About two years ago, Charles Merritt and Jay Paul, both singletrack cyclists, river runners, skiers, snowboarders, and adventure racers who live in Richmond, Virginia, noticed a problem among听their friends and other sports enthusiasts: high deductibles and limiting health-insurance policies meant that a broken bone often broke the bank.

鈥淲e have dozens of stories about ourselves, friends, and others who鈥檝e been injured pursuing their outdoor passions,鈥� says Paul, 58, who has worked in the insurance industry for more than 25 years. 鈥淚 personally have been to the emergency room four times through the years for everything from broken ribs and a broken shoulder to lacerations.鈥�

Then Paul and Merritt started seeing GoFundMe campaigns for injured active friends who couldn鈥檛 pay their medical bills. 鈥淎fter contributing to GoFundMe after GoFundMe for friends, we decided that we could do something about it,鈥澨齭ays Merritt,听34, a financial technology marketing specialist who started his career at Kayak, helped launch Jetsetter, and later consulted for insurance giant Allianz Global Assistance.听

The last ten years of health care and health-insurance policies have opened up huge financial risk for outdoor enthusiasts. 鈥淚n general, insurance is opaque,鈥澨齅erritt says. 鈥淭he cost of care is always increasing, and the 2010 Affordable Care Act has caused health insurers to shift more of it to the individual.鈥�

So听Paul and Merritt teamed up with computer-programming expert David Vogeleer, 39, to develop听a radical new concept for people with an active life: on-demand accident insurance听that is efficient, affordable, and user-friendly, rebooting the insurance process much the way Uber rebooted taxis. In October 2018, they launched their company and named it Buddy.

鈥淛ust as breakthroughs in materials science have enabled us to have faster, lighter gear, the revolution in insurance technology allows for us to create new types of coverage to better protect adventurous lives,鈥� says Merritt, Buddy鈥檚 CEO. 鈥淲e鈥檙e starting to see the first wave of how risk will be managed in the era of on-demand everything, and getting what you need when you need it will enable adventurers and active people to choose when and where they add a layer of protection.鈥澨�

Buddy鈥檚 coverage is episodic, and you can tailor it to your needs. You can buy it on your phone or laptop 24/7 at in as little as 90 seconds, from virtually anywhere with cell service, including the base of the mountain you鈥檙e about to climb or the bank of a river you鈥檙e about to run. The policy, backed by Lloyd鈥檚 of London and others, is e-mailed to you instantaneously. It costs听less than $10 for a day (slightly more if you need the competition rider). Or you can scale it up. A week costs $21, a month $50. You can also buy a family policy. Buddy covers most adventure sports鈥攆rom climbing and skiing to road and mountain biking鈥攁nd it doesn鈥檛 ask what sport you plan to do. (While Buddy hopes to expand what activities and adventures it covers, it does exclude a number of more extreme sports, which Merritt describes as activities where you are 鈥渘ot attached to the earth and falling from high heights,鈥� like BASE jumping, big-wave surfing, parachuting, free soloing, wingsuit jumping, and a few others.)

Buddy covers you for the amount of time you sign up for, no matter how many activities you engage in during that time (as long as they aren鈥檛 on the excluded list), whether you鈥檙e听taking part in the sport or heading home and slip on a patch of ice. And you don鈥檛 have to worry about being rejected: with Buddy, you are听鈥済uaranteed issue,鈥� which in insurance lingo means there鈥檚 no underwriting and there are no tests, so you can鈥檛 be denied coverage.

Buddy鈥檚 benefit payouts include cash for ambulance rides鈥攗p to $5,000 for an airlift or $250 for the road鈥攁s well as $500 for an urgent-care visit and $1,000 for the ER (for injuries听like sprains and minor broken bones),听$1,000 a day for a hospital stay (for up to ten听days),听$5,000 for a break or an ACL tear requiring surgery,听and $10,000 for serious burns or a dislocated or broken hip. A more gruesome list of injury awards ranges from $25,000 for the loss of a hand or foot or eyesight in one eye to $50,000 for quadriplegia, severe brain damage, or death. Physical therapy is compensated at $75 a day for up to ten听visits.听

The company鈥檚 business model relies on frequent usage. The average person Buddy targets takes 77 outings a year.

Meanwhile, other companies with similar approaches are hitting the market. There鈥檚 , which currently offers life insurance geared to the adventurous starting at $7 a day for a policy听and is expanding to offer accident insurance in July, and , which covers gear, like bikes and skis, on a sliding scale that starts at less than $1 a day.听

鈥淚f you engage in many outdoor pursuits, bad things can happen, and it can be expensive,鈥� says Paul, Buddy鈥檚 head of business development, who in 2013 was named Insurance Marketing Innovator of the Year by National Underwriter Magazine for pioneering another bold accident insurance: , which pays lump sums to cyclists injured while riding. 鈥淏alance was my first effort at creating new innovative insurance coverages,鈥� he says. 鈥淎fter we built that, I knew we could design one for all outdoor enthusiasts, not just cyclists.鈥�

Buddy鈥檚 coverage is not coordinated with health insurance, and you can do whatever you want with the money, which you receive regardless of other coverage you may have. That means your benefits can be used for any out-of-pocket expenses you鈥檝e incurred, like replacing damaged gear, changing travel plans, covering missed work or your health-insurance deductible, or helping with childcare.

鈥淚 do a lot of solo bikepacking,鈥� says Bill Wright, a retired financial professional听who lives in Buena Vista, Colorado. 鈥淚 like to have insurance. On my most recent use of Buddy, I was going on an all-day, 50-mile ride up into the mountains. My insurance isn鈥檛 that great. Buddy fills in the gaps and gives me peace of mind when I鈥檓 out in the middle of nowhere. When I was younger, I didn鈥檛 think of it, but now I wear a Road ID bracelet with emergency contact information and carry a Garmin inReach. Insurance like Buddy is the perfect complement to all that.鈥�

From the start, Buddy has won insurance and tech-world kudos, incubator awards, and partnerships. It was accepted into the two most prestigious insurance-tech accelerator programs in the country. The only bump in the road has been how slow the insurance industry and its regulators can be.

Each of the 50 states has its own insurance standards, so Buddy has to apply separately to regulators in each one. Fortunately, Buddy鈥檚 paperwork is solid, with pricing and benefits based on sports-injury data from the CDC and听reports from听institutions like the Outdoor Foundation, and it鈥檚 crunched by actuaries in the U.S. and at Lloyd鈥檚 of London.

So far, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas have given the thumbs-up听and are the only states in which you can currently purchase a Buddy policy if you鈥檙e a resident. Once purchased, the policy covers you wherever you plan to adventure, whether it鈥檚 your backyard, across the U.S., or internationally. Buddy expects to be available to purchase in at least 45 states by fall.

In the states where it鈥檚 approved, Buddy has partnered with regional and national outdoor associations, event promoters, and sports organizations. The American Canoe Association, the Mountain Bike Association of Arizona, Bicycle Colorado, the Colorado Mountain Bike Association, the Colorado Mountain Club, and Xterra adventure races听are all early adopters.

鈥淥ur mission at Bicycle Colorado is to get more people riding bikes,鈥� says Jack Todd, the organization鈥檚 communications and policy manager. 鈥淏uddy helps by making people feel safe while riding. Our missions are mutually beneficial. Buddy will help us get some more of those people who aren鈥檛 riding today, riding tomorrow.鈥�

It seems to be catching on. Since launching, Buddy has covered more than 8,000 days of adventure.

鈥淥ur goal is to help outdoor enthusiasts live their lives more fearlessly,鈥� says Paul.

鈥淥ur on-demand accident insurance does that by giving people a fast and light way to protect from the maybes,鈥� adds Merritt. 鈥淲e all know the feeling of maybe or what-if when we鈥檙e about to take on something big. Those doubts can cause us to second-guess the commitment to a jump or take our minds off our foot placement just long enough to cause a mishap.鈥�

User听testimonials听on Buddy鈥檚 website validate this. 鈥淚 definitely felt more free to send it!鈥� Noah Moore, an Air Force master sergeant, wrote after a ride on the trails of Mingus Mountain, in the Black Hills of central Arizona. 鈥淚 knew it was going to be gnarly; it was the next level of awesome I was looking for.鈥� Worried about his carbon bike, Moore signed up for a day of Buddy coverage听but still rode cautiously on the first run听鈥渢o protect my investment.鈥�

On the second run, his crew wanted to go faster. 鈥淚 was, like, 鈥楬ell, yeah.鈥� There were features I avoided the first time that I really wanted to do. The second time I hit them. I don鈥檛 think I would have if I didn鈥檛 have the insurance. I don鈥檛 think I鈥檒l ever ride a serious downhill again without it.鈥�

The post This 国产吃瓜黑料 Insurance Is Good News for Risk-Takers appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

A ball of fire with twinkling blue eyes, Robert Arthur Wood Jr. is a four-foot-six, 70-pound eight-year-old who loves to swing. His doting grandmother, Norma Jean Williams, calls him Bud, and he gives as good as he gets when he and his brother, Ryan, a year younger, scrap over a toy. Robert can see and hear fine, but he can鈥檛 talk, swim, sit still for a movie, or use the bathroom by himself, because he is also severely autistic.

Ryan, a dark-haired version of Robert and also autistic, but less so, hugs and kisses his brother. Robert is not as affectionate. He is prone to repetitive motions, like hitting himself over and over with an empty plastic soft-drink bottle. But most of all he enjoys swinging. If you let him, he鈥檒l do it until his hands blister and the skin on the back of his legs rubs raw. Even then he keeps swinging.

Robert and Ryan are both in constant motion, jumping, rocking, and pounding things. Like many children with autism, they are fearless. As a toddler, Robert liked to climb on top of the television and the refrigerator. He also likes to wander鈥攐r, as behavioral specialists call it, 鈥渢o elope.鈥� At Walmart, Robert鈥檚 mother, Barbara Locker, still puts him in the shopping cart. If you don鈥檛 hold him by the hand or by his shirt, he might run off.

