Hiker stuck in quicksand free#

What Daniel found is that we can never drown in quicksand.

Thankfully, our iconic devil didn’t sink beneath the quicksand, never to be seen again.Īs quirky as this experiment sounds, it has real-life applications. He collected samples of quicksand in Iran and analysed what it was made from – mix of fine sand, saltwater and clay.ĭaniel then used beads and other items, including (bizarrely) a Tassie devil figurine with similar densities to humans, to check whether they would ‘drown’ in the quicksand he re-created in the lab. This was a question Dr Daniel Bonn, Professor of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, was determined to answer. Is this fear warranted? Can you really drown in quicksand? Osmun calls what happened a “freak accident.” Still, he doesn’t plan to hike that trail again.Perhaps the fear of quicksand engendered in many of us is compounded by a snake being used to pull Indiana Jones out of quicksand in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.Īlthough quicksand is no longer a go-to for films, fear around it remains. out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure”? (Psalm 40:2) Was David thinking of quicksand when he wrote, “He drew me up.

In times of distress, God is always near. They think about where they might have veered from the right path, what dangers they could have avoided. Trouble often makes people re-evaluate their lives. Besides hypothermia, he suffered only a swollen leg. The next day, a helicopter flew Osmun out. Unbelievably, Osmun and his rescuers had to stay put all night. After freeing him, rangers needed to airlift Osmun out, but a snowstorm was brewing. In all, he was trapped for over 10 hours.

Hiker stuck in quicksand free#

It took several more hours for rescuers to locate Osmun and two more hours to free his leg. “The scariest.” Park rangers found her suffering from hypothermia, a condition in which the body cannot generate heat fast enough to replace the heat it is losing. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” she says. Three hours later McNeill finally got cellphone service and called 911. “Toward the end, I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” he says. He feared losing his leg or dying alone in the 17-degree weather. “I kept telling myself: ‘He would do it for me,’” McNeill says.Īfter she left, Osmun started hallucinating. She knew the fastest route involved wading down the frigid, waist-deep river, rather than walking a trail.

Without cellphone service, McNeill had to go for help. Osmun compared his predicament to “standing in a huge puddle of concrete.” McNeill tried prying the leg out with a stick, but that didn’t work. Osmun’s leg sank up to the knee in the sloppy mixture. “When water cannot escape, it creates a liquefied soil that cannot support weight and creates suction.”Īn unusually wet winter at the park set up perfect quicksand conditions. Quicksand can form in loose, wet sand and standing water, says Aly Baltrus, Zion National Park spokeswoman. Osmun was able to free her-but got stuck himself.

McNeill tripped into a hole containing a frightening mixture: quicksand. Trouble for Ryan Osmun and Jessika McNeill began four hours into their hike. This spring, such conditions in Zion National Park forced two hikers to keep their heads, push through pain, but eventually (spoiler alert) live to tell their tale. Wet weather and sandy terrain turned one hike into a fight for survival.