#Head stuck in quicksand movie#

We thought that hypothermia would make this a life or death situation. At four o’clock we hit the beacon because we didn’t know when someone might come. I was stuck in mud and it was cold, but there was no blood. It was a weird conversation because the situation didn’t seem super serious. The runners came back around 3:40 and we talked about using the Personal Locator Beacon. The woman connected a trash bag filled with my coats to the rope and moved it out to me. The sun started going behind the canyon wall around three o’clock, and the temperature dropped substantially. I was able to get the quicksand where it was right above my boot line, but that was it. I tried rocking back and forth to move the goop away from my legs.

The woman with me was talking to keep me comfortable. I was wearing a pair of work pants, a wool longsleeve shirt, and wool gloves. I’d been pretty conscious about not getting my body wet, but I lay down in the mud on my belly. When I put my hand in the drink, it went numb after maybe 30 seconds. The struggle to get out had moved mud and led to maybe an inch or two of water around me. I decided to take the weight off my feet. I thought if I was wearing different footwear, and not gaiters, I might have been able to get out. This trip was the first expedition on which I had worn hiking boots. One of his feet had some solid ground that he was able to use as leverage, and he slipped out of his stuck shoe. After about an hour, the other guy got out. At about one o’clock, we built a three-to-one haul system where we rigged up some rope and carabiners to an anchor point on a rock and tried to pull ourselves out. We had a static line for rappelling through slot canyons. The guy with me sank too, but only one foot got stuck.Īfter about 15 minutes of struggling, it became clear that we were going to need leverage. As I hit 90 degrees-facing the canyon wall-I sunk knee-deep in mud. I got about 20 feet from shore and realized it wasn’t easy moving my feet, so I started turning around. I said, “Oh, I’ll go.” Getting Stuck in Quicksand A couple people would check it out and then the others would follow. It looked as though you could walk on it without hitting any water.

We spotted a bank in the river where sand and mud were exposed. About 12:30 P.M., we came to a point where we could no longer walk on the shore because the canyon wall had come to the river’s edge.

We moved along the eastern shore of the river toward an area where we’d meet everyone the next night. The instructors went their own way, and a few other groups of students went theirs. On the morning of November 23, I began hiking with three other NOLS students along the Dirty Devil River in Southeastern Utah, just outside of Canyonlands National Park. That was exactly the situation in which Rob Tesar found himself stuck. A person in a river canyon in the Western United States might be susceptible to hypothermia. Without help, a victim near the ocean might be susceptible to drowning in an incoming tide. The bad news is that once the sludge fully settles around an intruding object, the strength needed to retrieve it would be equal to the might needed to lift a Ford Taurus. The scientists said a human would respond likewise, sinking only up to his or her waist. To test how far someone might sink, Bonn and colleagues put aluminum beads that were the same density as a human body on top of quicksand in a giant box. In 2005, University of Amsterdam physicist Daniel Bonn and his colleagues concluded the stuff, which consists of fine sand particles lightly held together by friction in a water and clay gel with the consistency of yogurt, simply doesn’t work that way.

#Head stuck in quicksand movie#

Forget the corny black and white movie scenes of a jungle explorer getting swallowed whole in a pit of quicksand.