So what if someone knows I drank filtered urine to stay alive? They probably wouldn't mess with me after.
It amazes me that Yosemite has so many rescues. Last year, I talked to the local SAR in early August and they hadn't had a rescue all year.
Perhaps a sanitized book of rescues in the gift shop at Yosemite would prevent some of these rescues. It could earn SAR some extra money, too.
There is a nagging concern I have for myself. Since I've never had a bad situation in the wilderness and have never run across someone who has, maybe I'm underestimating the dangers. A book of local rescues could dispel that and at least make me more alert. As you say, it will probably never happen, so I read news accounts every so often.
I doubt it would help. It's like survival skills training - the people who need it the most won't be the ones really motivated to seek it out.
We have a few "repeat offenders" locally who never learn from their own experience. We go looking for them anyway. A little annoying, but not everyone is as functional as everyone else...
On the other end of the spectrum we have people like the fellow who signed up for my backpacking class - he did not want to even go out there without someone who "knew what they were doing" and so paid for himself and his teenagers to attend a class. They learned a lot and had fun, and it was evidently a positive experience - he intends to sign up for the hiking group in spring and continue to learn. He'll be one not likely to be a search subject.
If people paid attention to the safety classes we (SAR) teach at REI, to the signs we post on all our trailheads in our area, to the basics of hiking posted a million places on the internet - it would reduce the number of incidents. And I think it does. The classes are well attended. On preventive SAR hikes people I talk to are paying attention to things like leaving itineraries with someone. But, these are all people who tend to seek out the information.
It's just that far too many are not open to it - and sometimes, you run into people who just don't care who tells them the risks and how to be safer. They do what they do. Don't care about the risk. Thru hikers determined to hike through the night into a storm because they "must be X by Tuesday" are not concerned by lighting on high passes.
Sequoia - Kings sends out a 10 essentials flyer with all confirmations for wilderness permits you reserve, and they have an excellent set of four pdfs on their website on wilderness safety and planning trips. You do not need the details of searches to learn wilderness safety. Things like those pdfs and all the information provided in backpacking books and classes are well informed by the many incidents that have taken place. And people who are looking for them get it. The non-receptive folks who we short haul off ledges probably just throw away or ignore....
There are people who live here
who do not know search and rescue exists. I sometimes mention to co-workers that I volunteer for it. "What's search and rescue?" This is why we walk in parades and show up to local community events to man a booth, and show kids how to tie a bowline on a bight, or hug a tree. Every once in a while, families take a trip where they have never been, to camp or hike where they never have before. I've had members of the hiking group call ME directly when someone they know gets lost (or they think the person is lost... long story) - and I have to tell them to call the national park, or the county sheriff. It is not even on the radar that getting lost while hiking *might* happen. These are not folks who would even imagine picking up a book about this sort of thing.
So, awareness, then exposure to basic prep for venturing into the outdoors, then experience. Survival skills is a looooooong way off for some people.
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