That鈥檚 exactly what happened on October 23, 2011, a warm Sunday afternoon. After lunch, the boys鈥� father, Robert Wood Sr., 34, known as Robbie, and his girlfriend (Wood and Locker have been separated for six years) took Robert and Ryan for a walk at the rarely visited 80-acre , in Virginia鈥檚 Hanover County, 15 minutes from the boys鈥� home in Ruther Glen. This was no ordinary walk in the park. The hilly green thickets of central Virginia, where Grant vied with Lee in an epic battle for nearby Richmond, are prickly and hardscrabble, with skin-ripping greenbrier and blackberry bushes, not to mention coyotes and bobcats. In this land of rivers, ravines, swamps, mosquitoes, and water moccasins, the Union general soon discovered, inhospitality was endemic.

Within the park, narrow paths tunnel through dense woods. A warren of Confederate breastworks leads to a bluff鈥攚ith no guardrails鈥攖hat plummets 90 feet. Below, the North Anna River rumbles through the boulders and Class III rapids of Falls Hole. Nothing separates the park鈥檚 other boundaries from a massive open Martin Marietta gravel quarry, with its clatter of industrial dump trucks, bulldozers, and freight trains and roar of controlled explosions. It鈥檚 a fantasy-land for any boy, autistic or not.

At around 2:30 p.m., while the group was resting after a mile-long walk, Robert ran down a spur trail. Somehow both his father, an avid Civil War-relics hunter, and his father鈥檚 girlfriend missed seeing him take off. Wearing a red long-sleeved shirt, blue pants, and blue tennis shoes, Robert would not have been difficult to spot. Yet he vanished.

Within five minutes of Robert鈥檚 disappearance, according to Wood and his girlfriend, they had placed a call to 911 for help. Within an hour, the Hanover sheriff鈥檚 department was searching the area with two canine teams. , a local tracking organization, arrived with two more teams.

Because of his autism, Robert probably didn鈥檛 know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from them, thinking it was a game of hide-and-seek. Or he might not have wanted to be found by a stranger, even one calling out his name. This made efforts to locate him extremely difficult, and it鈥檚 how Robert managed to elude what would soon become one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in Virginia history.

When he disappeared that day, Robert began an unlikely adventure that placed him at the center of the newest concern in the search-and-rescue (SAR) world: lost autistic children. Why autistic kids have the tendency to run off is not known, but the urge is strong in half of all children diagnosed with the disorder.

A neurological condition present from early childhood, autism is characterized by difficulty communicating and forming relationships, as well as cognitive abnormalities. The condition is measured on a spectrum, from high functioning to low functioning, from those with Asperger鈥檚 syndrome鈥�-associated with above-average intellectual ability, impaired social skills, and restrictive, repetitive patterns of interest and activity鈥攖o the 40 percent who, like Robert, are nonverbal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a staggering increase in the number of autistic children in recent years. In 2008, 1 out of every 178 children had some form of autism. By early 2012, that number had risen to 1 in 88. Little is known about the sudden upsurge of cases, but researchers at the National Institutes of Health believe that a genetic predisposition to the disorder may be exacerbated by an unknown environmental component. The condition affects five times as many boys (1 in 54) as girls (1 in 252).

Unable to filter out distractions and easily overstimulated, autistic kids don鈥檛 like noisy environments or group settings. 鈥淯sually, when we see a child wander off, bolt, or elope, they are on the severe side of the spectrum,鈥� says Lori McIlwain, mother of a 12-year-old autistic boy, Connor, and executive director of the Boston-based . She helped found the organization in 2003 to advocate for policy change in medical care for those with autism. Connor has run off nine times from three different schools. 鈥淎utistic kids can鈥檛 tell us, 鈥楬ey, the sunlight is bothering me鈥� or 鈥業 saw a pool I want to check out鈥� or 鈥楾here鈥檚 a swing I want to see.鈥欌�夆��

McIlwain estimates that 40 percent of children with autism will go missing at some point in their lives.

It was the case of nine-year-old Logan Mitcheltree that alerted McIlwain to the budding crisis. In December 2004, at 5 p.m. on a Saturday, the four-foot-tall, 55-pound boy with reddish-blond hair and dark brown eyes slipped out of his home in South Williamson, Pennsylvania. For two days, firefighters, forest rangers, state troopers, civil air pilots, police, and hundreds of volunteers searched around the clock. A snow squall hit, and the temperature plunged to 15 degrees. Logan, who was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and slippers and was carrying a knapsack, died of hypothermia a mile and a half from his home. He was headed up a nearby mountain, probably attracted by the flashing lights of a radio tower.

Since September 2011, McIlwain says, 143 cases of missing autistic children have been reported around the world. Circumstances vary widely. In February 2012, outside Melbourne, Australia, seven-year-old Ryan Pham, who had disappeared overnight, was found naked and shivering in the reeds, about to wade into the swift Kororoit Creek. In April, 13-year-old Ross Harrison bolted from his home on West 182nd Street in the Bronx and rode New York City subways for three days while his parents, friends, and the authorities searched for him. Two riders eventually found him late at night on a J train in Brooklyn.

Once Robert Wood was off and running, he was quickly lost, too. Dashing up and over trenches, through thickets of mountain laurel and briars, he caught spiderwebs in the face and picked up ticks and chiggers as he ran. The forest floor was littered with large trees, branches, and piles of deadfall caused by recent hurricanes and tropical storms. Robert likely moved from one thing that provoked his curiosity to the next鈥攂oulders to climb, trees to examine, the allure of a train-whistle blast. If it weren鈥檛 for the profusion of copperheads, black snakes, and corn snakes, it would have been the ideal place to play paintball or hide-and-seek.

Over the age of four, normal children recognize that they are lost and will look for their parents. Their spatial maps are flawed, but they will devise strategies to get found. 鈥淭he biggest difference,鈥� according to SAR expert Robert Koester, is that nonautistic kids are 鈥渁 lot less likely to be evasive. Once they get hungry or cold, they will call out to searchers.鈥�

But Robert doesn鈥檛 feel pain the way normal children do. He could sprain an ankle or suffer cold and dampness without complaint. The pangs of hunger wouldn鈥檛 make him cry. He鈥檇 harbor no fear of the dark or the bogeyman and wouldn鈥檛 dread solitude, so he wouldn鈥檛 get panicky at dusk.

He is also in possession of a healthy dose of determination. One educator called him 鈥渁 very tough kid,鈥� 鈥渁 very resilient kid,鈥� and 鈥渞esourceful, in his own way.鈥�

Robert's father and his girlfriend had been sitting on a bench in the park at observation deck number seven when Robert bolted. The north-facing bench looks out on a ravine up which a futile Union assault had been made on May 24, 1864. A sign describing the battle, and the kindnesses rendered to a fatally shot Union officer afterward, is entitled SAVE YOURSELF IF YOU CAN.

From there the police dogs had tracked the boy going toward the river. Like many autistic children, Robert is obsessed with water. Autistic kids can be hypersensitive to certain stimuli, and some experts believe that water is soothing to them. Though Robert can鈥檛 swim, he thinks he can. According to the National Autism Association, from 2009 to 2011, 90 percent of the deaths of missing autistic kids were by drowning. The river would remain an area of major concern throughout the search.

Typically, after a 911 call is received for a missing person, police officers report to the scene and evaluate the situation for foul play and other factors. When a minor is involved, any adults associated with the child, including parents, are routinely assessed as to whether they should be considered suspects. The reporting officer usually has discretion to initiate a search.

Robbie Wood, an unemployed maintenance worker, has weekend visitation rights with his sons, and they鈥檇 stayed with him the night before. The day after the trip to the park, he was due in court. He had been summoned by a judge in Caroline County, where the boys and their mother live, for failure to pay child support amounting to $6,698.01. Locker was seeking a court order and possible jail time to get him to pay up. But while the family has its troubles, authorities ruled out either parent as a suspect and quickly initiated a search for Robert.

Once a person is officially declared missing, often it is a combination of police officers, fire department personnel, and other specialized units who conduct the search. Decisions are made as to which resources to tap, usually SAR units鈥攄ive teams, technical teams, dog-tracking teams鈥攕ourced from local and regional emergency services. State police specialists, including air support, are the next level.

Half of all searches are concluded within three hours and 10 minutes鈥攁n overdue hiker, having sprained her ankle, finally surfaces or a hunter emerges from the woods after a prolonged search for a lost hound. Within 12 hours, 81 percent of all lost-person cases are wrapped up, and 93 percent of the time the case is closed within 24 hours.

As the hours passed without any sign of Robert, Hanover County authorities called in more and more support from neighboring Caroline and Henrico counties, Virginia State Police, and local search organizations. They issued a reverse 911, using computers to send a message about the lost boy to all the landlines in the area. Neighbors started searching their yards and beyond.

Norma Jean Williams, Robert鈥檚 maternal grandmother, a dialysis technician who lives next door to Locker and the boys and often
cares for Robert and Ryan, found out on Monday morning, while she was at work, that Robert was missing. One of her coworkers had heard about it on the radio.

A salt-of-the-earth Baptist whose family has beaten a living out of the land in Ruther Glen for three generations, Williams, 58, jumped into her 2003 Dodge Dakota quad-cab pickup鈥攕he has a backseat for Robert and Ryan鈥攁nd drove to Battlefield Park. A deputy sheriff stopped her at the entrance. No one was being allowed in; the park was being treated as a crime scene. She parked her truck outside, as near as she could to the entrance.

Locker had found out the evening before, when she received a phone call from Wood. Late that night, a sheriff and a dog tracker came by her home to pick up some of Robert鈥檚 clothes and toys to use as scent articles for the dogs. Locker stayed with her mother by the truck during the day and left in time to bring Ryan home from school. Because Williams, Locker, and Wood were emotionally distraught and the park terrain was strenuous, authorities declined to have them participate in the search. (Williams and Locker talked to me for this story. I also spoke with Robbie鈥檚 father, Roger, but was unable to reach Robbie, who, Roger told me, had been hospitalized with kidney failure.)

