In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent shares harrowing and tragic tales of families who took a wrong turn on the road and ended up facing disaster.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I have one rule when I travel, it keeps me safe from monsters and mayhem, and that is stay on the interstate. You ever saw The Hills Have Eyes, you know those movies. As soon as any horror movie, when you decide to take that shortcut and get off the interstate, bad things can happen. And indeed, in today’s episode, I’m going to talk about three stories of families traveling who took a wrong turn with some tragic consequences, and maybe this will help you to avoid a tragic consequence yourself. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. And Monday and Wednesday we talk apologetics and theology. But Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And I remember in the early heydays of Free for All Friday, I always had a disaster fix. I like talking about plane crashes and bad things that happen. It’s something I get a little bit obsessed with.
To my wife, Chagrin, like, “Trent, don’t read those stories. They make you think everything bad is going to happen.” No, they keep me safe from bad things happening. So what I want to talk about today though is getting lost. So I’ve been on road trips with my family. We’ve driven from Dallas out to Phoenix. We’re hoping maybe to do Dallas to San Diego. We had to do a road trip recently for my wife. Her grandmother passed away. So we had to go to Eastern New Mexico, Carlsbad, New Mexico for the funeral. And to get there, I had to leave the interstate and I was a little jittery. It’s like, “Oh, I really don’t like leaving the interstate.” But I left to a highway. It was still, at worst, it was one of those highways that’s not divided. So you have cars coming head on at you and there’s just a stripe lane between you.
I hate driving on stuff like that. I love my four lane interstate with the divider in the middle. A Loves Truck Stop every 15, 20 miles that you could stop at, a Buc-ees if you’re in Texas. But when you go on really, really small roads, you think, “I’m going to take a shortcut. This’ll get me through here.” Perhaps you should reconsider that. Is that shortcut worth your life? So let’s talk about three examples of families taking shortcuts that they would later come to regret. So here are the three stories I’ll share with you. Going from most tragic, to tragic, to, oh wow, that’s some story. So it’s the least tragic or it’s actually not tragic, but it’s harrowing. So one is a tragedy, another is tragic, and then another is a harrowing tale is what we would call it. So the first one is the most tragic, and that would be the Death Valley Germans.
So this happened back in July of 1996. A family of four from Germany were visiting Death Valley in California. They were driving all around California. They wanted after Death Valley to go up to Yosemite and then they had to go return their rental car, which was just a minivan. It was a 1996 Plymouth Voyager. They had to go return it in the next day or two. So they were finishing out their time at Death Valley and they were just driving through the roads and their goal was to head over to go see, I think like an abandoned mine. They were going to go through a thing called Mengel Pass, very small roads. It turned almost into dirt roads that are very difficult to traverse unless you have four wheel drive, not a 1996 Plymouth Voyager. I mean even a minivan today would’ve no shot on a lot of these roads.
So they were going through, they went down this road. They ended up stopping at what is called the Geologist Cabin. It was a cabin that had been built back in the 1930s that actually still had running water in it. And people, they stopped there. They actually took the American flag as like a souvenir that’s supposed to remain at the cabin. They thought, “Oh, okay.” So they go and they look at this cabin and see the little site, and they had been going down a really rough road in Death Valley to get here. They continued on over to Mengel Pass and they soon realized that, you know what? We’re not going to be able to finish going over Mengel Pass in this van. We’re going to get stuck. They turn around, they head back the direction they’re going, and they should be able to go make a big turn.
Now, they were worried that road was really rough for them to get down. They made it, but it was a rough road for them to traverse in the minivan. They weren’t looking forward to going through it again. At least that’s what’s hypothesized because you can already suspect they all didn’t make out of this one. Okay, we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what happened. It was a mystery for a long time. So what happened is that, I mean basically people realized something was wrong. On July 27, 1996, they didn’t return the minivan. It was registered stolen. People went looking for it. The van was found on essentially a wash, a river wash, in Death Valley. It was located there on October 21, 1996. So it took about three months to find the van, but there was no sign of the family. Where had the family gone? Where were they? How far could they have gotten from the van there?
It turns out what probably happened was they thought, “Okay, we don’t want to go back this road.” But the map, they were using an older map that showed them Anvil Creek Road, but it’s a road that had not been used since the 1930s. It was closed and it was essentially allowed to fall into disrepair and it basically transformed back into a dry river bed. And so they ended up driving on this thinking that it was a road and it was actually just a dry river bed in Death Valley, in July of Death Valley. So they’re turning off the main road, which as you could barely call a main road, onto this road that if you look at it today on Google Maps, it does not identify it as a road. It just shows this… It looks like a trail, like a hiking trail you would go on. They were driving it. The van got stuck and then they were nowhere to be found. So that’s where the mystery began. The people were looking, they found a single beer bottle by a bush a mile away, but nobody knew where the family was.
