No one sets out to spend two months drinking out of mud puddles and getting your husband killed. I get that, I won't pile on with "morons, don't rely on your GPS", because that doesn't help anything but my own sense of superiority. That said, I sometimes wonder if there shouldn't be a little one-pager that comes with your GPS. No one will read it, of course. I'm not exactly sure what it would say, either. But a few points to consider...

Observe your surroundings. If you begin to start to feel the slightest discomfort with the route you're on, consider turning back. Please reference "sunk cost fallacy". The time you lose backtracking is nothing in comparison to the time lost if you're dead. Or to be less dramatic, it might take a day for a tow truck to get to you, if they can get to you at all.

And always be prepared to turn back. Hell, I do it all the time; did it just this weekend, in fact. Wanted to go over Stampede Pass in the camper van with the dogs, camp, do some hiking, see the ghost town of Lester. Big plans! Warm spring, mid-May, should be good. Nope, turned back by snow. Might have been able to make it, but on those tires? Meh, go camp somewhere else, no fun to be had digging your van out of the snow ten feet at a time. More so on the bike: point A to point B on forest roads, map says it should go all the way through. Sometimes I'm turned back by gated roads. Sometimes, like the stories in this articles, the road turns to two dirt tracks separated by tall grass, to trail, to what once was a narrow trail and is now overgrown with saplings. And yet I still catch myself thinking, "park the bike, walk ahead a few hundred feet, see if it gets any better". Despite being somewhere no tow truck will come, with a 600lb. bike (heavy, for the uninitiated) ridden by a scrawny marathon runner who's going to have a shitload of fun picking said bike up when he drops it. Don't be a dumbass like me; turn around.

If you are well and truly lost, stay where you are. I'm not talking the "oh, we missed our turn" kind of lost. I'm talking, "without backtracking, I have no real idea where I am in relation to a major road or decent-sized town...or even a house" lost. If you find yourself hoping the road gets better, hoping this road will take you where you want to go, and hoping it will just all work out if you keep going, STOP. Maybe not until Search and Rescue finds you, but at least stop for an hour and get your bearings. Good bearings, so that you can point at a map (if you had one) and say with 90% confidence, "that's where we're at". Figure out your plan, 'cuz the current one ain't working. And do not leave your vehicle. Time and again I read these stories of "GPS took them down a snow-covered forest road, and they got stuck" that end with someone dying because they walked to get help. You're obviously already lost, you're not going to unlost by walking around ill-equipped.

Call in to work, call the friends you're supposed to meet, call off that client meeting, because you're going to be late or not make it at all. Seriously, just give up those thoughts right now. The time for "making up time" is over. You fucked up, and now you're late. Continuing on is not going to undo that fact. For one, you have insufficient information to conclude that you stand any chance of arriving on time. You don't even know where you are, how do you know how long it will take to arrive? So go ahead and backtrack, because you're plans are shot. Or go on over that mountain pass in mid-Novemember, the GPS says there's a road, and you might still make it. Just kidding, no you won't. You'll get stuck, try to walk to get help, and freeze to death on the way.

That's what my pamphlet might look like anyway. I often wonder how folks get themselves in these situations, and the best theory I have is that we have enough everyday convenience that we forget the parts of the U. S and Canada (let alone the world) that are still very remote and very dangerous for the unprepared. Many of us live where there's always a gas station, always a cell signal, always some landmark to give us guidance as to where we are. Road signs to tell us where to go, guardrails to keep us falling off a cliff. As the folks in this article found out, the western U. S. is a place where it is very easy to get yourself into trouble if you take all of those assumptions with you down a dirt road. Gas might be 100 miles away (whoops, that station closed ten years ago, hope you have enough to make it 50 more miles), you probably won't have a cell signal, and once you're off U. S. and state highways all bets are off as to road conditions or if the road even exists anymore.

After all this typing, it just occurred to me how some of these tragedies could be avoided, and in one sentence: if you're not a local, not experienced in off-pavement driving (especially in the mountains), and are not equipped to spend a few nights out there if you absolutely had to, then the instant the road turns to dirt, turn around; no exceptions. For the folks that drive off bridges, sorry, my only advice is to turn in your keys.