As Monday afternoon wore on, the area around Williams鈥檚 red pickup looked like Armageddon. County and state-police dog teams deployed in the woods and nearby fields. Tactical dive teams headed for the river. Helicopters thundered overhead, sometimes only 500 feet or lower, using infrared cameras designed to detect heat through smoke, fog, or haze. Because autistic children are often drawn to bright objects and certain noises, fire trucks twirled their lights and ran backup sirens, audible across hundreds of acres, hoping to attract Robert. With the same goal in mind, searchers hung glow sticks in the trees. They also put out water and blankets for him.

Williams hung glow sticks, too, and she refused to leave until the boy had been found. She slept in her truck.

Monitoring from the sidelines, Billy Chrimes, deputy SAR coordinator for the (VDEM), kept abreast of the search from his home in Roanoke. Chrimes, a 36-year-old search-and-rescue training specialist, helped build Virginia鈥檚 SAR system, one of the nation鈥檚 best. But there are strict protocols and codes of behavior in the field. Representing a state agency, Chrimes had to be invited in by local authorities before he could help. 鈥淭here are 134 localities in Virginia,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd 134 different ways to do things. Some of them call to alert us the minute they know someone is missing and call us again within a few hours to bring resources.鈥� But after 24 hours, the state still hadn鈥檛 been called.

Nevertheless, Chrimes and his colleagues spent Monday night preparing and planning their version of the search, sectoring off a map of the area and parsing the first 40 tasks to be accomplished if they were called. Finally, Chrimes decided to seek an invitation to help. At 2 a.m. on Tuesday, he got out of bed after two hours of sleep. As he prepared for the three-and-a-half-hour drive east to Battlefield Park, his mind churned. Originally from Wise County, in the southwestern reaches of the state, Chrimes had gone on his first rescue operation at the age of five, with his father, a firefighter and EMT, to save an injured caver. When he was 13, he started working for the volunteer rescue squad. Chrimes never played high school sports. On weekends, when a call came in, he either was already at the station or would speed the quarter-mile there on his bike鈥攁nd often be the first person to arrive. He skipped college to work in the Coast Guard in Alaska and at jobs as a deputy sheriff and fire department captain.

In the fall of 2008, Chrimes began to overhaul the training for Virginia鈥檚 700-plus volunteer system, a corps of dog handlers, visual trackers, cavers, case analysts, and other search experts. He鈥檚 currently rewriting the state鈥檚 SAR training manual, which VDEM will share across the country and internationally. He sometimes operates for weeks on end out of his Ford F-350 four-door long-bed pickup, which doubles as a mobile command center. He hauls around all sorts of rescue gear鈥攔opes, litters, a SAT phone, a dozen two-way radios, a laser printer for producing topo maps, and a PowerPoint projector for briefing searchers. He handles more than a hundred SAR operations a year for people who need help鈥攔anging from campers, climbers, and boaters to natural-disaster and crime victims to autistic children and elderly people suffering from dementia.

The search for Robert had become statewide news. Tuesday morning, Chrimes showed up at the Hanover County sheriff鈥檚 department command center and requested a meeting with Sheriff David Hines. A high-profile search can become a turf war, and Chrimes wanted to avoid that. He sat and waited three hours鈥攚atching silently as the overwhelmed deputies and their staff tried to process and deploy hundreds of untrained 鈥渆mergent鈥� volunteers鈥攂efore making his pitch to two majors.

By noon on Tuesday, the first ground pounders鈥攁s emergent volunteers are known to SAR veterans鈥攚ere in the field, and Sheriff Hines gladly ceded search-operations management to Chrimes, though he would still maintain his own base at Battlefield Park. Chrimes set up shop in a public-safety building at the nearby Kings Dominion amusement park, where he鈥檇 deal with the processing and deployment of volunteers and manage the state鈥檚 resources.

鈥淕iven the circumstances,鈥� says Chrimes, a blunt, optimistic country boy, 鈥淚 felt like we were going to find him the first night.鈥�

Chrimes had modern technology, dogs, choppers, and thousands of searchers鈥攊ncluding equestrian, kayak, and rappelling teams鈥攁t his fingertips. He also had Professor Rescue, the man who revolutionized the field of search-and-rescue, to lean on.

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Robert Koester had joined the in 1981. He is a VDEM incident commander and a former president of the Virginia Search and Rescue Council. He has conducted SAR operations and research for NASA, the U.S. Coast Guard, the , and FEMA. Over the past two decades, the 49-year-old self-avowed 鈥渘umbers guy鈥� has almost single-handedly codified the search-and-rescue world by collecting SAR cases and feeding them into his international incident database. Published in 2008, Koester鈥檚 handbook, , is regarded as the field bible. Using the book鈥檚 40 categories to create a lost-person profile, a searcher can better predict whether a victim is alive and, if so, where to find him or her.

According to Koester鈥檚 book, where lost hikers are concerned, 97 percent of those found on the first day are recovered alive, while just 49 percent located on the fourth day are. Although it varies by terrain and climate, about 25 percent are found within a mile of where they were last known to be, 50 percent within two miles, 75 percent within four miles, and 95 percent within 12 miles. Half of all hikers are found within 100 yards of a trail or road. Similar data can be found for cavers, climbers, horseback riders, hunters, mountaineers, mountain bikers, runners, skiers, snowboarders, snowshoers, snowmobilers, and ATV riders. There are also statistical breakdowns of children, organized by age, and sections on people with dementia, mental illness, and autism.

Koester鈥檚 stats told searchers that 50 percent of autistic kids in temperate environments are found within one mile of their last known location and 75 percent are found within 2.3 miles; that even in the wilderness, 45 percent are found inside structures and 20 percent on roads; and that 50 percent are found within 15 yards of a linear feature鈥攁 river, railroad, trail, or road鈥攁nd 75 percent within 22 yards. 鈥淭hat gives you a model that sort of looks like spaghetti thrown against a plate,鈥� Koester says with a wry chuckle. Nonetheless, it is a searcher鈥檚 road map.

Despite identifiable tendencies, autistic kids are considered highly unpredictable. As the saying goes in the field, 鈥淲hen you meet one autistic person, you meet one autistic person.鈥� The bottom line for Robert鈥檚 profile was troubling. The model went out only 48 hours, at which point there was only a 56 percent chance of finding him alive.

It would have seemed even worse if it hadn鈥檛 been for a remarkable case 18 months earlier in the Florida swamplands north of Orlando. There, 11-year-old Nadia Bloom, who suffers from ADD, anxiety, and Asperger鈥檚 syndrome, wandered off from home and was lost for four days. She slept in an 鈥渋tchy鈥� bush the first night, managed to evade snakes and alligators, and ate spongy plants until a rescuer found her, dehydrated but otherwise OK. How did she spend her time? She took photographs, many of sunlight flashing hotly off water.

By听2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Robert had been missing 48 hours. At home he took medication to help him sleep on a normal schedule. 鈥淗e would wake up at 3 a.m. and start playing like it was the middle of the day,鈥� Locker told me. In the wild he might be seminocturnal, roaming for several hours and then sleeping for several, making him harder to locate, since he would be hunkered down for at least part of the daytime, when he鈥檇 be easiest to spot if he were moving around.

Based on their research and experience, Chrimes and Koester figured they still had some time to find Robert, as long as he hadn鈥檛 gone to the river and the relatively mild weather didn鈥檛 take a turn for the worse. Temperatures were dropping into the forties at night, and the forecast called for rain and colder weather later in the week.

Thirst was much more of a threat to Robert than hunger. People can go weeks without eating, but dehydration will start to weaken and disorient them within 48 hours. There were plenty of streams to slake Robert鈥檚 thirst, but no one could be sure he would know to drink from them.

Chrimes, Koester, and two others analyzed data and factored in various likely scenarios鈥擱obert had initially gone down to the river or over to the cliffs, or he had wandered outside the park. They circled areas of special interest on the map, giving various chunks of real estate priority in the search, especially the nearby quarry, which would be searched repeatedly by ground and dog teams. 鈥淭here is a methodology,鈥� says Chrimes. 鈥淚t鈥檚 all about putting resources in the right place at the right time.鈥�

If Robert had not gone to the river and drowned, then, given the searches that had already gone on, he was probably either hiding from them or on the move or both.

In the field, searchers need to nail down the initial planning point (IPP), which is either the place last seen (PLS) or the last known position (LKP)鈥攕ay, where a lost person鈥檚 wallet was found or where his car turned up. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 get your IPP right, you鈥檙e going to have problems,鈥� Koester says.

Chrimes had already dispatched Rob Speiden, who runs his own man-tracking and land-navigation school in Christiansburg, Virginia, and is one of the nation鈥檚 top visual trackers, to GPS-map the PLS and LKP. Hanover sheriff鈥檚 department canine handler Matt Crist, the first man in on Sunday, showed Speiden where his dog had tracked Robert and where Wood said he had last seen him, on the park鈥檚 observation deck number seven. As he wandered off, Robert had dragged a walking stick he鈥檇 picked up in the woods. Crist found scuff marks in the path. This LKP indicated the direction of travel: northeasterly toward deck number eight, some 50 yards away.

Then Crist led Speiden to some footprints that had been found about a half-mile east of the PLS, on a sandy bank about 10 feet above the river. Robert and Ryan had been wearing the same kind of Nike shoes. Speiden knelt down and took measurements. They were the right size. Ryan鈥檚 shoe, which they had a cell-phone image of, had small half-inch square patterns, but this track was scored with bars and flex grooves. The match was negative.

Tuesday evening, Koester helped brief some 75 core SAR volunteers in the public-safety building. At 11:30, he called it a night. He was flying to Winnipeg, Manitoba, the next morning to speak at a SAR conference on searches for autistic children. He had worked with Chrimes long enough that he could read him. 鈥淗e was under a lot of stress,鈥� Koester says, pointing out that Chrimes was struggling under the weight of so many emergent volunteers. 鈥淭hings weren鈥檛 going the way they normally go.鈥�

At 1:30 Wednesday morning, a glimmer of hope came. As a member of the mounted search team combed an area about half a mile northwest of the PLS, he heard a strange noise in the woods. It was brief and inscrutable, but it sounded human to him, like someone yelling out. Then nothing. The searcher investigated but saw no sign of the boy.

