Stupid People

[WalksWithBlackflies]

Grumpy -

The operative words from your post are "because I just didn’t know any better at the time."

I agree that everyone makes mistakes due to inexperience, ignorance, etc. But when 50-year old men place a rock in a ski trail at the bottom of hill... well, stupid is as stupid does.

 

[dave.m]

There was this one guy who hiked into Taft Lodge on Mt. Mansfield in January with a cotton turtleneck. Of course, it got soaked with sweat and turned into a frozen 2x4 before dinner was cooked.

Oh wait... that was ME.

Man, I've been stupid so many times, it's a wonder I'm alive and haven't killed anybody.

 

[stevec]

could be a book "fun trail stuff"

Reading the posts so far has been a treat. Maybe someone can create a book of this stuff so I can take it with me on the trail ?

 

[CaNoE_MaN]

I have been lurking here for a while I do not mean to sound rude but how is this an on topic post for questions specific to the North East? Just curious because I have seen numerous post deleted that were as off topic as this. Darren why can this thread stay and others are deleted?

 

[MadRiver]

During my first trip up Washington in 1983 I was dressed in my finest tennis attire when the weather took a turn for the worst. I arrived on the summit cold, wet, and without any money with which to purchase nourishment. I wondered around the summit in a daze while mumbling, ”Mommy” hoping some generous benefactor would take pity on me and buy me a cup of coffee. After losing all hope that I would survive this ordeal, my then fiancée emerged from the haze and lead me by the hand to the awaiting train. I sat quietly blowing spit bubbles while holding her hand as we descended the mountain.

 

[sli74]

Oh MadRiver, that story had me almost peeing my pants

sli74

 

[MadRiver]

Thanks Seema. As you know, I no longer hike in tennis whites.

 

[MonadnockVol]

Reviving this thread

I just referenced this thread in another post, (reckless conduct) but I had so much fun re-reading the entries that I decided to update it. Here are some additions:

When I was in high school I was standing in Tuckerman's Ravine at the base of the headwall when I man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me the way to the summit. I looked to see that he was in street clothes and had a little girl (8? 9?) with him who was dressed in (and I swear this is true) a party dress and black patent leather shoes. I just pointed at the trail down and told them it was the quickest way to the summit.

Ed Stark, a ranger at Mt. Monadnock, told me that when he's standing at 3/4 ledge on the White Dot trail, he is frequently asked if it is the summit, even though the summit is clearly visible behind him.

Cairns are a special target. I once stopped a group of boy on Monadnock from disassembling a cairn to get rocks to throw over a cliff.

Another time I stopped a couple from taking a cairn apart "because they wanted to see what was stored inside."

 

[skiguy]

While waiting to take the Mount Washington Tour Boat from Weir's Beach out on to Lake Winnie the couple in line behind me asked how long it took to get to the Summit! ......

 

[dug]

While waiting to take the Mount Washington Tour Boat from Weir's Beach out on to Lake Winnie the couple in line behind me asked how long it took to get to the Summit! ......

And, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!!!

 

[woodstrider]

Interesting thread. We all have our stories to tell...too many sometimes to be able to pull out just a few, but...

Yeah- Yellowstone..People are just Crazy Stupid there. Everytime that I've been there, the sight of cars pulled over willy-nilly on the side of the road has been like an animal sighting alert, so I pull over, too....wait, I guess that makes me pretty stupid too! Of course, I did get to see the Agate Creek wolf pack that way.
But I am not as stupid as to walk up to a Bull Elk in September (or anytime, though I hear that they are rather prickly just around rut time) just to snap off a few pix, as I saw one gent do. For that one I did stop to see if there would be any Elk on man violence , but unfortunately nothing happened . I guess that guy got to live and pass on his genius genes- so much for Darwin.

This next story is a doozy- and if you've heard it already my apologies...once I was on a Backpack and agreed to share my large tent with a "beginner" who did not have alot of equipment.
The first night, as we were setting down to sleep, my tentmate pulls out a large hunting knife (OK, it was an average sized folding knife, but dosen't "large hunting knife", or better yet, a Bowie Knife, sound so much more dramatic?) and lays it on the floor between our sleeping bags. A little alarmed, I asked what was up with the knife. I was told that it was for protection, from bears and other sundry wild and murderous animals.
I picked up the knife and folded it up and handed it back to this person and said that the only animal that you might need protection would be from an angry tent owner (that would be me) with a hole in their tent or body.
Oh no...I think that this is me, again . Being stupid, again . Did I mention that I enjoy solo trips?

But seriously, all joking aside (...well, most joking aside), Once I was backpacking and a man hiking solo stopped and asked me a pretty stupid question- I thought he was joshing me, so I gave him a curt answer and moved on. Later it worried me that maybe the guy was out of it and I should have engaged him in conversation to evaluate his need for help.

