Why I'm Writing This
I'm not a survival expert. I'm not a search-and-rescue veteran. I'm a regular hiker who's been going into the backcountry for years and has made mistakes that could have killed me. Not "could have been inconvenient" or "could have ruined my trip" — could have actually ended my life. I got away with every one of them through some combination of luck, fitness, and the help of more experienced people who happened to be nearby.
I'm writing these down because the outdoor community has a weird relationship with failure. We share summit photos and gear reviews, but we rarely talk honestly about the times we screwed up. That silence makes it easy for newer hikers to think that bad outcomes only happen to careless people, and that if you're "careful enough," you're safe. That's not how the mountains work. The mountains don't care how careful you are. They care about the decisions you make, and every one of these mistakes was a decision I made with incomplete information, overconfidence, or plain ignorance.
1. I Crossed a Flooded Creek Because I Didn't Want to Turn Around
June in the North Cascades. Early season, heavy snowmelt. I was 8 miles into a 14-mile day when I reached a creek crossing that was normally ankle-deep. It was thigh-deep and moving fast — brown, silty water carrying sticks and debris. I could see the trail continuing on the other side, 30 feet away.
The smart move was obvious: turn around. I had 6 hours of daylight, I knew the trail behind me, and going back meant nothing worse than a longer day than planned. Instead, I unbuckled my sternum strap and hipbelt (correct — so I could ditch the pack if I went down), grabbed a trekking pole in each hand, and stepped in.
The water hit me at mid-thigh with a force I didn't expect. My downstream foot slid on a slippery rock and for one sickening moment I was falling sideways into the current. I caught myself with my trekking pole — which bent under the load but held — and somehow scrambled to the other side, soaked and shaking.
Here's what I didn't know then: moving water exerts 6 times more force per square foot than you'd intuitively expect. Knee-deep water flowing at 6 mph exerts about 66 pounds of force per leg. Thigh-deep water at the same speed? Over 200 pounds. My legs weigh about 35 pounds each. I was one slippery rock away from being pulled downstream into a log jam I hadn't even scouted.
What I learned: If a creek crossing feels sketchy, it is sketchy. The trail will be there tomorrow. Your life won't respawn. Now I turn around without hesitation if a crossing exceeds knee-deep or if I can't see the bottom clearly. The ego cost of hiking back is nothing compared to the real cost of getting swept away.
2. I Got Lost Because I Trusted the Trail
Glacier Peak Wilderness. An unmaintained trail that was well-defined for the first 5 miles and then gradually faded into nothing as I climbed through dense forest. I kept following what I thought were trail markers — worn spots on trees, gaps in brush — but I was actually following game trails. By the time I admitted I was lost, I was 2 miles off-route in old-growth forest with no landmarks, fading daylight, and a phone that had died an hour earlier.
I didn't have a paper map. I didn't have a compass. My entire navigation plan was a phone app, and when the phone died, my navigation plan died with it. I spent 45 minutes of increasing panic before I stumbled onto a creek, followed it downhill for an hour, and eventually intersected a maintained trail that I recognized. I was out of the woods by dark. Barely.
What I learned: Phones die. Always carry a paper map and compass, and know how to use them. I also started carrying a Nitecore NB10000 battery bank and keeping my phone in airplane mode with GPS only — which extends battery life dramatically. But the paper map is the real insurance. It doesn't need batteries, doesn't crack when dropped, and doesn't care about the temperature.
3. I Kept Hiking in a Lightning Storm Because the Summit Was Close
Mount Ellinor, late July. I was 30 minutes from the summit when I heard the first rumble of thunder. The sky to the southwest was dark, but directly overhead it was still blue. I told myself the storm was moving away. I kept climbing.
Twenty minutes later, I was on the exposed summit ridge when the air started buzzing. My trekking poles hummed. The hair on my arms stood up. I felt a tingling sensation on my scalp. I was standing on the highest point in the area, holding two metal poles, surrounded by nothing taller than me, and the air was literally electrified.
I dropped the poles, crouched down on my pack (insulation from ground current), and the storm passed over in about 15 minutes. Lightning struck the ridge about a quarter mile away — close enough that the thunder was simultaneous with the flash, close enough that I felt the concussion in my chest.
What I learned: Lightning kills about 20 people per year in the US, and it injures hundreds more. When you hear thunder, you're already in the danger zone — sound travels about 1 mile per 5 seconds, so if the gap between flash and thunder is under 30 seconds, the strike was within 6 miles. If your hair stands up or metal objects hum, a strike is imminent. Get below treeline, avoid ridgelines and summits, crouch on insulating material, and make yourself small. No summit is worth this. None.
4. I Didn't Bring Enough Water and Got Heat Exhaustion
I covered this briefly in my day hiking essentials piece, but it's worth telling the full story. Maple Pass Loop, August. Seven miles, 2,000 feet of gain, entirely above treeline with no shade and no water sources on the loop itself. I brought one 16-oz water bottle because "it's only 7 miles."
By mile 4, I was out of water. By mile 5, I had a splitting headache. By mile 6, I was dizzy, nauseous, and my skin had stopped sweating — which is a bad sign, because it means your body has run out of water to cool itself with. My heart rate was elevated, my thinking was fuzzy, and I sat down on the trail twice because my legs felt unstable.