During a 3 a.m. debriefing, the command team turned to the Internet and listened to the sounds of various indigenous nocturnal animals鈥攔accoons, opossums, owls鈥攖o see if the searcher could identify a match. He couldn鈥檛.

Was it possible that Robert was still alive? 鈥淚鈥檝e seen a lot of searches where they give up after two or three days,鈥� Koester says. 鈥淭hat always makes me cringe. Search-and-rescue is about everybody coming together to find the person鈥攁nd not giving up.鈥�

When it comes to a lost child, communities will rally in astounding numbers, making great sacrifices of time and resources. Wednesday morning, people began registering at the Kings Dominion volunteer center before daybreak鈥攁t least those who came through official channels. Search teams would report well-meaning neighbors combing the grounds and the river on everything from ATVs to horseback to paddleboards. The first official teams headed into the woods at 8 a.m. In all, 940 volunteers would be deployed that day. This was a blessing and a curse.

鈥淎 lot of times, they bring local knowledge and know things that don鈥檛 appear on a map,鈥� says Koester. But it鈥檚 remarkably easy to miss what you鈥檙e looking for. Koester calls it screening鈥攖he eye stops at the outer layer of foliage and doesn鈥檛 register what鈥檚 beyond the screen door. 鈥淪earchers are looking for a full-blown human being,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f the subject is hiding, they might see part of a shoe or a patch of flesh, and subconsciously it doesn鈥檛 register. They don鈥檛 recognize that鈥檚 what they鈥檙e looking for.鈥�

For Chrimes, the volunteers presented a massive logistical challenge. The extra traffic tramples footprints and contaminates the scent pools that tracking dogs are trained to find. Then there are safety issues in tramping off-trail through the woods: ticks, snakes, tricky slopes, hazardous water crossings, and tree limbs that can poke eyes. Volunteers have to be screened for fitness and gear. Some show up in sandals. Others become exhausted and need medical treatment for fatigue.

There was a benefit to the numbers, though. 鈥淲e were able to search a monumental area,鈥� says Chrimes, who over time extended the perimeter several miles in every direction.

All day Wednesday, hundreds of volunteers conducted 74 search missions, some over the same ground twice, tackling a 22-square-mile area north and south of Verdon Road, which contains the entrances to both the park and the quarry. Searchers walked in grids for miles through thick, swampy woods, many carrying treats and toys for the boy and squeezing empty plastic bottles, making a crinkling noise Robert was known to like. They fanned out in long lines, combing woodlands and harvested cornfields. They paced through rows of soybeans, climbed over Civil War trenches, and crawled under farmhouse porches. One searcher fell and had to be treated for a sprained knee.

Many of the volunteers worked in emergency services or were themselves parents of autistic children. A Pennsylvania Turnpike worker came for two days. His 11-year-old son is autistic and had once evaded the watching eyes of four adults at the beach. The boy had taken off in a flash, zipping through the sand so fast that it took the adults an hour to run him down. A Dallas businessman, also the father of an autistic child, skipped his return flight after a meeting in Richmond, visited a Walmart for blue jeans and boots, and joined the line.

鈥淚 have two autistic kids, so it hit really close to home for me,鈥� volunteer Tammy Rogers of nearby Powhattan County told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 鈥淎s a mother you ache. This is the best medicine, just to get out here.鈥�

Another volunteer, Donald Turbin, 47, from Chesterfield County, is a father of four and has an autistic cousin. 鈥淪oon as I heard about it, something told me to go help,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e went through thicket after thicket, stuff so dense you almost needed a hunting dog. And some swamp, too, with knee-deep water and lots of bugs. It was worth every step as long as that boy got out of there fine.鈥�

鈥淚 was worried about copperheads,鈥� says volunteer Rodney Clifton, 65, a retired glazier. 鈥淎 black snake will run from you. A copperhead will bite you.鈥� Clifton showed up underdressed, in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, and scratched up his arms and legs, but that didn鈥檛 matter to him. 鈥淢y grandchildren, I worry so much about them,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f something happened to them, I hope someone would go out and hunt for them.鈥�

Two o'clock Wednesday afternoon marked the 72nd hour that Robert had been missing. Chrimes believed that, if he hadn鈥檛 drowned, he was playing hide-and-seek and playing it well. He thought the boy was mobile, meaning that the areas they swept could be considered clean for only a short time. After every sector search, team leaders reported in and graded the effort.

鈥淭he way to picture it is if there were 100 milk bottles in your sector. Given the number of searchers, the time of day, weather conditions, and other factors, how many would you have found?鈥� Chrimes says.

Rappelling teams descended the steep bluffs to the North Anna River, searching for clues鈥攐r a body. A helicopter-assisted state-trooper dive team was taken in hard hats to the center of the Martin Marietta quarry, where it searched along the surface edges of pits that plummeted 75 feet to dark pools of water.

鈥淲e were seeing nothing,鈥� Chrimes says. 鈥淲e weren鈥檛 finding any clues to follow up on.鈥� But Chrimes is no quitter. In 2000, he saved the life of a teenage hiker who had been missing in snow and freezing rain for eight hours on the Appalachian Trail, near the Dragon鈥檚 Tooth rock pinnacle on Virginia鈥檚 3,000-foot Cove Mountain. Severely hypothermic and unconscious when found just off the trail, the teenager was nearly given up for dead by other rescuers. But Chrimes determined that he still had a pulse. He and another rescuer stripped off the boy鈥檚 wet clothes and their own and did body-to-body warming. The boy was talking and coherent as they carried him off the mountain wrapped in their jackets.

Early Wednesday evening there was another glimmer of hope. Independent tracker Scott Forbes鈥� Dutch shepherd, Da Wu (鈥渂ig warrior鈥� in Mandarin), found a human scent. Dogs play a major role in any wilderness SAR mission. Robert鈥檚 was no different. 鈥淒ogs are huge in that one dog can cover what a team of half a dozen searchers can cover,鈥� says Chrimes, noting that humans shed 40,000 cells a second. 鈥淲hat the dog is doing is finding the most abundant thing we leave behind. They don鈥檛 have to lay eyes on the person.鈥�

Da Wu is trained to find cadavers but can also follow living scents. However, on Wednesday evening he was frequently thrown off by some other smell. Then Forbes saw something he didn鈥檛 like. A bold coyote was paralleling him and Da Wu in the shadows. 鈥淭he boy would be easy opportunity for a pack of coyotes,鈥� Forbes recalls. An awful thought crossed his mind: Maybe they took him and buried him somewhere. Even the veteran searchers were beginning to get spooked鈥攁nd to think the unthinkable.

By ten o鈥檆lock Wednesday night, Chrimes was spent. He had not had more than a catnap at his post since Monday evening. At a nearby Best Western, which had generously provided free rooms for the searchers, he took a hot shower and collapsed into bed.

On Thursday morning听the mood turned darker. At around 11 a.m., an explosion shook the ground under Norma Jean Williams鈥� truck. The Martin Marietta quarry, part of the nation鈥檚 second-largest producer of construction aggregates, had delayed a scheduled blast next to Battlefield Park for as long as it could. Quarry officials said they had searched the area twice that day and needed to go ahead with the detonation. Then volunteer Rodney Clifton, who uses a pacemaker and had shown up for another four-hour search, suffered a massive heart attack at the end of his shift. (A quick-moving medical student would revive him.)

Later that day, searchers learned Williams鈥� special nickname for Robert. They swept the area close to the PLS once again, calling out for Bud. At around 8:30 that evening, two of the state鈥檚 top trackers, Randall Burleson and Mark Gleason, from , heard something near the PLS that made the hair stand up on the backs of their necks. It was human sounding: a high, guttural noise鈥�bepp, bepp鈥攃oming from the woods. They looked at each other and called out Robert鈥檚 nickname again. They heard the same noise, but fainter. 鈥淗ey, Bud, let鈥檚 go see Daddy,鈥� they called. 鈥淟et鈥檚 get something to eat.鈥� No response. The searchers thrashed into the bushes. They found nothing but were sure that they had been within yards of Robert.

Chrimes responded with everything he had: canine teams and searchers with night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging cameras. They scoured the area for four and a half hours. At 1 a.m. they gave up. If it was Robert, he had pulled another amazing vanishing act.

That night, as predicted, it started to rain and it got colder. Williams had to turn on the heat in her truck. Each night she had parked it in a slightly different place, shining the lights into the woods at a new angle, hoping in vain that they would attract Robert. It was her fourth night in her cramped Dodge, and her nerves, her body, and her will were shot. 鈥淚 gave up hope,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 cursed the Lord. I told him he wasn鈥檛 any God to children.鈥�

By 9 a.m. on Friday, 350 trained workers were in the field. At this point, Forbes says, 鈥淚 was thinking it was much more likely we were doing a recovery than a rescue.鈥�

That afternoon, local authorities finally let Robert鈥檚 father, Locker, and Williams into the park. They drove Williams in on an ATV because she does not get around well. The three hurried down the paths calling out 鈥淩obert鈥� and 鈥淏ud.鈥� There was no answer. For Robert to be found alive at this point was going to take a miracle.

That's exactly what happened in the case of Nadia Bloom, the 11-year-old autistic girl lost in the swamps north of Orlando for four days. A man named James King, a member of the church Nadia attended, had a dream. In it he saw the girl sitting on a log in the swamp. God told him to 鈥渇ollow the sunrise.鈥�

鈥淗e directed my path,鈥� King later told Good Morning America. 鈥淚 would be praying and calling out Scripture, and at one point I called out 鈥楴adia,鈥� and I heard 鈥榃hat?鈥欌�夆��

Could lightning strike twice?

A Richmond-area man, who would insist upon remaining anonymous, said he was reading the newspaper Friday morning over breakfast with his wife when he saw that the temperature was about to drop and that it was going to rain. He told his wife he wanted to go look for the boy. On the way, he stopped at a store to buy a coat, gloves, and a hat.