Usually, though, I have quite a bit of patience for the hiker that I meet on the trail that asks a "stupid question", after all, I was once a novice and asked some pretty dumb things and I have even been accused of stupididty that I will own.
For stupid behavior I don't know what to say...I have seen things done by people that I would not do, and I am sure that I have done things that others would not do.
I just know that with any endeavor there is a learning curve that we all must go through...no speeding it up. Of course, if you've got experience, then there is no excuse and I have read of and been told of some real scary behavior and by really experience people.
Case in point... some years ago in an issue of the 46er magazine, a number of people submitted stories of past "adventures" that they'd had in the Adirondacks. One story, in a nut shell went something like this....

As a very experienced 46er, I took two novices on a winter ascent of Blake and Colvin. We got to the summit of Colvin and ran out of daylight, so I thought that it would be better to bushwhack in the dark back down to the Ausable Road. We got hung up on the cliffs that surrounds Lower Ausable Lake, but luckily we were able to find a rocky niche where we spent the night huddled before a fire (no equipment, of course, this was a day hike). We all survived, Cool!

Did I mention that I hike solo?

The guy who discovered the South Pole had some very interesting things to say about "adventures" . He tried to avoid them at all costs.

 

[cbcbd]

While waiting to take the Mount Washington Tour Boat from Weir's Beach out on to Lake Winnie the couple in line behind me asked how long it took to get to the Summit! ......

I heard it takes longer going up because you are fighting the current upstream... but the way down is like a log floom ride.

 

[DougPaul]

Yeah- Yellowstone..People are just Crazy Stupid there.

One guy put honey on his kid's face so he could take a picture of a bear cub licking it off...

The guy who discovered the South Pole had some very interesting things to say about "adventures" . He tried to avoid them at all costs.

Adventures are often the result of something going vary wrong.

A well known quote:
The superb pilot is best defined as the pilot who uses
his superb decisions to avoid situations in which
he has to use his superb skills. --Dick Rutan

Of course, there is the minor problem of how one learns those superb skills.

Doug

 

[Solitary]

One guy put honey on his kid's face so he could take a picture of a bear cub licking it off...
Doug

I heard that one too, but Snopes.com lists it as an urban legend:

Kodiak Moment

Maybe it should be called a "sylvian legend" ...

 

[Solitary]

True???

The following collection of "stupid hiker tricks" has been floating around the internet for some time. I don't know if it is true or not. It is listed as having been published in the San Francisco Examiner. I searched the Examiner site and couldn't pull up this article, but I don't know how far back their archives go. I did find the author, however, who is indeed a well-known Bay Area outdoors writer. So for what it's worth:

WOODSY WHACKOS
Park Visitors Get A Little Squirrelly In Great Outdoors

BY TOM STIENSTRA, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
Reprinted in Salt Lake Tribune, Monday, July 8, 1996

A female vacationer, disturbed and in tears, entered the visitor
center for California's Redwood National Park, then searched out a
ranger.

Choked by sobs, she explained she had seen "dozens of Irish setters
lying along the highway," apparently dead or injured, and nobody
was doing anything to help them.

The rangers responded by immediately driving off and surveying the
highway, then returned and explained to the woman that the Irish
setters "were pieces of redwood bark that had fallen off logging
trucks."

At the Grand Canyon, after a one-hour interpretive group hike, the
ranger asked the group if there were any questions. "Is this
man-made?" came one.

At Yosemite National Park, a vacationer walked into the information
station in the valley, sought out a ranger, then asked, "What
happened to the other half of Half Dome?" Another asked, "Do you
turn the waterfalls off at night?"

Yes, people say and do the darnedest things, especially on their
summer vacations to national parks. Many of the accounts were
compiled on the Internet by Steven Willoughby, who runs a humor net
page, and Debra Shore, a contributor to Outside magazine.

Half Dome Half-Wits: Many of the zaniest stories are from Yosemite,
which gets 4 million visitors each year. Last summer, a group of
horrified European tourists entered the Wawona Ranger Station and
said their car had been "blown up by terrorists" and that "powder
residue from the explosive" was all over the back seat.

Inspecting rangers found that the "powder residue from the
explosive" was actually flour from a box of pancake mix, and that
bear paw prints were everywhere amid the powder.

A woman from the San Francisco Bay Area was hiking to the top of El
Capitan on Yosemite's popular North Rim Trail, a seven-mile hike,
when she became lost, saw clouds forming, and called 911 on her
cellular phone and asked to be rescued. A helicopter rescue team
found her. When the helicopter lifted off with her -- and she saw
how close she was to the top -- she asked the crew to land and let
her back out. When the crew declined, she threatened to sue for
kidnapping.

Another woman hiker in Yosemite also called 911 with her cellular
phone, this time from the top of Half Dome.

"Well, I'm at the top and I'm really tired," she told the 911
dispatcher.

"Do you feel sick?" she was asked.

"No, I'm just really tired and I want my friends to drive to the
base and pick me up."

"You'll have to hike back down the trail for that," she was told by
the dispatcher."

"But you don't understand. I'm really tired."

Then, according to a ranger, "her phone battery luckily died."

