After driving around on a bunch of bumpy roads all morning doing research monitoring the effectiveness of closing roads with the Clackamas Stewardship Partners, we turned a corner only to be waved down by someone.

As it turns out we found two lost hikers/campers that were totally lost. They had been out in a fairly obscure part of the watershed and had been wandering, lost since the day before.

Their first question was, "any chance you have a good map?" Never before has a vehicle so equipped with mapping capacity driven down this bumpy road. We had GPS with a live link to GIS on a laptop, topo maps, hard copy maps, the works. So naturally our response was a fairly confident "yes".  We then listened to their confused descriptions of where they think they started and parked.

Of course out of all the maps we had none of them showed the obscure trailhead(I say trailhead lightly, it was little more than a pink flag marking the trail) that they were describing. Fortunately I had seen older maps that showed this trail, so we made a few educated guesses and headed further off the beaten track to where we thought their truck was. Much to their great joy we got lucky found their truck down at the end of a very obscure road. 

Yea for happy endings.  Moral to the story, bring your own good maps, don't hope to run into a virtual map store driving down the road the next time you venture out to the middle of nowhere!

Erik