The man drove to the volunteer processing center to join the search. But he was too late for that day鈥檚 training session and was turned away. Instead, he drove himself to the search area, parked, and followed his instincts. They led him to Misty Morning Lane, a dusty road beside the Martin Marietta quarry. Somehow he evaded the quarry guards, who at other times had been posted at entries to the property. Chrimes鈥� searchers saw the man in the new coat. They left him alone.

Less than a mile from where Robert had last been seen, the man walked between an agricultural field and the quarry. At some point, he either climbed a wire fence posted with no trespassing signs and two strands of barbed wire strung across the top, or he found one of two openings where the fence had been breached by fallen trees. He then pushed his way through scrub brush and onto the backfill from the quarry, scrambling over soft gray earth toward a vast, deep quarry pit. He scanned the pocked, gravel-piled, eroded quarry moonscape. There, near a sheer chasm, in a deep, wet gully, he saw a figure lying on its left side, tucked into the fetal position.

Barbara Locker was with her friend Carolyn Coutts, in Coutts鈥� RV, where she had gone to get coffee. Coutts got a phone call and told Locker that Robert had been found. 鈥淭he look on her face and the screech she let out,鈥� Coutts told a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter, 鈥渢hat was worth every second of every minute we were there.鈥�

When Williams saw a sheriff鈥檚 car speed up and then heard the news from a plainclothes detective that Robert had been found, she dropped to her knees. 鈥淚 thought he was going to tell me he was dead,鈥� Williams says. When she found out that her grandson was alive and was being flown to Richmond for treatment, she said, 鈥淚鈥檝e got to get to the hospital.鈥�

The man in the new coat had found Robert, still dressed in all of his clothes except his shoes. The boy was cold and scared. His hands and feet were purple and swollen. He had been mauled by insects and spiders and inhabited by chiggers and ticks. His body was covered in dirt, bruises, and scratches, and his head was skinned up. But he was alert and breathing without trouble. The man took off his new hat鈥攁 stocking cap鈥攁nd put it on the boy鈥檚 head. He slipped his new gloves over the boy鈥檚 bloated hands and wrapped him in the new coat. He gave Robert some water, which he gulped down. Then he called 911.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think Robert would have lasted one more day,鈥� his grandmother later said.

News spread among the searchers. Word went around summoning all the volunteers back to their base stations. There they learned that Robert had been found. There were hugs and tears and shouts of joy.

Several men, including a firefighter and Sheriff Hines, had formed a chain and passed the boy up out of the gully to where others stood with a litter. 鈥淏ud, Grandmother loves you. She misses you,鈥� one of them told Robert. Shortly after 2 p.m., Robert was airlifted in fair condition to Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center Children鈥檚 Hospital by a Virginia state-police helicopter. By that evening, his condition was upgraded to good. At some point, he had eaten something that had torn his esophagus, probably a stick, but the abrasion would heal itself.

As soon as the man called in his find, the sheriff鈥檚 department sealed off the area. Neither press nor other searchers were allowed in.听

Like James King, the man who found Robert wanted no credit for finding him. Instead, he issued a statement through the Hanover sheriff鈥檚 department: 鈥淚 was guided by the Holy Spirit,鈥� he said. 鈥淭o take any recognition for finding Robert would take credit away from God.鈥�

Despite repeated efforts by me and others, the man has never been identified, and he has never spoken publicly. The Hanover sheriff鈥檚 department refuses to forward him a message. Few if any questioned the story in the tsunami of praise that came for the humble man.

Norma Jean Williams tried several times to learn his identity through the sheriff鈥檚 office. 鈥淭hey said they would deliver a message,鈥� Williams says. 鈥淏ut they never would tell me who he was.鈥�

How had Robert beaten the odds and, for five days, evaded multiple searches of the area that he was ultimately found in? There are rumors that a quarry employee actually found Robert, but Martin Marietta officials aren鈥檛 talking. Nor is the Hanover County sheriff鈥檚 department, which refused my request to discuss the search with its officers other than a spokesperson.

The expert searchers want to know, too. 鈥淥ur hounds checked this man鈥檚 steps,鈥� says Forbes. His story checked out. 鈥淲e tried to backtrack on the boy but could not find a scent,鈥� he says. 鈥淎 dozen dogs on the ground … I鈥檓 still baffled by it.鈥�

The only explanation is that anytime Robert heard someone nearby, he ran and hid. And he was damn good at it.

Chrimes and Koester are taking it in stride. 鈥淚鈥檓 a gut-instinct kind of guy,鈥� Chrimes says. 鈥淚n this case, someone listened to his gut and happened to be in the right place at the right time.鈥� He adds, 鈥淓verything Robert did fell into the file of what would be expected of him. The area where he was found was searched anywhere from six to 10 times.鈥�

Koester agrees. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 strike me as a particularly unusual outcome,鈥� he told me. 鈥淚t ultimately fit the model well. Being evasive fit the model well. His survivability doesn鈥檛 actually surprise me all that much. Lost people last longer than the general public thinks they will. There鈥檚 a big difference between being uncomfortable and being dead.鈥�

Robert is alive and well, living at home with his mother and grandmother and going to school. He still can鈥檛 tell us where he was all that time or what he was doing. He and Ryan now wear miniature transmitters on snug vinyl straps around their ankles, acquired for them through , a program that helps those suffering from Alzheimer鈥檚, dementia, or autism, and through the Caroline County sheriff鈥檚 department. The transmitters send out a signal for up to a mile and can be tracked by law enforcement.

But Robert has also changed.

鈥淵ou can touch him now. You can hold him,鈥� says Williams. 鈥淏efore, he would never let you. When I say, 鈥楪ive me a kiss,鈥� he gives me a kiss. And he doesn鈥檛 run off like he did before. He would run out in the field or toward the road. Now, if he runs, he runs to the front door to go inside or to the door of my truck.鈥�

Robert鈥檚 time in the woods might change things for other autistic kids, too. 鈥淩obert鈥檚 case brought it to a national level,鈥� says Lori McIlwain of the National Autism Association. 鈥淟aw enforcement is now asking more about autism. And it showed that you shouldn鈥檛 give up too easily. These children can be found. We would hate for our kids to be left out there.鈥�

Sometimes it just takes a little luck鈥攐r a divine act. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 dismiss the religious side,鈥� Koester says. 鈥淎 few protracted searches for a child with autism had very similar outcomes, where somebody had divine guidance and just went somewhere and looked.鈥�

Dean King () wrote about trekking in China in the April 2010 issue. He is the author of .

The post Catch Me If You Can appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Map of Mao’s Long March, China

Trekking on the Trail of the Long Marchers

China

Horseman Jiu Jiu

China

Local Tibetan hair dress on Dagushan

China

The author in the bog

Dean King in China

Clockwise from top left: the horse caravan; Tibetan cowboy Gama; a local Tibetan woman; crossing into the grasslands; collecting beimu, Chinese medicine; a wolf skin; lunch on Dagushan; local sausage; a Buddhist monk

China

A Tibetan tosses prayer cards for the wind to carry to heaven

WE RECEIVED MIXED MESSAGES before setting off in Sichuan Dagu Glacier Park, a newly established preserve in Sichuan province’s Great Snowy Mountains. At roughly two-thirds the size of Texas, China’s fifth-largest administrative district has 87 million people (more than triple that state’s population). Still, its western border lies on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, from which the Himalayas rise, hundreds of miles to the west. At an average elevation of 14,500 feet, the Snowies remain plenty wild: We were told bandits, mad dogs, and wolves roam the place.

To complicate things, the park lies in Heishui County, one of the hardest-hit by the Wenchuan Earthquake of May 12, 2008. Heishui, which is largely inhabited by Tibetan peoples and still heavily influenced by its lama monasteries, had been officially closed to all foreigners until 2004. The earthquake had temporarily shut its borders again, and no one knew the condition of the roads and trails.

Fortunately for us, our Beijing-based guide, Anglo-Aussie expat Ed Jocelyn, 41, and his Chinese partner, Yang Xiao, also 41 and a contributor to China’s edition of 国产吃瓜黑料, had recently opened Red Rock Trek and Expedition Company for adventures in western China. Ed, who has more Chinese miles under his boots than Marco Polo and had trespassed in this region in 2003, was sanguine about what lay ahead; he pointed above, where, he assured us, Tibetan lasses danced through pastures tending to their yaks, cooled by Dagu’s three 10,000-year-old glaciers.

听

It was early July, the beginning of the rainy season, and in the village of Xia Dagu, at 9,000 feet, the clouds hung on the firs like Spanish moss. 国产吃瓜黑料 the quake-fissured stone house where we’d spent the night, Womudo, a hunched and blind Tibetan, gave us yet another warning: “The bodies of dead Long Marchers found on Dagushan,” he said, “were mauled by bears.”This piqued my interest most of all.

I’d organized the expedition to this remote region to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding the epic trek that had brought Mao Zedong to power in the Chinese Communist Party in 1934 35 and was afterwards turned into the nation-defining myth known as the Long March. Besieged in its Jiangxi-province stronghold in southeast China by the Western-backed Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao’s overmatched Red First Army 86,000 men and 30 women had cut out on an October night in 1934 and simply vanished. Their plan was to regroup with other Communist forces (namely, the second and sixth army groups) 500 miles away in Hunan. But the Nationalists and allied warlord forces resisted fiercely and prevented that from happening. Instead, the First Army would march, fight, and suffer nonstop for an entire year in one of the longest and most brutal military marches in history.

Nine months and a staggering 3,000 miles after setting out, fewer than 20,000 battered First Army soldiers the rest lost to bullets, bombs, starvation, and exposure trudged into the Great Snowy Mountains. The women had served in many crucial ways on the march, from gathering food and recruiting new porters and soldiers to performing onstage for locals and troops and organizing stretcher teams to carry the sick and wounded. Three had been left behind two with wounded husbands, one to organize local militia and 27 remained. For the next two months, on the edge of the area known as “the Roof of the World,” the Reds dealt with debilitating altitudes, bitter internal strife (after merging forces with the Fourth Army), and deadly uncharted high-elevation bogs. They emerged and proceeded to march another thousand miles to northern Shaanxi province, where they established a new permanent base.

