Tried that. Once.

[rcjordan]

Spent most of a hot summer day in a tree.

https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/v0z672/dont_mess_with_the_bull/

[Drastic]

Somewhat related:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/us/yellowstone-woman-gored-by-bison/index.html

[Rumbas]

Thank God the wildest animal we have is a fox.

[ergophobe]

My brother used to ride the local heifers that were pastured next to our house. One "Lucy" (so-named for the L-shaped white patch on her forehead) decided she had had enough. She charged him and he got up an apple tree just in time. Fortunately, I was only about 7 and he forbade me from riding.

His technique was in the fall to climb an gone-wild apple tree and jump on the branches. It would shake the apples to the ground and the heifers would hear it can come running to eat apples. When one passed under the branch, he would jump on. I wonder if boys are still doing this sort of thing. They must be.

As for the bison, I bet there was a camera involved. In my "Staying Alive in Yosemite" program, I had a list of questions for people. One of them was: "Would I be here and do this if I didn't have a camera?"

[Brad]

> camera

I think that is 80% of it.  My theory is that the other 20 percent is media + suburbanization = clueless.  We older people grew up watching adventures like old Tarzan movies where Tarzan fights a stuffed lion or westerns were some mountain lion tries to bushwhack somebody.  The stories and the message was still from the 19th Century Frontier: nature was full of dangers.  Today everybody grows up in cities or suburbs.  Nature just ain't a danger in the suburbs. Danger comes from other people in the 'Burbs not from nature.

That's the short version.

[ergophobe]

>>Danger comes from other people in the 'Burbs

Funny you should say that. We have a little... not a mnemonic, but just a sort of memory tool. "We're in the city - computers out, food in." That's to remind us that in the city, we cannot store things humans want in the car, but we can store things animals want. Here it's the opposite. We don't really worry if we've gone to bed and realize the computer is in an unlocked car overnight, but if we realize it's a bag of groceries, we get up and get dressed and go out and get it.

>>clueless

In 2011, when I was a ranger, three kids around 21-22 from an Armenian-American church group went over the waterfall. As they were jumping the fence, someone told them they shouldn't do that. The one guy yelled back, "We can do whatever the f### we want to." As far as anyone knows, those were his last words. The woman slipped and went in the water. Guy 1 grabbed her hand and she pulled him in. Guy 2 grabbed Guy 1's hand and he went in too. Strangely, Guy 2 ended up sort of coming upright into a sitting position facing back at the crowd just as he went over the waterfall. Someone got a photo. It's on file with SAR. Below is about a mile of raging river with rocks and all manner of hydraulics. The bodies were not found and recovered for months. The parents were saying on Day 10 that the park service was evil because they were calling off the search and their children could be downriver injured somewhere.

Utterly clueless. Even without the waterfall, you don't go in that river at high spring flow in a very high snow year and come out alive. A couple weeks earlier, a German teenager went in below the the waterfall. They didn't get her body out for three months or so (retrieval in August and I think these accidents were May or so).

Anyway... something one of the older church members said stuck with me. He said that his parents were shepherds. They had lived their entire lives outdoors day after day. They were at home in the unbuilt world. His generation went to the cities and then on to America. They worked two jobs and had no time to get out into the unbuilt world. They finally reached a level where they had some money and leisure and could bring their children into the world outside the cities and burbs, but in the meantime, all knowledge of that world, known so intimately a generation earlier, was gone. So they have no tools to evaluate the dangers.

It was in the context of those accidents and several more that I started doing my Staying Alive evening program at the campground amphitheater. It was a big hit with the campground hosts who told me it was the best program they had seen in the campgrounds in their years of hosting and would go around every evening and drum up business. So I typically had over 100 people in attendance.

My goal was to give them a mental survival toolkit. I used to ask them what was in their survival kit. They would throw out things like "flashlight" or "matches". I would counter with, "We like to say, the more you know, the less you need." Then I would show them a picture of my friend Yuji, one of the best climbers in the world, getting ready to climb El Cap with about 10 pounds of gear. Then I would show them me getting ready to climb El Cap with over 100 pounds of gear. The point being, there's no list of "Ten Essentials." If you're Yuji, you need almost nothing. If you're me, you need more gear than you can carry in one trip.

So I would say that things I try to put in my toolkit are
- sound judgement
- basic knowledge
- patience

Things like that.

Then I would show them pictures of various threats and ask which are known to have had killed the most people in the history of the park. Bear. Next slide. Mountain lion. Next slide. Rattlesnake. Next slide. Deer. Laughter. Next slide. Tree. More laughter. Next slide, the numbers. Bear, mountain lion, rattlesnake: 0. Deer: 1. Trees: 13 or something like that (the number is higher now - there have been a few tree deaths since 2011).

My favorite part was a set of slides that just got progressively darker until the screen was black. As I went slide to slide, I would say, "You're on the Valley rim. It's getting dark. You have no flashlight. You've lost your backpack. You have no food or water. You're dressed like me," which is to say, short-sleeved shirt and thin pants. "Are you going to survive the night?" Every time, about 20-30% of the audience would say low, "Nooo," in sort of a sing-song way and some smart aleck would say, "Yeah, no problem."

Then I would say, "What's going to kill you up there? I just checked the weather report. The low temperature tonight is 58 degrees. I might not be comfortable dressed like this. I'll get a bad night's sleep. I'll just be a little cold, a little hungry, a little thirsty if I wait for the sun to come up. On the other hand, if I decide I must get down tonight and wander around without a light and walk off a 1000-foot cliff in the dark, that will be a bad outcome."

Another one I would show a slide of bridge that I had crossed in normal spring flow. It was getting heavy spray from a nearby waterfall. "Would you cross this bridge on this day?" Most people said no except the couple of smart alecks who say, "Sure." Then I would ask, "What about on this day?" and show a slide taken by SAR the afternoon after two guys tried to cross and got washed from the bridge and died (and one was an ER doc... he knew about risk). There is a torrent of water crossing it. It looks insane to cross it. Nervous laughter. Even the smart alecks say, "Hell no!" Then I would explain that they arrived there on a tight schedule because he was due at work. The detour around was 26 miles. If they could get across the bridge, they were less than two miles from the car. They went for it. They died. I put up a quote from great mountaineer and former president of the American Alpine Club, George Lowe: "A lot of climbers die from a lack of patience." I never could find a citation to that quote. A few years later, George Lowe is staying at my house. I told him I read that in an interview somewhere. He said, "I don't remember that, but it sounds like something I might say. Keep using the quote."

Anyway, stuff like that for roughly 1:15 plus about 30 minutes of Q&A.

My goal was to give people some basic decision-making tools. But the interesting thing was how far off people's risk calibration was. They were scared of things that would be very very unlikely to hurt anyone, and comfortable with things that could kill you.

It's probably about as accurate as my risk calibration walking around San Francisco. Everything seems vaguely threatening, but I'm guessing that lots of the things that are most threatening would just float right by me.

[Rupert]

George Lowe

We have discussed this man before, right?

[ergophobe]

Perhaps. My possibly-made-up quote from him is one of my favorites.