An Unbearable Way to Wake Up: A backpacker was disappointed that he
never saw any bears, because he kept sleeping right through their
covert nightly visits. So this time, after rigging a bear-proof
food bag to hang from a tree limb, he put his sleeping bag directly
under it, figuring he would wake up for sure when the bears came
prowling. Nope. The camper went into deep sleep, that is, until
he woke up with a shock -- when a bear tried to reach for the
hanging food bag, and stepped right on his chest.

Here's a selection of some of the craziest things ever said and
done at national parks, provided by Shore:

-- Yellowstone National Park: Does Old Faithful erupt at night?
How do you turn it on? When does the guy who turns it on get to
sleep? We had no trouble finding the park entrance, but where are
the exits?

-- Mesa Verde National Park: Why did they build the ruins so close
to the road? Why did the Indians decide to live in Colorado?

-- Denali National Park: What time do you feed the bears? Where
does Bigfoot live? How often do you mow the tundra? What time do
they let the animals out in the park?

 

[Kevin Judy and Emma]

Goats/Lions

While volunteering at the Mount Washington Observatory an intern told me this story:

Nin, (the former summit cat) had escaped the confines of the Sherman Adams Building and was out for a supervised walk around the summit. An elderly woman peered over the railing of the building's deck and saw Nin below on the rocks.

"Is that a mountain goat?!" she gasped at the intern beside her.

"No, it's a mountain lion," the intern teased.

The woman gasped again, "I guess I need new glasses," she said.

KDT

 

[DougPaul]

One guy put honey on his kid's face so he could take a picture of a bear cub licking it off...

I believe I heard it while in Yellowstone, possibly from a ranger, most likely in the 1960s.

I heard that one too, but Snopes.com lists it as an urban legend:

Kodiak Moment

I recall nothing about an injury to the child.


Here is a story that snopes cannot dispute because I saw it myself. We (my family) watched a guy back a bear cub up against a tree while trying to take its picture. Mama was panhandling a short distance away and came running. The guy backed off and returned to his car. (This was again back in the ~1960s.)

Doug

 

[grouseking]

Examples of ignorance, and just plain stupidity

Oh man, these are great. More ignorance than anything else, but it makes for the best stories.

Now for some of my own:

1) At Champney Falls trailhead, getting ready for my first hike ever... people got out of a car, and one person said, "is this the top?" I was 7 at the time, and couldn't believe what I just heard. To this day, I wonder if I was daydreaming.

2)The countless folks on the summit of Washington, who either drive up, or took the cog up, asking me why I could ever hike up when there is a perfectly good road to drive.

3)The guy who asked me if I was going to summit Washington, while on the Pemi East Side Trail. I said yes.

4.) A lady on Monadnock asked me if we could see New York City from the summit. I said no, but LA is in clear view.

5.) Drunk people at Sawyer Pond shelter...this is prob the dumbest thing I have seen. Oct 2005, two families were there, during the flooding we had that year. Mattl and I were out to check the water levels and check out the pond, and one of the guys told us that he got so drunk the previous day that he got lost and couldn't find his way back to the shelter. The two wives just kind of sat there, drinking Wild Turkey with the husbands, while the kids were bundled up in the back, playing gameboy. When Matt and I returned to the trailhead, the stream levels were double what they had been when we came in. The little bridge that we crossed looked like it was ready to float away. I wonder if they made it out ok...I felt bad for the kids. But man....that whole situation just made me shake my head. It was cold, raining, 40-45 degrees, flooding, and they were out camping for the weekend.

6) Oh and how can I forget...maybe this was dumber. The morons who were skiing down the hiking trail of Mt Tecumseh, when you can see the darn ski trail thru the trees. I was nearly hit several times. One person hit a tree, and I almost wanted to say, "serves you right." I was ok with it when it was just kids coming down...I mean it made me mad, but I figured they didn't know any better. But then when their parents followed suit behind them, I almost lost it. Share the trails? Fine. But don't be stupid about things. That still gets to me.

On the contrary I do dumb things all the time. Like just last week...I hiked 12 miles in bad sneakers. My thought..."well 4 of the 12 miles are on pavement, and I don't want my feet to be screaming at me during the walk back." Instead, my arches have been screaming at me this entire week. Duh... Lesson learned, and will prob be making a trip to the doctors at some point soon.

Many more, just cant think of them right off the bat.

grouseking

 

[Whiteman]

More on Yellowstone

I also heard the story about the kid with honey put on his/her face, back in 1975. The story was told to us by an off-duty ranger, who was kind enough to pick up a couple of straggley hitch-hiking hippies and give us a tour on his day off. He also had the tale of the fellow who pulled the tail of the bison to get it to stand up for a picture (yep, another bad idea).

He had a bunch of other stories along the same lines, but these were the most dramatic.

 

[ctsparrow]

I'm going to pick on myself on this one. B. H. (Before hiking), i was riding the cog on M.W. Above treeline I noticed rocks piled up here and there....I wondered aloud to my now husband....are dead people buried under those?

While i didn't quite get why they were there, as we approached the top, i realized there were far too many to be grave markers!!!

ctsparrow