I’d come here to retrace one of the trail’s most harrowing stretches for a book I was writing on the 30 women and their fight for survival. In 2006, I had interviewed the last surviving female First Army veteran of the Long March, Wang Quan颅yuan, then 93, whose journey had taken a twist when she was captured by Muslim warlord Ma Bufang’s troops and forced to be a sex slave for two years before escaping.

Over the next ten days, guided by Ed and Xiao, their assistant Mike Tan, 40, and puckish Tibetan wrangler Jiacuo, 46, we intended to follow in Mao’s footsteps, ascending Dagushan on the highest pass of the Long March and crossing the zigzag continental divide (between the Yangtze and Yellow river basins) three times. A team of ten horses handled by four local Tibetan cowboys would carry our gear. We would switch teams in the Maoergai River Valley and cross the caodi, a stretch of high-altitude grassy bogs, where the Long Marchers had vanished by the dozens in inky pools that, as one Red Army soldier put it, “stank like horse piss.”

Traveling with me were several friends and colleagues: Andy Smith, a high-school history teacher and amateur nature photographer; college pal Lawrence Gray and avid hunter and fisherman Gordon Wallace, both businessmen on sabbatical; and Philipp Engelhorn, a Hong Kong based German photographer.

We would cover about 90 miles in all, almost always above 10,000 feet, in a place rarely visited by Westerners. That is, if we could actually get there.

IN THE EIGHTH century, the Chinese poet Li Bai famously proclaimed that it was “more difficult to go to Sichuan than to get into heaven.” Our arrival there had been delayed by 14 months, due to the magnitude-7.9 Wenchuan Earthquake, which devastated the region, taking some 90,000 lives, leaving millions homeless, and burying mountain roads. Finally, in early July 2009, I had made it to Chengdu, Sichuan’s robust capital.

Now two more obstacles had materialized. The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China the Communist-led nation that arose after the revolution was won in 1949 was about to be celebrated, and the government had begun to crack down on travel @#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;boxin and around Tibet to avoid any embarrassing political incidents. Meanwhile, a protest by the Turkic-Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province, a thousand miles to the north, had turned violent; at least 197 people had been killed and 1,600 wounded. Security officials went on red alert, checking IDs at road stops and clamping down borders.

Luckily, Ed, a Mandarin-speaking Russian-studies expert who swapped Russia for China more than a decade ago, is more than just a little savvy. Having walked the entire 4,000-mile Long March route with his friend Andy McEwen in 2002 03, and explored many of the horse and spice trails of western China since, he had picked up a trick or two.

The day we landed in Chengdu, he arranged for a press conference with Sichuan’s largest newspaper. A headline the next morning dubbed us “the Seven Friendly Foreigners.” On our grueling three-day backcountry drive through the Snowies to reach Dagushan, Ed had wielded the article like a badge at checkpoints. At a forestry outpost at the foot of Jiajinshan, the deadliest mountain on the Long March, our van was stopped by uniformed officers and we were told that the road had been closed for three months. Ed presented his papers with the article on top, and an exception was made. Not only were we allowed to pass; we ate lunch in the foresters’ mess before setting out. Bulldozers cleared the road of dirt and debris ahead of us as we drove.

Sichuan Dagu Glacier Park was not yet open to the public when we arrived, though it already had an impressive new Soviet Bloc style lodge and 40 brand-new buses in a mall-size parking lot ready to haul visitors up to see the glaciers. In pursuit of the high pass over Dagu颅shan, we left the village of Xia Dagu on foot and headed up through a jungle-covered gorge of ferns, firs, and at times knee-deep, boot-sucking mud. This working yak herders’ trail climbed a ridge with several hair-raising downhill drops, and twice we had to turn sideways to make room as caravans of horses loaded with yak butter passed. Not far away lay a dead cow stiff but untouched by bears.

We reached the summer pasture at 13,000 feet around happy hour. Sure enough, the meadows were full of yaks, dhoykes the vicious Tibetan mastiff dogs famed in the region and lovely untended yak tenders. One lass with creamy skin and quarter-moon eyes fearlessly invited us into her cabin. Squatting beneath yak jerky hanging from rafters, we sat around the woodstove as she dished out sweet bowls of yak-milk tea.

“There’s a sense of freedom in the people,” Ed said. “You don’t see many fences here, and you also don’t get any sense of indulging in poverty tourism’. The Tibetan herders might not have much cash money, but they have a spirited and strong culture and look outsiders in the eye as absolute equals.”

In fact, in these Tibetan lands, the Red Army had to contend with a fierce people. Advised by their lama monk leaders, who had been doing battle with outsiders for centuries, the Tibetans melted into the mountains before the Reds’ arrival, only to return and pepper them with sniper fire, cut the throats of stragglers, and push boulders down on the marching columns from above.Our second night on Dagushan, we pitched camp at 11,500 feet just before a colossal downpour and lightning storm emphasized the failings of our tarp, where we cooked and ate, and where some of us slept. Nevertheless, Ed fired up the gas stove and whipped up a feast of rice with pumpkin and sausage made by Xiao’s family. For the fearless, Ed like Mao, a fan of culinary heat added a dish of cabbage, bacon slabs, and mouth-numbing black Sichuan peppers.

As the others turned in, Ed and I continued our ongoing conversations about the Long March. He and Andy McEwen had written a book on their journey, in which they detail such groundbreaking discoveries as finding a woman who was potentially Mao’s lost daughter, born to He Zizhen, his wife at the time, and abandoned on the trail.

After retracing the First Army route with Andy, Ed had walked the entire, even longer, route of the Second Army (which had eventually met up with Mao) with Xiao, who is equally passionate about the Long March. Ed has visited every survivor who would see him and now has a better grasp of the Long March than any other Westerner.

“You’ve got to write the definitive Long March account,” I told him.

“I don’t know,” he said with a sardonic chuckle. After returning from each of his expeditions, sitting in front of a computer in his small Beijing apartment, Ed confided, he’d had “crushing depressions.” He prefers above all to be in the field.

It had taken us a day and a half to reach the top of Dagushan. By then we had discovered why Mao and his gang had suffered so terribly. Even in summer, the winds were icy up top and the air thin. In straw sandals and cotton shirts, the 27 women, by then with shaved heads to rid them of lice, suffered from exposure and altitude sickness. After terrible cramps in the Snowies, Wang Quanyuan, then 22, would later find that she’d developed permanent infertility here.

By the time we approached the pass, at 14,661 feet, we were at the highest point of Mao’s Long March. None of the women, who were preoccupied with surviving, ever mentioned in interviews the stark, magnificent view of distant peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls that we now scanned.

IN ALMOST EVERY VILLAGE, we saw signs of damage from the Wenchuan Earthquake, which made buildings sway as far away as Shanghai, more than a thousand miles to the east. In the village of Hadapu, the place where the Red Army finally reemerged from the Tibetan region of China kissing the ground as they did we would see the worst destruction. Whole sections of old houses, shops, and temples were reduced to rubble. Cement facsimiles were now rising in their places.

Xue Luo, a village at the bottom of Dagu颅shan, typifies the double-edged sword of progress in these parts. Here on a small tributary of the Maoergai, the Chinese government has begun building a new village of identical stone houses with red roofs. One cannot dispute the step up in comfort. The atmospheric old village of intricately carved wooden houses sits just above it, doomed to oblivion.

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In the village of Wodeng, a local handed us a note, which read that the two-story mud-and-wattle house in front of us was the site of the watershed Shawo Meeting. Ed and I looked at each other. This was a startling revelation. A young guy named Yixi, whose father was away herding in the mountains, let us in. As was typical in a traditional Tibetan house, livestock lived on the ground floor and the family above. We climbed steep wooden stairs. Yixi pointed out the view from the front window of a large sandbar in the stream. It had always been assumed by Westerners that the famous meeting, at one of the most politically sensitive stages of the Long March, was so named because it took place in a village called Shawo. But now Yixi explained that the words sha wo can be translated as “house by the sand”; the Reds had looked out the window and called the gathering the Sand House Meeting. We’d added a footnote to history.

Here, General Zhang Guotao, leader of the Red Fourth Army, which had met up with the First Army in the Snowies, wrangled with Mao over the structure and leadership of a unified force. Zhang commanded a far larger, better-equipped, and less battered army. But Mao controlled the Communist Party leadership and was more clever in every way. At Shawo, they combined and redivided the troops in an arrangement that appeared favorable to Zhang, but actually kept Mao on his path to ultimate power.

国产吃瓜黑料, oblivious to this transcendent moment, a crowd had gathered to watch Gordon assemble his fishing rod. On his first cast, he landed a footlong Chinese cousin of the catfish, then released it. Strictly speaking, Tibetans, being Buddhist, don’t eat fish.

At a nearby village where we stayed overnight, Ed and Xiao were lectured by a drunk police chief, who, toeing some old party line and mixing his politics, harangued them for more than an hour: “You people from capitalist countries must understand this is a socialist country, and you must respect our different rules! We are Tibetan, we will never go back to the time of feudalism!”

But the hospitable Buddhist monks of the valley’s lamasery, which included a two-story white-painted temple and homes for several hundred holy men, had no qualms about the visiting Westerners. They welcomed us warmly, showed us around their temple, and introduced us to the tonsured nuns at a nunnery nearby. They also served us tsampa, the staple of the Tibetan diet. The Long Marchers, from rice-eating Han China, had a hard time digesting this paste of barley, yak butter, yak curds, and tea. We soon felt their pain.

THE SOUTHERN END of the Snowies is dominated by Mount Gongga, the 24,790-foot peak immortalized in Men Against the Clouds, the classic account of an American team’s successful attempt in 1932 to become the first to summit Sichuan’s tallest mountain. It’s also the site of many climbing accidents, including the May 2009 avalanche deaths of Colorado climbers Micah Dash, 32, and Jonny Copp, 35, and 24-year-old Minnesota filmmaker Wade Johnson. In 1935, the Red Army wisely skirted the treacherous behemoth, but they could not avoid another nightmare, one that awaited them just north of the range.

