The entirely preventable death of Geraldine Largay was the self-inflicted outcome of her failure to be prepared.

Leaving the trail for privacy requires only about 10 steps. That Maine jungle swallows you up, and other hikers are focused on their own paths. Don’t go too far. She did. Nobody is going to see you. They didn’t.

The Appalachian Trail is not a trivial hike; it is an expedition-grade undertaking. You must be capable and responsible for your own decisions and consequences. Going into the Maine woods without even a passing familiarity with map and compass skills is a recipe for disaster. The British Mountaineering Council produces a text of mountain skills, “Mountaincraft and Leadership.” The first chapter is “Navigation.” The third sentence reads “… it is a skill you ignore at your peril.”

Travel, progress, safety in the field depend on map and compass. If you don’t have the map, then you aren’t on the map. You are lost.

Largay was “lost” in every outdoor sense of the word. Disoriented, unable to recover either her position or direction, fearful of her surroundings, the result a kind of stationary panic. Not knowing which way to go she went nowhere, dying by inches. How awful.

“Inanition” is hardly descriptive of what must have been an ultimate creeping confrontation with death: acknowledgment, resignation, acceptance. Thus we see Geraldine Largay as the failed cautionary tale for hiking, lacking the mental rigor and technical ability for the trail.

Nature is not forgiving. You must be fit and equipped to escape the lurking hazards, or maybe just lucky. Geraldine Largay was neither that July day.

This was no comedy, no walk in the woods. With sad due respect to Geraldine Largay, it was tragedy, a life-and-death terror. She saw it coming and was paralyzed to avoid it.

Michael Grady

Albuquerque, N.M.

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