Comment on Anon creates a mystery

• peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  In my experience, police are tipped by the family of missing people that the victim was a frequent visitor of the preserve. The police ask for access, but aren’t really equipped to survey / don’t have maps, so we join in person. I get the vibe that as folks contemplate killing themselves in a natural area, they visit it more frequently leading up to the event, so it’s kind of obvious. I mean, humans don’t disappear. If it’s a normal person, hiding somewhere, they are either at a friend’s house, the bar, or in the woods.

  The other category of people are the ones who just kill themselves in the parking lot or guest areas. Truly, these people can fuck right off. Its a horrible thing to come to work and find a dead body hanging off the observation tower.

  We manage less than 100k acres, the longest public trails here are probably only 15 miles long, and we have maybe 3 million people nearby. So, people don’t usually die by accident on ours, at leat not in mysterious ways. Distressed hikers are usually found by other hikers before dying. Most accidental deaths I’ve seen have been drowning due to swimming in undesignated areas.

  Reflecting on this response, our police might just be better funded than more rural land management areas. Like, the last search i was involved in was extensive and prolonged. On BLM land way out there, maybe people do disappear, but working in environmental lands management has taught me that truly empty natural land doesn’t really exist in most places with reasonably sized populations. Chances are, if you walked out there, someone else will too, at least in public lands.

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  • XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Oh, yeah. What your descrbing isn’t what I meant at all by the wilderness. I was talking like, actual wilderness. Not even managed necessarily. If you don’t want to be found there shouldn’t be a parking lot or a visitor center to the area you go. That should be obvious. I’m talking like literally just drive out into the middle of a national forest until the roads end and then just start walking. If there are trails your in the wrong area.

    If you are curious about the disappearances tho you should look into Missing 411 (fair warning there are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding it). The missing people are real, but people get weird about it if you look at the wrong corners of the internet lol.

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    • peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      At the risk of being a contrarian, even that scenario of driving into a national park until you can’t drive and then walking is probably a guarantee of you being found. National parks are managed land and they’re pretty popular. You’re also leaving your car behind, either on a designated access road or a fire lane which makes finding you more of an inevitability than anything else.

      Part of what I do for work are wildlife surveys. People tend to steal the cameras or the SD cards. Something I’ve noticed is that when I look for places to put cameras, specifically to avoid capturing humans, I still get humans on them, or the cameras are sometimes tampered with. I think this is a sort of confirmation bias. Anywhere you or I go, someone else is likely to go. Even if we’re trying to hide, we still have shared common biases.

      The least likely places for humans to go are the ones selected at random via GIS on a map. I select 10 random points in the management unit then i rule out the obvious bad ones that intersect with an access road or some kind of facility. The trouble with these points is that they tend to be really hard to access.

      But you know what? I do think this is kind of splitting hairs. Obviously there are always remote areas, and a determined person could hike for many hundreds of miles.

      I think the bigger factor in “disappearing”, whether it’s for some nefarious reason such as suicide or not, is how well known you are. Are there people who are motivated to find you? Are the local police well funded? Are there land management staff here willing to look for you? How many years will your spouse, parent, child look for closure? I think for most affluent people, enough of these factors align to make them easy to find. Those most capable of disappearing are those who have nobody. Unprivileged people, who don’t have the support structure that they need. This sort of person can disappear even in a well populated area. Where I live, there are many road signs warning of human trafficking. I suppose human trafficking is probably the leading cause of true disappearance, since the victims often fall into that category of person who has nobody.

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      • XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah I guess my perspective is scewed by being one of those people. I pretty much have no one that knows what I do day to day. There are people who might wonder where I went and call the cops when I don’t show up to certain places but they’d have literally 0 leads unless I was stupid enough to leave a digital paper trail or something.

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