Years ago I worked as a park ranger on Mount Mansfield, where my colleagues and I emulated the hero of that old radio show “Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.”
The main route over the Mansfield ridge is the white-blazed Long Trail. All the side trails are blazed in blue. When hikers said “I’ve got to go back down the blue trail”, it took a while to help them figure out where they needed to go. And every so often people took the wrong blue trail. When they did, we’d get a call that so-and-so was overdue at such-and-such a trailhead.
Finding them didn’t require much skill, since it was pretty easy to figure out probable wrong turns and to narrow down possible routes. The four of us would fan out, follow the likely trails, and either catch up with the missing hiker or found him – always him – at the bottom, wondering why this didn’t look anything like his starting place.
The calls came late in the day, so we searched in darkness. I shudder to recall one time making my way by flashlight on the old Bear Pond Trail, headed straight down over the cliffs into Smuggler’s Notch, every so often calling out for the objects of our search: two teens named – and I’m not making this up – Alphonse and Gaston.
One day an anxious hiker sought directions to the Alpine Trail. Pointing south I asked, “Do you see that peak way down there that looks as of it’s tilting slightly to the left?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Camel’s Hump. And that’s where you’ll find the Alpine Trail.”
He indignantly produced a map to demonstrate that he was indeed on Camel's Hump. Only gently pointing out cars on the toll road, ski trails, and tourists in sandals began to persuade him that someone was in error. And so, he joined the legions who have echoed mountain man Jim Bridger’s explanation under similar circumstances: “Lost? I wasn’t lost. I just didn’t know where I was for six weeks.”
