it was just something you did in that environment, as routine.
Routine - yeah, exactly. It becomes second nature; you don't even really think about it. Like I was saying in another comment below, it probably makes a big difference that living in an environment like that, you often see news stories about massive search and rescue efforts, know some of the first responders, and so forth, so it's not just abstract; it really hammers home both the risk and the effort/expense that it takes to find somebody when something goes wrong.
And yeah, with Into the Wild and Grizzly Man - same. It's not that they deserved to die, it's just hard to get past the sheer "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING" of the whole thing.
The summer I worked in Denali Park as a seasonal worker for one of the hotels, 1997, was also the year that book Into the Wild came out and became a bestseller. At that point, it hadn't yet become a big problem for tourists to show up looking for the bus (apparently that's a pretty big thing now, which has resulted in a number of people having to be rescued in the area); however, what was HUGE that summer among the park's seasonal workers was hiking out there THEMSELVES as a sort of pilgrimage to check out the bus. The park's seasonal employees primarily of outdoorsy 20-ish guys, so you can see why that would be a thing, but those of us who weren't interested did a lot of boggling at the Darwin Awards nature of it.
no subject
Routine - yeah, exactly. It becomes second nature; you don't even really think about it. Like I was saying in another comment below, it probably makes a big difference that living in an environment like that, you often see news stories about massive search and rescue efforts, know some of the first responders, and so forth, so it's not just abstract; it really hammers home both the risk and the effort/expense that it takes to find somebody when something goes wrong.
And yeah, with Into the Wild and Grizzly Man - same. It's not that they deserved to die, it's just hard to get past the sheer "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING" of the whole thing.
The summer I worked in Denali Park as a seasonal worker for one of the hotels, 1997, was also the year that book Into the Wild came out and became a bestseller. At that point, it hadn't yet become a big problem for tourists to show up looking for the bus (apparently that's a pretty big thing now, which has resulted in a number of people having to be rescued in the area); however, what was HUGE that summer among the park's seasonal workers was hiking out there THEMSELVES as a sort of pilgrimage to check out the bus. The park's seasonal employees primarily of outdoorsy 20-ish guys, so you can see why that would be a thing, but those of us who weren't interested did a lot of boggling at the Darwin Awards nature of it.