Drone Saves Hiker Trapped in Quicksand.

[The Droning Company]

Drone Saves Hiker Trapped in Quicksand

 

[hank970]

Drone hyperbole. The drone didn't locate or save the man. It just captured some video of the rescue. The hiker triggered a satellite communicator, perhaps something like a Garmin inReach, to alert emergency personnel of his location and situation. Then the NPS and Grand County SAR responded.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Drone hyperbole. The drone didn't locate or save the man. It just captured some video of the rescue. The hiker triggered a satellite communicator, perhaps something like a Garmin inReach, to alert emergency personnel of his location and situation. Then the NPS and Grand County SAR responded.

Exactly! More like drone hallucination!

 

[hank970]

I was hiking years ago with a friend in Colorado National Monument's No Thoroughfare Canyon. It was springtime, and there was a bit of meltwater running down the usually dry creek bed. In most places, the sandy bottom was firm, but there was quicksand in other spots. He stepped in a little patch of quicksand and sunk up to about mid-calf. When he pulled free, it sucked off his boot. He retrieved the boot, full of wet sand, and I was able to snap a picture of it hurtling through the air as he angrily tossed it across the wash.

Quicksand is strange stuff. The hydraulics which produce it can change very rapidly. Wet sand can be firm one minute, as it is along the strand on an ocean beach, and like pudding the next.

 

[GadgetGuy]

I was hiking years ago with a friend in Colorado National Monument's No Thoroughfare Canyon. It was springtime, and there was a bit of meltwater running down the usually dry creek bed. In most places, the sandy bottom was firm, but there was quicksand in other spots. He stepped in a little patch of quicksand and sunk up to about mid-calf. When he pulled free, it sucked off his boot. He retrieved the boot, full of wet sand, and I was able to snap a picture of it hurtling through the air as he angrily tossed it across the wash.

Quicksand is strange stuff. The hydraulics which produce it can change very rapidly. Wet sand can be firm one minute, as it is along the strand on an ocean beach, and like pudding the next.

However, as the link states, quicksand does not suck you completely under and drown you, unlike in all the movies. You cannot sink in any deeper than to your waist, because the quicksand is denser than your body. The real danger to this hiker was from overexposure and freezing, while trapped from the waist down, because of continued exposure to the almost freezing air temperature, and not from suffocation under quicksand. Fortunately, with his manually activated Garmin GPS tracking beacon, he was quickly located and rescued before he died from hypothermia.