’s called, appropriately, lost person behavior.
The study expanded in the 2000s, with a researcher named Robert Koester. In 2008, Koester compiled, analyzed, and published data on how different types of people behave when wandering the wilderness—and how to find them. His work has become foundational to the field of lost person behavior, and a cornerstone of how SAR teams plan missions to find people who have wandered off the beaten path.
While it’s hard to come by solid numbers because there is no mandatory centralized place where SAR teams must file reports, in 2021, nearly 3,400 people needed help getting out of the wilderness in U.S. national parks alone (a minority of the land where people need rescue).
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