San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Hiker tracks risks on John Muir Trail
Eight-year survey to yield insight into most treacherous challenges of trek
When John Ladd first began surveying long-distance hikers on the John Muir Trail in 2012, he hoped to fill a void of critical information on the trail’s most dangerous elements.
He’d recently become chief moderator of the Yahoo hub where thousands of hikers gather to swap stories and tips on how to approach the famous trail, which stretches 221 miles through the High Sierra between Yosemite Valley and Mount Whitney. Backpackers get caught in dangerous situations on the trail every season — swept off their feet in stream crossings, marred in snowfields and incessantly harassed by mosquitoes.
Ladd, who has trekked about 2,000 miles in the Sierra, felt it was his duty to disseminate data about the accidents and pitfalls —
Hikers often prepare for years before taking on the John Muir Trail. Ladd says some hiking guidebooks contain misleading information.
the circumstances of which are dependent on shifting variables like snowpack, climate and wildfires — but he couldn’t find any quality research, just lots of anecdotes.
“There was no survey data to speak of,” he said.
So Ladd, a retired lawyer who
lives in San Francisco and is now 76 years old, took it upon himself to create such a database. That first year, he’d venture onto the trail with pen and print-outs and solicit hikers for details about footwear and blisters, a common and potentially debilitating malady
among long-distance hikers. It was a crude one-man operation.
“It was a disaster,” Ladd said.
But he stuck with it, refining his approach each year and gathering a mix of on-site interviews and online questionnaires from people who have hiked at least part of the JMT, as it’s known.
Now, having amassed 8,642 survey responses over eight hiking seasons, Ladd and a team of volunteers have embarked on a project to analyze the data and publish findings on the most common challenges faced by the thousands of hikers who set foot on the trail each year. It’s a borderline unprecedented attempt to clarify the collective experience, and Ladd hopes it will foster a smarter populace of wilderness hikers and perhaps reduce injuries, deaths and rescues in the mountains.
The survey is a multilayered inquiry with 81 questions — allowing hikers to dive into the minutiae of gear weight, muscle soreness, lightning fears, altitude sickness and more — and the median time spent filling it out is 35 minutes, Ladd says.
“There’s nothing like this,” said Elizabeth Wenk, who has written seminal guidebooks on the JMT, Yosemite National Park and the High
Sierra. “If I had endless time and life, I would take this data set and use it to write an entire book.”
Hikers often prepare for months or years before attempting to thru-hike the JMT, which takes about three weeks and draws hikers over mountain passes, across alpine meadows and through flowing streams.
The most accessible information comes from a melange of guidebooks, personal hiking blogs and social media posts that, as it continues to grow unfettered across the internet, has become a morass of biased, potentially misleading data. For example, you can find self-professed experts who argue that longdistance hikers should eschew boots in favor of running shoes, or that thru-hikers needn’t bother packing ice axes for high-elevation segments of the trail during high snow years — claims that Wenk finds appalling.
Ladd’s analyses could cut through that kind of noise. Although the JMT passes through three national parks and two national forests, the National Park Service doesn’t publish details of hiker injuries, deaths or rescues. There is no central repository of such statistics. However, there have been a few deaths in recent years: a lightning strike, a
John Ladd has plenty of hiking gear. The former lawyer has been surveying hikers on the John Muir Trail to determine its most dangerous aspects.
drowning and a slipand-fall on consolidated snow.
“It’s incredibly difficult to find responsive data on what’s happening out there,” said Susanne Spano, associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at UCSF Fresno.
Spano authored a 2018 peer-reviewed statistical analysis of JMT hiker injury variables based on Ladd’s 2014 surveys. It rendered three key takeaways: Older hikers were less affected by medical issues than younger ones; traveling lighter correlated to fewer reported issues on the trail; and people with a lower body mass index experienced fewer problems. Whether or not such findings upend conventional hiking wisdom, the point is knowing they’re properly representative, Wenk said. “Having something underlying the anecdotal data is, to me, so important.”
Until this year, Ladd had been posting his
personal interpretations of the survey responses on JMT Facebook and Yahoo groups — not exactly a scientific approach. But now he has brought in a group of 8 volunteers with technical backgrounds — data engineers and an epidemiologist — to analyze and visualize his data. They’ve just begun digging into Ladd’s data sets.
One early insight: In the past six years, the severity of mosquito interactions for hikers has peaked in June during dry years and late July in wetter years.
Why it matters: The combination of climatefueled drought conditions in California’s mountains and the trail’s spike in popularity in the past decade has sent higher numbers of hikers out as early as June, which can be a treacherous time to attempt river crossings as streambeds tend to gush with snow melt in the early-summer heat.
Because mosquitoes propagate in water, they
serve as an indicator of yearly weather variation and correlate to snowpack levels, melt rate and the timing of spring’s warmth — factors that should inform hikers’ plans.
“As soon as I saw the mosquito plot, I thought, ‘Wow, all these factors were captured so quickly in one place,’ ” Wenk said. “That was astounding, really.
“Knowing exactly what to expect on the JMT is the biggest thing that’ll reduce the number of rescues needed.”
Ladd’s recommendation: “In years similar to what we expect for 2022, mosquitoes should be a minimal problem for most 2022 JMT hikers with entry dates after July 15 and virtually skeeter-free for hikes starting after July 30,” he recently posted on a JMT Facebook group. Then he recommended early hikers treat their clothes with an insecticide before setting out.
Although Ladd’s ultimate goal with his surveys is to educate hikers and spare them injuries or worse, he has become protective of his data sets and refuses to publish them. Instead he will reveal his findings piecemeal in finished, stand-alone charts and graphs. He worries about confirmation bias — that his data would be wielded by people seeking to validate predetermined theories or support agendas he doesn’t agree with.
“People would be free to mince the data to get statistical significance proving ridiculous things,” he said. “I only want to share specific data sets, and only if I know what people intend to do with them and where they’ll publish.”
Ladd says a wave of new analyses will be done by the end of March — they’ll address stream crossings, lightning strikes, water availability, sleeping difficulties and other issues. For now, he’s posting them in Google Drive folders.
Spano would like Ladd to share the data with researchers who could mine it for new learning about longdistance hiking.
“In a perfect world ... you’d be able to use this to develop a set of best practices for backcountry use,” Spano said. “You’d have less strain on the individuals, less strain on the whole system” of park authorities, first responders and search-and-rescue volunteers called into the remote wilderness to help hikers in trouble.