hvydrt wrote: ... if its your first time out, something as simple as following an easy trail can be tricky ...
Here is the first review on Yelp:
"This is my favorite hike in Orange County. It is family friendly if you are just going to the waterfall. The drive from the main road to the parking lot for the trail head is 4.5 miles, and the last 2.5 of it is very rugged - too rugged for small cars with poor clearance. It's about an hour of easy-to-moderate hiking each way to and from the waterfall. Plenty of parents carrying infants and toddlers made it, as did plenty of of preschool aged kids who were walking on their own. The poison oak was plentiful, so be careful when the trail gets thick."
http://www.yelp.com/biz/holy-jim-falls- ... Rp67nTs2zQ
My "Afoot & Afield" guidebook classifies the hike as "marked trails/obvious routes, easy terrain," and other reports I've read seem to concur with that assessment.
I'm not finding anything tricky about this trail. Isn't it basically a clear path up the canyon floor to a waterfall? Even if it's your first time, shouldn't you know enough not to leave the bottom of the canyon and begin scrambling up a steep, brushy slope?
I don't buy the use trail theory. I usually refrain from speculation, but in this case I suspect they purposefully abandoned the trail for one of the many different reasons people do. They subsequently exceeded their navigational abilities, got lost, ran out of water, didn't know what to do, and became further disoriented. To their credit, however, they were smart enough to make an emergency phone call and keep warm by covering themselves in brush. But those things were done out of extreme necessity. At the root of it, they are really dumb and shouldn't be in the mountains unless closely supervised by some of those preschool kids from the Yelp review.
Edit: I thought of one last way to belabor this point. If you analyze most cases where a hiker gets into serious trouble, you'll probably find that it was caused by a failure to reason or simply think things through a bit. For really dumb people such a failure easily occurs on the Holy Jim Trail. But for really smart people it might take severe oxygen deprivation 100 meters from the summit of Everest to induce extreme thoughtlessness and disregard for one's well-being. In both cases, it's the same problem, though: irrationality.
They had some rotten luck for sure.
) and are more concerned with getting a dramatic story out to the public as quickly as possible.