What I was experiencing was heat exhaustion — one step short of heat stroke, which can kill you. At the trailhead, a family gave me a liter of water and I sat in their shade for 20 minutes before I felt stable enough to drive home.
What I learned: Carry minimum 1 liter per 3 miles in warm weather, more if the route is exposed or steep. Pre-hydrate before the hike — drink 16-20 oz of water in the hour before you start. And carry electrolytes, not just water. Plain water without sodium can actually worsen dehydration by diluting your blood electrolytes. I now keep LMNT electrolyte packets in my day pack year-round.
5. I Descended a Snow Slope Without an Ice Axe
Early July on the PCT, crossing a steep snowfield on the north side of Forester Pass at 13,200 feet. I didn't carry an ice axe because "it's July." The snowfield was hard-packed from overnight refreezing and tilted at about 35 degrees. Below me was 500 feet of snow ending in a talus field of car-sized boulders.
I started down using my trekking poles for balance, stepping carefully in other hikers' footprints. Halfway across, my right foot punched through the crust and I slid. My trekking poles were useless — they skittered across the surface without digging in. I accelerated. The talus field grew larger in my vision. I rolled onto my stomach and tried to self-arrest with my forearms and knees, which tore up my clothes but slowed me enough that I stopped about 200 feet above the rocks.
I sat there for five minutes, breathing hard, staring at the boulders below, doing the math on what would have happened if I hadn't stopped. A more experienced hiker traversing above me shouted down: "You okay? Where's your axe?" I didn't have one. He shook his head and kept moving.
What I learned: Carry an ice axe and know how to self-arrest if your route crosses snow above a consequential runout zone. This applies even in summer — north-facing slopes above 10,000 feet in the Sierra hold snow well into August. A Black Diamond Raven (14 oz for the 60cm) is cheap insurance. Practice self-arrest on a gentle slope before you need to do it for real on a steep one.
6. I Pushed Through Early Hypothermia Symptoms Instead of Stopping
October in the Olympics. A long day of rain and wind, temperatures in the upper 30s. I was wet from rain that had overwhelmed my jacket hours earlier, and I'd skipped lunch to keep moving because I wanted to reach camp before dark. By mid-afternoon, I noticed my fingers were clumsy on my pack buckles. I was stumbling on roots I would normally step over easily. My thinking felt slow, like I was making decisions through fog.
These are textbook signs of mild hypothermia: loss of fine motor control, impaired coordination, degraded judgment. And the cruelest symptom of hypothermia is that it impairs the judgment you need to recognize that you have hypothermia. I remember thinking "I'm fine, I just need to keep moving and I'll warm up." This is wrong. Exercise generates heat, but in wet, windy conditions, the heat loss from convection and evaporation can exceed heat production from exercise, especially when you're already depleted and underfueled.
A group of three hikers coming the other direction stopped me. One of them was a nurse. She took one look at me — shivering, stumbling, slurring slightly — and told me to stop. They helped me set up my tent behind a windbreak, got me out of my wet clothes, into my dry sleeping bag, and fed me hot soup from their thermos. Within an hour, my thinking cleared and my coordination returned. Without their intervention, I would have kept hiking until I fell or until my core temperature dropped low enough to cause cardiac arrhythmia.
What I learned: Eat before you're hungry, drink before you're thirsty, and layer up before you're cold. Prevention is everything with hypothermia because once it starts, your compromised brain tells you everything is fine. If you're shivering and can't stop, it's not a suggestion — it's an alarm. Stop, get out of the wind, change into dry clothes, eat calorie-dense food, get warm. The miles can wait.
7. I Hiked Solo Without Telling Anyone Where I Was Going
This one didn't result in a dramatic near-death moment. But it easily could have. For years, I hiked solo without leaving a trip plan with anyone. No note on the fridge. No text to a friend. No check-in schedule. If I'd fallen, gotten lost, or been injured on any of those trips, nobody would have known where to start looking. Search-and-rescue operations depend on knowing where to search — without a last-known location and an expected route, they're searching thousands of square miles of wilderness instead of a 5-mile corridor.
I changed this habit after reading about a hiker who broke his leg on a scramble in the North Cascades and crawled for two days before being found by chance. Two days of dragging a broken femur over rocks, in the rain, because nobody knew he was out there.
What I do now: I text my wife my trailhead, my route, and my expected return time before every trip. If I'm overdue by 2 hours and can't be reached, she calls the ranger station. I also carry a Garmin inReach Mini 2 on solo trips, which lets me send GPS-tagged check-in messages and trigger an SOS with my exact coordinates if I'm incapacitated. The inReach subscription costs $15/month. The cheapest insurance I carry.
The Common Thread
Looking back at these seven mistakes, they share a pattern: I knew better. In every case, a calmer, less ego-driven version of me would have made the safe choice — turned around at the creek, brought a map, descended before the storm, carried enough water. The knowledge was there. What failed was judgment, and judgment fails most often when you're tired, hungry, cold, committed to a goal, or too proud to retreat.
The mountains test your decision-making, not your fitness. Being strong enough to push through a bad situation doesn't make it a good decision — it just means you got lucky. And luck, as any SAR volunteer will tell you, is not a strategy.