And the mystery continued from 1996. It was unsolved until 13 years later. Some hikers… Or actually there was a guy, Tom, I forget his last name, but he has a blog all about it. He wanted to investigate what happened to them. So he traced their steps and he developed a hypothesis as to why this German guy and his family, where would they have gone and why wouldn’t they have been located? Now you would think, maybe they tried to hike back. Now if I was in their shoes and our van is stuck in Death Valley on a river wash that no one’s going to find us. They were only four miles away from the Geologist Cabin, which had shelter and had running water. It was still an isolated road. It could have been a while before anyone found them, but you’d be in much better straits going there than anywhere else that you could hike four miles. I mean, that would take you, at a hiking rate with kids, maybe that would take you about an hour, hour and a half.
And if you wait, if you do it right at dawn, the coolest part of the day, and you still have some light going at you, you can make it back there and then set up signals with rocks, anything for a plane or an overhead to show your stranded and you need help. If I was in… It’s always hard you quarterback these situations, like what would I do in that situation? A lot of times though, you don’t know what you would do under stress. So you would think, “Why didn’t they hike back to the Geologist Cabin?” Or maybe they continued to hike forward, thinking they could get back to the main road they were driving towards. No one found them. So the researchers thought, okay, maybe… These two guys, not researchers, but they were researching the case. Maybe they thought that the German family was going south because on their map it would’ve said China Lake Naval Research Center.
And it was shown on their map, there was a military base nine miles south of them, and maybe they thought, “You know what? We got to get our van towed. We got to turn in the rental car. We don’t want to be penalized. We got to make our flight back to Germany.” It’s weird how you can be so consumed thinking, “I’m going to miss my flight.” There are people who have probably died in the wilderness because they thought, “I got to get back. I’m going to miss my flight.” And they’re more concerned about missing their flight than dying in the wilderness because they don’t realize how dangerous the situation has become for them and they think they can just power on through. So they might’ve thought, “Okay, military base, we’ll go there, we’ll get help and we can get our van unstuck and we’ll be on our way.” And nine miles south, that’s not that hard. Nine miles is different than four miles, especially, they would have to have traversed more difficult rocky terrain than following the riverbed, the wash, back to the Geologist Cabin.
So that might’ve taken, let’s say two hours in that kind of terrain. It would take maybe four or five. By that point, even if you start early in the morning, by the time you’re getting close, the heat of the day will catch up to you fast. I mean Death Valley in July, I bet morning temperatures, you’re seeing high eighties at dawn, 90 maybe. So then in a few hours it’s a hundred degrees. And since the [inaudible 00:09:09] the German dad was drinking beer, he was dehydrated, dehydrating himself more. Don’t drink alcohol in a survival situation, don’t do that. So they theorized that they went south rather than east or west or north. And then they located the bodies later, I think it was a few miles south. The adults were found. There were two skeletal remains identified as the adults. The children were never found, but I think their shoes were located. So that is the most tragic case, thinking, “Oh, we’ll take that shortcut there in Death Valley.”
But these roads, you got to be careful of these kinds of roads, like in the middle of nowhere, especially in the 1990s, you don’t have cell phone, you don’t have GPS. Even if you do travel today, a lot of places don’t have cell reception. The only hope you would have is if you had an emergency GPS locator beacon. Those can work in almost any location on earth. So here’s the next one. 2006, the Kim family. Just after Thanksgiving in 2006, family of four, James Kim, his wife Katie, and two daughters, took a risky journey in the wilderness. Only three of them made it out alive. This was actually in the news for a while because we have these infamous roads in Death Valley, this is a very infamous road in Oregon. I believe it’s called Bear Canyon or Bear Creek, Bear Camp Road. That’s it. Bear Camp Road. So they were on Interstate 5, and they’re trying to get to the Oregon coast and there’s these big mountain range, the coast range in between them. How do you get through?
Normally you go to the north of the south of the range and there’s a nice highway to get you across there. They missed the turnoff for Highway 42 that would’ve taken them to the coast. But instead of backtracking, they thought, “Oh, we can follow the map. It shows a road here.” It’s just labeled other road. It’d be a tiny little road on the map, and that would be Bear Camp Road. It is a winding road. Goes up to 4,000 feet in elevation through the mountains. And this was in November, late November. So you’ve got winter conditions setting in, snow, nighttime. They are leaving. They’re leaving late at night to get through the mountains here. Already many mistakes are being made at this point when you should have just quit, find a hotel, or backtrack and take Highway 42. They probably thought, “Oh, it’s okay, we’ll just quick get over the mountains and take this road.”
