[pct-l] Bear Attack Strategy (Revised)

[elee at microsoft.com (Eric Lee (GAMES))]

Bob wrote:
>
All activities have some inherent risk, and repetition only increases
the 
probability that something ill will occur. How many times does a person 
drive their car before their first fatal accident? Does that make them a

Darwin candidate?
>

That's true, but on the other hand there are some situations that are
*inherently* unstable, and if people choose to put themselves in those
kinds of situations over and over again, no amount of skill or good
judgement will change the inevitable outcome.  It's not a question of
"if", it's a question of "when".  In fact, skill (or the perception of
having skill, anyway) can often accelerate the catastrophe because
people are lulled into thinking they have the situation under control
when they don't.

Driving a car certainly carries some amount of risk; probably much more
risk than hiking the PCT.  But the objective odds of dying in a fatal
car crash have proven to be fairly low overall.  That kind of situation
is mostly stable.  On the other hand, living with grizzlies is in no way
a stable situation.  No matter how skilled Treadwell thought he was, the
outcome was predetermined by his choice to continue doing it.

I'm not saying that everyone should avoid all risk.  Far from it.  But
people need to be honest about the level of risk that they're running,
and to think about the consequences.

If anyone's at all interested in this topic, here's an *excellent*
article written by the author of Deep Survival, which was the book we
were talking about a few weeks ago.  Highly recommended reading, and
available for free online:

http://home.comcast.net/~laurencegonzales/Rulesart.pdf

Eric