I believe survival skills are important. However, experience teaches me that it won't happen Unless the person has a motivation to put effort in, and a good ninety percent of backpacker just don't.
That's an interesting observation. Is this your experience because of the classes you lead or your SAR work (or both)?
Most of the backpackers I run into here are fairly well skilled and prepared. We don't have many SAR incidents here that I know of, at least not for backpackers. I could see how that might not be the case out West. I don't know about the East though, I suppose the AT gets their share like that.
I don't think there's anything special about Ozarker's backpacking, it's just not a "trendy" thing to do here, so most that do backpack here are involved in outdoor recreation and familiar with outdoor skills, and not many tourists actually come here to backpack like they do out West. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most those here with little experience and skill head out West to backpack (so you get to deal with them
).
People from all over the world head to California to backpack. People from all over California show up on our trails locally - I talked to a number of folks last weekend who drove more than 200 miles from San Francisco to backpack five miles to a lake off Kaiser Pass. I also talked to some hunters and randomly met four members of my 2,000 member hiking group. I was merely rambling out overnight on a whim myself.
You can bet that I have gotten really really tired of explaining to people what the 10 essentials are and why we look for more day hikers than we do backpackers, and why we end up looking for "experienced" backpackers quite a bit more than one would expect. It is easy to make the same mistakes over and over without serious consequence. People can get wet or blistered or delayed here, even stay out overnight unprepared, and the Sierra Nevada can forgive until next time.
However, we do, every great once in a while, have to identify bones we find while on searches for other people. People do not always tell anyone where they are going, so putting together such puzzles is in the realm of genetic testing these days.
I'd guess that it's one in five hundred or so that will really get stuck out there (or lost) and need rescue. We have a lot of search callouts, two or three per month for hikers from early spring through fall - this is still remarkably few given we are often called for mutual aid searches in three of the most tourist-ridden parks in the national park system.
Still not enough that your average businessman who goes backpacking on a lark will say, hey - I really need to know how to build a fire before I go. Most of them say "eh, I've got matches" and figure it's that simple, and since you are not able to whip out a credential or diploma that says you know more than they do, "I know what I'm doing." They always do until they don't.
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