And they called their hotel because they probably thought, “I’m not going to get a hotel. We have a room, it’s waiting for us.” And they called the hotel, leave a key out for us. Little did they know, they’re never going to make it to the hotel. So they’re driving down the road and at some points it’s so winding, you’re against the edge of a mountain. It’s one lane. If you come across another car, you have to back up to a turnout. It’s a very dangerous road. It’s typically used for experienced hikers, campers, and for logging purposes. This is key. As the Kim family was driving down this road, they made a fatal error. There is a point in the road where it turns off or the road continues towards the coast and there’s a turnoff. It’s forks. And on the fork, one of the turnoffs becomes a bureau of land management road, a BLM road.
Normally, it has a gate and it’s closed during the winter. The gate was not closed this time, so they turned onto this BLM road, Bureau Land Management, not Black Lives Matter. And it’s a logging road. It is a winding road that goes nowhere in the wilderness. They were low on gas and they drove like 27 miles down this road before they ended up running out of gas, which by the way, they’re also in trouble here because they’re going down this mountain, this perilous mountain road. They’re trying to go through it. And if they drove 27, I’m sure… Let’s say they even drove a hundred miles, I doubt they had a full tank of gas when they went into the mountains. I doubt that. I don’t know what car they were driving, but yeah, I doubt that they had a full tank of gas. I think they ran out of gas and that’s why they got stuck.
And so if you had a full tank of gas, at the very least, if you get stuck, you can run the heater every now and then to build up heat in the car. You just got to make sure if you do that, somebody gets out and clears the tailpipe if snow is falling. But you can at least run the heater intermittently when it gets really cold to try to extend your survival ability there. So they go and they get stuck, and they don’t check in and people start looking for them. And it takes a long time. People don’t know where they are. They can’t find them in this hilly forested terrain. And they’re just on this little turnoff that they drove two dozen miles down and ended up getting stuck. So at some point, the dad, James Kim, put on warm weather clothes and started trekking down the mountain, I think, to try to go get help.
His family was eventually discovered, a helicopter discovered them and they were rescued. He unfortunately, his body was found later, he died of hypothermia. So very sad, at least his family survived. But it’s hard. Now, a lot of people are critical of him. They’ll say, “Look, you stay with your vehicle.” The number one rule, you get lost, stay with your vehicle. You have shelter. More likely someone’s going to spot you. That’s not always the case though. There was another guy who got stuck along the same road and he got stuck there and nobody found him. His body was found later that spring, he disappeared in the winter, he was found in spring, he had died of starvation. So sometimes, yeah, you should stay with a vehicle unless you have near a hundred percent certainty, you will not be located. And there you will run out of supplies. Then you just have to go for it. So you always try to make these judgment calls. So sometimes there is no right decision. You’re just overwhelmed by the situation and the circumstances.
So there, that’s another one though, to be careful on these mountain roads to go during the day, make sure you have supplies, and if you feel like you’re getting lost, turn back the way you came. Don’t continue heading into an error. Let’s see here. Here’s the last one. This one at least is a bit happier, and then it’s bummer at the end. James and Jennifer Stolpa. Another cold weather, well near disaster. December 29, 1992, the Stolpas with their two young children were driving in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They were trying to get from California to Idaho for a family funeral. The roads were closed because of snow. That should have been their first sign to give up. The main highway was closed because of snow, but they found a smaller road that was not closed and decided to drive it in the snow. During the time, they were disoriented as they were driving. And they turned off that road onto a unmaintained gravel road and they ended up getting stuck there. No cell phone, no GPS, at the time, it wasn’t a big thing back then.
They had some food and they waited in the car and they realized, “You know what, we might never be found on this road. Someone might not come on this road for months.” So they couldn’t wait there. And they had driven down it. They were probably miles and miles, dozens of miles away from help. So they started away and they started thinking, “Okay, maybe we can hike ahead and we’ll see, there’s a town here on the map.” So they left the road and they hike through the wilderness and they get on the top of a big hill and look across and they just see nothing, just snowy wilderness. And that’s when they thought, we’re going to die out here. So they go back, they find a cave for the wife and the kids, and James Stolpa, he continues hiking. He hiked 30 miles and he eventually found help. He found a county road maintenance worker in his vehicle.
Stolpa had frostbite, hypothermia, but he remembered the landmarks and he navigated and got them all back. He got rescue workers back to his family and they survived. Their story is chronicled in the 1994 film, I think it was a film made for TV movie called Snowbound, the Jim and Jennifer Stolpa Story. There have been numerous dramatizations of the event. The only bummer is that I was reading about them a while ago, and then it turns out they got a divorce. So they could survive the elements, they just couldn’t survive each other, I guess. I don’t know, sorry. It had to be morose about, or not to be crude and all of that, but at least they made it out of there. And it’s always a good story when someone has a harrowing experience rather than a tragic one.
All right, well I hope this is helpful for you. Just remember, stay on that interstate, stay on that highway. Take extra supplies, have a road atlas. Invest in a GPS system. If you’re really neurotic about it, get an emergency GPS locator. Tell people where you are going, that way someone’s expecting you. And if you do disappear, they’ll know to go and get help. All right, thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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