The most demoralizing stretch of the Long March lay in the uncharted caodi, a system of ridges and bogs, which the Red soldiers called mofengyu a disparaging term for a person with a pockmarked face. Here, the Reds faced wind-driven rain, sleet, and hail. Hundreds died of hunger, exposure, and exhaustion, many drowning in pools of mud and rotting grasses that absorbed them like quicksand.

Now, as we were about to enter the caodi with ten fresh horses and a new set of wranglers, their leader, Sanjindao, 41, neat and inscrutable in a fedora, told us they could not go up the first valley. Their village had a blood feud with villagers in that valley over the right to harvest aweto, a valuable medicinal fungus that grows on caterpillars and is used in the local moonshine. Eight people had been killed in the fighting. So we had to detour several miles to the next valley. There wasn’t anything we could do at this point but add the extra miles to our route.

Crossing a ridge at 12,000 feet, we could sense that we had entered a wilder, emptier place. So large a party does not pass unnoticed in this area, and the Tibetan wranglers feared a raid from their rivals, the same people who’d made the Red Army’s passage here so miserable. At dusk, we circled up the tents on a shelf above the bog and kept the horses inside the ring. With no trees on the hills, the Tibetans hacked up boards they had carried with them and built a fire in their vented tent. Philipp, Lawrence, and Andy crawled inside to join them and warm up. Communicating in sign language and grins, the Tibetans brewed tea and passed around a Sprite bottle full of white lightning.

Green mosquitoes swarmed us, which to Gordon meant a fresh hatch to try on one of the many rivers. He crawled through the fences of an empty winter compound to reach the river but only met heartache.

The rain came down again that night as we huddled around the lantern under the tarp. Jia颅cuo, who had a sun-scorched shaved head, told stories in Tibetan, which Mike translated into Chinese, Ed turned into Anglo-Aussie English, and Lawrence and Andy sometimes re-dialected for the Americans. The Tibetans called the Red Army the “Eat Everything Army,” according to Jiacuo, who lives in the village of Cirina, which the Red Army eventually occupied and we would visit. We later discovered, to our surprise, that Jiacuo, who cheerfully performed some of the camp’s lowliest tasks, like digging the latrines (always with a view), is a Communist Party member and lives in a large home whose pine-paneled living-room walls are hung with salt-cured pigs halved down the middle from head to tail.

“They killed all the soldiers left behind,” he admitted of his village ancestors, “except for the children.” The Red Army called the youths that traveled with them “little devils.” In Cirina, a 12-year-old covered in sores had shown up at the doorstep of one family. They shooed him away. He showed up the next day, and they shooed him away again. On the third day, when the boy returned, the family decided it must be fate and kept him. His children still live in the village.

Now that he’d warmed up, Jiacuo, whose devilish grin made him a camp favorite, told us a ribald tale about Ma Bufang, the leader of a clan of Chinese Islamic horsemen whom the Red Army soon fought. “Ma Bufang kept a harem of 20 women,” he said. “He made them keep dates in their vaginas for two days at a time. He would then eat the dates to give him virility and longevity.”

ED’S NEXT EXPEDITION will be over one of the tallest of the Snowies crossed by the Fourth Army, 17,950-foot Danglingshan. “The peak is clearly the highest,” he said, “but there’s no record I can find of anyone crossing it in modern times.”

Fast running out of Long March peaks to bag, Ed has another obsession: the tea trails into Tibet. While the main routes, which crossed Sichuan, are now mostly paved roads, he has set out to find and chart the north south spurs that connected adjacent districts to the main lines. “The minor trails are the exciting ones,” he said. “They reach into remote parts of areas the size of U.S. states that are basically virgin territory for trekking.” Once he documents these trails on treks that adventurers can join via his Red Rock trekking company he hopes it’s possible to link them in a continuous network, “something like a Chinese version of the Appa颅lachian Trail.”

Deep into the grassland bogs, a week into our trek, it rained torrentially, saturating the endless convolution of ridges, bogs, and streams trilling off in all directions. Picking his way from grass clod to grass clod with his camera gear strapped to his chest, Andy finally splashed down in a murky pool. “The clods got smaller and smaller,” he explained, grinning, “until it was check and checkmate.”

Under such conditions, the female Long Marchers often had to sit upright, back to back, to sleep. “The food ran out, and we had no salt. People felt weak all the time,” a woman called Little Sparrow, then 29, later said. “The swamp was dangerous, and many people sank in and never came back.”

The driving rain took us with such ferocity that, despite the gaiters we wore, our boots filled to the brim. Cold and drenched, we reached Galitai, a nowhere highway stop, and filed into the Grasslands Diner, a metal shack with a pipe chimney billowing black smoke. We’d cross this highway and head north, still through desolate caodi, on an old tea-trail route to Tibet for the last 30 miles.

Inside the diner, with our gear hanging from the rafters, we filled glasses with moonshine from a pickle jar on the counter and exchanged toasts with our wranglers. This wasn’t just any moonshine. It was a regional specialty, and medicinal stuff sorghum liquor with deer antler, aweto (caterpillar fungus), beimu (medicinal grass roots), hongjin颅tian (an herbal concoction used for altitude sickness), ginseng-like dangshen, and dates.

The place began to feel cozy, until the outside door swung open in a western-saloon moment worthy of Sam Peckinpah. Three long-haired biker bandits in yak-hide tunics stood in the doorway. Our horse crew, suspecting they were from the enemy village, froze. The baddest badass, with a gold tooth and a yard of blade in a gold scabbard hanging from his belt, scanned the joint. Twenty-eight petrified eyes stared back at him. Not a word was spoken. Apparently he did not like his odds. (Up against the Seven Friendly Foreigners, who would?) The door slammed shut again and the bikes zoomed off.

NORTH OF THE HIGHWAY, we made gratefully for the even more remote Baozuo Valley. “It’s hard finding places where man hasn’t shaped the land,” said Ed as we scanned the empty valley below.Over the next two days, we would walk beside the Baozuo River on the ghost of a Qing Dynasty road, part of one of the remote tea trails that Ed now waxes on about.

“These trails are a direct connection to the old days of great caravans journeying for many months,” Ed said, “the kinds of journeys I read about in adventure books when I was a teenager.”On the second day out, atop a steep ridge at 13,100 feet, we gazed up the Baozuo Valley, toward the exit from the caodi, where the Red Army had fought the Nationalists and escaped their liquid nightmare. Our horses were edgy, perhaps spooked by the wildlife or by the shifting clouds. One bucked, chucked its load, and made a dash for it, and two more followed. Sanjindao and Gama, his second in command, leaped on two others and chased down the runaways. A late-afternoon storm drove us into the dung huts of a winter camp by a river. As the light faded, shadowy animals barked at us from the steep hillside, and two large unidentified beasts with long red tails, white manes, and charcoal fur prowled. Our horses bunched, pacing and whinnying.

Gordon remained unspooked, however, and returned from the river with a grin and a sizable fish that Mike ID’d as a highland scaleless carp. The Tibetans didn’t mind if we ate it. Pan-fried, it was delicious.

A six-hour, 15-mile trek through the upper Baozuo Valley the next day would take us to the Reds’ exit point from the caodi. Under far different circumstances, we would celebrate the end of our trek. Beyond the reach of officialdom, we’d found a rugged wilderness deep inside China, with few people and vast, wild expanses. “This isn’t a place for day trips and so should escape the mass tourism that weighs on parts of Yunnan,” Ed said.

Organized efforts to try and link trails be they Long March or tea trails are still years away, says Ed, who, despite the complications inherent to China, remains hopeful. “The first step is to establish the concept and to encourage responsible use of these resources.”

The second step? Well, for Ed and Xiao, it will be in a remote valley or on a high slope. If they have their way, this part of northwest Sichuan will become one of the world’s next great adventure destinations.

The post In the Land of the Human-Sucking Bogs appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

WARNING: If you are pregnant, or have kids of any age, read on. This report contains information guaranteed to provide you with the premier places to rest you head. Then rip it in the great outdoors with your wee ones.

Cheating on Vacation: Cheat Mountain Club’s lodge

CHEAT MOUNTAIN CLUB
Durbin, West Virginia
Thomas Edison visited the Cheat Mountain Club in the summer of 1918. Old Tom strung up lights on the lawn and slept beneath the stars—he couldn’t get enough of the fresh air and mountain scenery. Your kids probably will want to do the same, and snooze in the shadows of 4,800-foot peaks and the tall hardwoods of Monongahela National Forest—until, that is, they hear the midnight howl of a coyote.

Built as a private hunting and fishing lodge for Pittsburgh steel barons in 1887, the three-story, hand-hewn log building feels as it might have 100 years ago. The great hall, with oversize maple furniture and a stone fireplace, is perfect for curling up with a book or singing songs by the piano. Hearty meals of fish and game, homemade soups and bread, as well as kids’ fare, are served in the family-style dining room. Children can raid the cookie jar—full of chocolate-chip and oatmeal-raisin goodies—at will.
Out the back door, you can fly-fish Upper Shavers Fork River, known for rainbow, brown, and brook trout. When the lines get tangled, take the afternoon to explore the ten miles of trails that wind through Cheat Mountain’s 180 wooded acres. My kids like the nearby Gaudineer Scenic Area, where a surveyor’s error spared a tract of red spruces, some 100 feet tall and 300 years old.
Afterward, it’s fun to goof off on the three-acre lawn, playing horseshoes or flying kites. As the sun sets, sit on the terrace overlooking the river. You, too, might be tempted to sleep outside. Then again, you’ll want to be well-rested for tomorrow’s adventures.

