Van got stuck in mud - Missing Canadian woman found after 7 weeks NV - husband still missing

A rescued Canadian woman who survived for seven weeks on water and trail mix after getting stranded in a remote part of Nevada was recovering Saturday as a search for her still-missing husband moved forward.

Hunters on Friday spotted the van of Albert and Rita Chretien on a logging road in Elko County in northeastern Nevada, according to a statement by the Baker City, Ore., police, who had searched for the couple.

The Chretiens disappeared in late March during a trip to Las Vegas.

The 56-year-old woman told her son, Raymond Chretien, that her 59-year-old husband set off for help on foot a few days after their van got stuck in mud and that was the last she saw of him.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13551481

Hope this is not another following GPS. Glad they found her, though I doubt they will find her husband alive.

I wonder/ hope they find her husband. Had they stayed together, he'd be safe now. I cannot begin to imagine how she must feel. What a wonderful relief for her family.

aA

I am just amazed they were found, or the woman and the car, at least. Holding good thoughts for the husband. Guess they must have been out of cell range, if they had a phone. Pretty wild and remote country in that section of NV. I kept having the awful feeling they were in the bottom of the Snake River Canyon, which is not far from Baker City, although certainly not on their route to Vegas. Good to know the lost are found.

Route 225 to find help ...
Canadian woman missing since March found alive
by Justin Burton, KGW Staff
Posted on May 6, 2011 at 9:44 PM
Updated today at 9:49 AM
http://www.kgw.com/home/Canadian-missing-since-March-found-alive-in-NV-121428749.html


... "They got turned around off the main road that they should have been on," Moskaluk said ... Officials said weather over the past month in that area has included snow, rain and chilly temperatures. "I don't believe they were prepared for winter weather," Raymond Chretien said. "They don't go camping" ...
In Nevada, search for missing Canadian man resumes
SCOTT SONNER, Associated Press
Updated 04:44 p.m., Saturday, May 7, 2011
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/In-Nevada-search-for-missing-Canadian-man-resumes-1370336.php



Sure sounds like another GPS story ...

I just completed a series of bus tours to various Civil War battlefields, mostly in Virginia, where the road network has been largely extant for 200 years.

The GPS steered us wrong on every single trip, at least once. Some of those battlefields, and the roads that feed into them (there is always a series of converging roads around a battlefield), I know well enough to draw from memory, and there would be times when I would be shouting at the driver and the GPS, "no, no, no! The GPS is wrong!" But the driver, rightly concerned with our safety, often would not have time to make a correction before our turn was behind us. So we wound up making a lot of U-turns.

On at least one occasion, the GPS was wrong because a bypass road built five years ago was only available as a paid update to the GPS content. I won that fight, and the GPS showed us splashing through a swamp at 55 mph.

On other occasions, we tried to use the GPS to get us to positions we wanted to see and it couldn't get us there, while following the maps of Jed Hotchkiss, 150 year-old maps, took us right to them. Eventually I started making a Hotchkiss map the cover of every handout I made, and I used them on every trip, trying to stay ahead of the GPS curveballs. Good old Jed really came through for us.

Part of the problem is us. It's complicated and time consuming to plot a route which forces the GPS to take us the way we want to go, so on-the-fly decisions by us invariably force the GPS to default to the "best" route rather than the correct one. The GPS seems to have no problem choosing a point 500 meters away on the far side of a river as the "best" it can do. It clearly has different objectives, seeking simplicity and safety with a limited data set, while we have actual places we want to go.

After that experience I have no problem whatsoever pointing out several things:

* The GPS is an excellent supplement to a capable navigator who knows the roads and can read maps. But it is not reliable enough on its own to replace a human navigator.

* An alarming proportion of people cannot read maps at all, either paper OR GPS. This seems to have something to do with the layout of our brains, and you are either a map reader or you are not. Apparently the US Army has been aware of this phenomenon for decades, and according to James Dunnigan, they think one out of three people are hopelessly unteachable. If you're one of those people, ADMIT IT! There is no shame in not being able to read a map. That's just how you are, and if you try to fake it with a GPS, you're going to fail and take everyone else with you.

* The second you suspect your GPS is steering you wrong, pull over immediately at the first safe place you find. Because the GPS chooses the fastest and most efficient routes, you can completely leave the area you want to be in within minutes. You must be safely parked to accurately and reliably read a map or to reprogram the GPS.

* Hey! Stop holding that god damned cell phone to your ear when you're driving! You've almost killed me ten times this year already. You are the real GPS, and driving requires your full attention at all times.

So that's what I think. I hope some of you will take my advice and profit from it. If something I've said sounds incorrect, I'd appreciate it if you'd call me out on it. This is a safety issue and I won't mind being wrong if what I say can be corrected.

If you're driving desert country in the summer, I don't care what road you're on: take some frickin water in your car. If you're driving wintry roads, and you're determined to wear flip-flops and a t-shirt while you drive, at least have some appropriate footwear and coats in your vehicle. If you're gonna explore backcountry in a national forest, tell the rangers where you're going and when, and plan as if something might go wrong

road for hours.

the unpaved roads up there are very confusing and it seems like they got off the road they intended to be on. there was more info in Reno's paper:

http://www.rgj.com/article/20110507/NEWS07/110507013/Search-continues-missing-man-Elko-after-wife-discovered-after-seven-weeks?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Rita Chretien, 56, told investigators the last she saw of Albert Chretien, 59, was on March 22 when he set off for help on foot with a GPS unit just a few days after they got stuck in the mud on a national forest road in extreme northern Elko County, Elko County Sheriff Jim Pitts said.

Deputies from Nevada and Idaho’s Owyhee County continued searching the rugged river canyons and snowy mountain sides about 10 miles northeast of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest’s Jarbidge Wilderness Area. The remote mountainous area where the van was found is popular with elk hunters, campers and hikers. It is surrounded by 7,000 to 10,000-foot peaks and geographic features with names like Rattlesnake Canyon and Rocky Gulch...The area is about 20 miles west of the Jarbidge River, which has been the focus of a decade-long legal battle between over the Forest Service’s closure of a road to help protect the threatened bull trout.

“They got turned around off the main road that they should have been on,“ Moskaluk said.

The van was found near the Bruneau River on national forest land. The Forest Service said in a statement on April 5 that a large landslide had closed the Bruneau River Road, but it wasn’t clear exactly where.