Rocky Mountain News reports on a mom, her daughter, two of her daughter’s friends and a Jack Russell terrier being found after they got lost and spent a snowy, sleety night in the Rockies near Aspen.

Sure, hikers occasionally fall off cliffs and freeze to death on lonely mountain passes and cut their arms off to extricate themselves from slot canyons, but what they do the most often is lose their way. For instance, I have an infallible instinct for coming to a fork in the trail and choosing the wrong one. My response has been to develop a 30-minute rule, which is: a trail has a half-hour to prove it’s going my the way. That way I’m never more than a mile or so from the last wrong turn.

I’ve also found that there are few powers in nature stronger than the urge to go downhill after a long, punishing uphill climb. That urge has betrayed me too many times to count — it starts with a lolling downhill gait that takes me twice as far as I’d ever go if the path were uphill, and it always ends up with a deeply annoying march back uphill to get unlost.

Though it seems like nature is conspiring to keep me lost, sometimes it sends clues that can get me found. Like the time I was hiking in a thick fog thinking I was going north but the wind was hitting me on the side of my face which told me I had to be going south. A map-and-compass check confirmed what the breeze was trying to tell me.

The trick is not to avoid getting lost — that’s inevitable. It’s to avoid staying lost.