A rural Olds youth says getting lost overnight in the bush near Sundre with some friends has taught him some valuable lessons.
Thaine Smith, 19, was one of seven local youth — Walker Roth, Thaine Smith, David Chatt, Taya Ryan, Nathan Altenhofen and Travis Pepin — who set out on Saturday, July 14 to go dirt biking northwest of Sundre. They eventually got lost.
Altenhofen and Pepin left the group to get gas and help. They were found by RCMP around midnight. The other four weren't found until about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, July 15.
Smith says one lesson he's taken from that experience is not to leave home without supplies in case you get lost.
"I know I normally have a bag with GPS, flare guns, fire starters, water and stuff that I keep with me. But this time, I didn't bring it with me," he says. "I was in a rush getting stuff going when I was leaving."
He says from now on, he'll also remember to bring — and place — flags as they go.
"One of another key things I like to try and do when I go out hiking trails that I don't know is flag every turn that we go, and if we go over top of a road, flag the road so we know where we're going — what leads to where," Smith says.
A third lesson is to communicate better with colleagues.
"(We need to have) better communication and probably staying together as a group instead of splitting up," he says.
"Miscommunication led to us following their tracks, trying to find out where they went, because they took a different way back than what we knew and we ended up getting ourselves lost."
He notes the trip was supposed to be a "casual dirt bike ride but turned into a bit more than that."
"One trail was supposed to go right and straight to the road. It turns out it wasn't the trail we thought it was.
"We followed that one for five or six K (kilometres) and realized it came to a dead end and had to turn around and backtrack about 20 kilometres back to the road."
After Altenhofen and Pepin had been gone for a while, the other four decided to look for them.
That turned out to be a mistake.
"We went looking for them, got ourselves even more lost. We all ran out of fuel and started walking our way back to camp," Smith says.
"And then late at night when we were walking, we went overtop of where we were supposed to be and turned and kept going and got ourselves really lost in the bush.
"(We) decided to stop and have a fire for the night and hang out and wait until morning when we could see where we were at."
Eventually, he says, "we found ourselves back to the road, got service, and got the phone call that there were people looking for us 'just go to the nearest road where you guys are at and hang out and wait.'"
When asked if it was a scary experience, Smith says, "for me, being a hunter, it wasn't too bad. But I know everyone else was a little worried, because we weren't sure where we were at and didn't really have proper necessities for staying out in the bush.
"We were lucky that we had a lighter that we could make a fire with. That was good; we got a fire going.
"It wasn't too bad once we stopped and hung out," Smith adds. "In the morning we found a little creek — a freshwater creek — that we got a little bit of water from."
Unfortunately, food was a problem.
"We didn't find any food. And then we couldn't find any edible berries, just a bunch of stuff that we can't eat. It's harmful to us and that's about it."
Smith says three of the four are trackers and hunters, so they had a good idea about what was — and was not — edible.