Enchantment Resort

Sedona, Arizona

Sedona at sunset

After two days exploring the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, my husband, two-year-old son, and I were careening around the hairpin turns of Arizona 89A toward Enchantment Resort, wondering if we’d planned our trip in the wrong order. What could top the Grand? But once we headed into thumb-shaped, pinon-and-juniper-filled Boynton Canyon, with its red walls rising 1,400 feet up on three sides, we felt like we had found our own private park. No crowds! No loud buses!
Set on 70 acres about five miles from New Age Central (Sedona), Enchantment is a modern adobe village, its 71 casitas and main clubhouse painted the same ruddy pink as the canyon’s sandstone walls. The indoor wonders rival the spectacular setting: Top on the list is Mii amo, the new, 24,000-square-foot spa, where haunting flute music greets you as you enter the museumlike space (children under 16 aren’t allowed). From a big menu of body wraps and Ayurvedic treatments, I chose Watsu and a custom facial.

Enchantment makes it easy for parents to indulge: Camp Coyote keeps four- to 12-year-olds busy making dreamcatchers and sand paintings and taking nature walks (our son was too young for the camp, but a grandmotherly babysitter was arranged by the concierge).
Despite my spa retreat and one romantic dinner at the excellent Yavapai restaurant, there was still plenty of family time. One afternoon we hiked the five-mile round-trip to the end of Boynton Canyon, but our favorite activity was simply hanging by the pool. One morning, I sat with a mother of three boys from Boston, watching our kids bat around a giant beach ball and soaking in the astounding view of red pinnacles and buttes. “We thought about taking a day-trip to the Grand Canyon,” she said. “But what could be more beautiful than this?”

Point Reyes Seashore Lodge

Olema, California

Olema, California

Ordinarily a downpour on vacation dampens my spirits, but when we awakened to rain at Northern California’s Point Reyes Seashore Lodge, it only made me want to heap more blankets on the already cozy double beds, laze in front of the crackling fire, and let the rain have its way with the bucolic pasture outside the bay window.
Our sons, Will, 6, and Griffin, 4, however, had food on the brain. So we threw sweatshirts on over our pajamas and trooped through the airy lobby with its 30-foot-long Douglas-fir chandelier and down the stairs to sit next to another fireplace, where we gorged on the continental buffet included in the room rate. Being first in line ensured dibs on the bear claws in the pastry basket. By the time we finished eating, the sky had cleared, changing the morning’s equation.

We know our options well—this 21-room inn is a favored family escape for both active and relaxing weekends. For instance, a two-minute walk out the door puts you on the Rift Zone Trail, which wanders through patches of redwoods along the base of the Coast Range, eventually joining more than 140 miles of trails in the area. My husband, Gordon, wanted to go kayaking in Tomales Bay or horseback riding, but I lobbied for something simpler—a visit to Olema Creek in the backyard. Surrounding the inn’s Douglas-fir-planked lodge are two acres of grass and gardens for play. And three and a half miles west is the surf, which crashes onto beaches with 100-foot-high cliffs along Point Reyes National Seashore.
We poked around Olema Creek and then headed for the Bear Valley Visitor Center, the hub of the National Seashore, via a half-mile trail. My children absorbed wildlife and habitat displays but reached saturation at the replica of a Miwok Indian village. So we turned back to the inn just as a gentle rain began falling.
We could have driven to the nearby lighthouse, or gone to see the local herds of tule elk, or tooled down Highway 1 past a couple of miles of cow pasture to the artsy town of Point Reyes Station. Instead, we returned to the inn’s indoor pleasures. We had everything we needed inside.

The Birches Resort

Moosehead, Maine

The moose of Maine

After 20 minutes cruising in a pontoon boat across Moosehead Lake in central Maine, my three-year-old daughter, Cady, spied the payoff: “I see him! I see him!” she yelled, knocking my husband’s Wisconsin Badgers cap into the chilly water. Sure enough, the lake’s namesake mammal emerged from the woods on spindly legs and nosed along the water’s edge, oblivious to the hum of video cameras.
But the loss of a favorite hat was the sole disappointment at The Birches Resort, a 1930 wilderness sports camp that’s morphed from a hunting outpost into an 11,000-acre family retreat. Situated in the Moosehead Lake region on the west side of the water, The Birches consists of a lakeside lodge with an indoor waterfall and trout tank, 15 hand-built one- to four-bedroom lakeside cabins equipped with hot water, kitchen and bath, and a wood stove or fireplace. That cozy heat source is welcome after a day of hiking or cycling the property’s 40 miles of trails, boating on the 35-mile-long lake, or exploring 1,806-foot Mount Kineo, the largest hunk of flint in the country, with an 800-foot cliff that drops into North Bay.
The Birches is home base for Wilderness Expeditions, which will outfit your crew for its Family 国产吃瓜黑料s Camp (rafting, kayaking, hiking, and wildlife-watching for ages 12 and up) or a float trip on the lower Kennebec River (ages 5 and up). Though the cabins are equipped with cookware, we opted for the meal plan so we could feast on pancakes and steak in the atmospheric lakeside dining room with its 35-ton fieldstone fireplace. Cady spent the last night of our getaway dancing to folk tunes while the moonbeams skipped across the lake.

Across the Bay Tent and Breakfast

Kachemak Bay, Alaska

Cutting across the glass-smooth surface of Kasitsna Bay

Rare is the Alaska lodge where a whole family can afford to stay long enough to let a day unfold without a hyperactive do-it-all plan. While other places on Kachemak Bay, near Homer in south-central Alaska, can cost three times as much, Across the Bay is more like a deluxe camping community where families sleep in platform tents and join together for shared meals harvested from the backyard garden—a modern commune.
The lodge sits among giant Sitka spruces before a steep mountain on the edge of Kasitsna Bay, and it’s most easily accessible via a 30-minute boat ride or a float plane from Homer. Accommodations are straightforward: five canvas-wall tents with cots, plus a main wooden lodge, a dining room, two outhouses, and a bathhouse. Those aren’t without comforts or elegance, though—a piano, board games, books, and hot chocolate in the lodge, and framed art hanging near stained glass in the, um, outhouse. There’s also a wood-fired sauna with stained glass by a creek.
On a typical afternoon, my three oldest kids played in the tide pools, collecting mussels and arranging sand dollars into castles. Later, guests gathered at the shore for grilled salmon and vegetables. A more adventuresome day could include renting the lodge’s mountain bikes to explore an abandoned road up to Red Mountain, eight miles south, or going on a guided kayak tour along the shoreline, visiting the Herring Islands to watch sea otters and whales.

The Wildflower Inn

Vermont

In full bloom: former dairy far, the Wildflower Inn

Turning your home into a family resort is not a stretch when you have eight children age four to 21. It certainly helps if that home is a former dairy farm ringed with plush green meadows and mountains in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Owners Jim and Mary O’Reilly converted their Federal farmhouse and three red barns atop Darling Hill into the 21-room Wildflower Inn, preserving the agrarian feel without tilling the 570 acres. Now in its 17th season, the Wildflower has become the classic outdoor getaway for Boston families who yearn for forests and fields.
A typical day starts with my three-year-old, Melanie, sucking down the chocolate-chip eyes of a teddy-bear pancake, while five-year-old Jake plays air hockey in the adjoining playroom. Then it’s off to the petting barn to frolic with sheep, goats, calves, and a shaggy donkey named Poppy. On summer mornings, a kids’ nature program runs for two hours, with activities like watching beavers on the Passumpsic River. Parents and older children can check out 12 miles of mountain-bike routes that link with the Kingdom Trails, arguably the finest fat-tire riding in the Northeast. Cruise past the barns on smooth singletrack and you’ll soon be lost in the woods, sweeping up and down a serpentine route.

Back on the farm, play a game of horse (what else?) on the basketball courts and then a set of tennis. Kids’ dinner and a movie are waiting at Daisy’s Diner, a converted barn. But after a full day, my little ones are content to lie on the grass and look for Orion—Vermont’s version of nightlife.

Bluefin Bay on Lake Superior

Tofte, Minnesota

I took my family to Minnesota’s Bluefin Bay, ironically, to escape the Midwest. For a group of displaced East Coasters like us, life in the middle can be hard at times. Along with decent bagels and attitude, we miss being on the edge of a continent and looking out. From the deck of our townhouse at the Bluefin Bay, though, we could gaze across the 31,800-square-mile expanse of Lake Superior and leave the prairie far, far behind.
A collection of 70 blue clapboard split-level buildings stacked around a rocky cove, Bluefin Bay recalls the Norse fishing villages that lined Superior’s northern coast a century ago. The airy suites and full-kitchened condominiums have vaulted ceilings and natural wood beams, fireplaces (to take the edge off breezy summer evenings), and stunning lake views that practically pour in through huge picture windows.
Guests are welcome to use the resort’s boats free of charge, and we spent days on the water, paddling over century-old shipwrecks with a certified sea-kayak guide and canoeing the coast on our own. Those willing to tear themselves away from the lake can explore Bluefin’s other backyard: Superior National Forest, a pristine 2.1-million-acre wilderness crisscrossed by more than 400 miles of birch-lined hiking and mountain-biking trails. Your kids will undoubtedly beg for a trip to the luge-course-like Alpine Slide, just up the road at Lutsen Mountains ski area.
At night, should you choose not to use the barbecues outside, take the crew out for mesquite chicken sandwiches at Breakers Bar and Grill, a walk along the lake from the condos. Or take advantage of the on-site kid programs and enjoy a candlelit dinner for two at the Bluefin Restaurant. The ambience and sound of crashing waves will get you in the mood to fire up the double Jacuzzi in your room. But first, stroll under the moon in the chilly night air, which will firmly remind you, lest you forget, that you’re in northern Minnesota.

Ross Lake Lodge

Ross Lake, Washington

Ross Lake Lodge

The Park Service advises visitors to use caution in the glacial meltwaters of northern Washington’s Ross Lake, a 21-mile-long alpine lake hard by the Canadian border, but the three kids cannonballing off the dock where I was sweating in the sun didn’t care. I looked hesitantly at the glaciers attached to nearby 9,066-foot Jack Mountain and then slipped, ungracefully, into the frigid azure water. Cheers erupted. I managed five gasping backstrokes. And then it was time to fish.
My dockmates piled into a wooden skiff with their dad and their fly rods and trolled away from Ross Lake Resort, a string of 15 floating wooden cabins connected by a serpentine dock and parked on the lake’s south end. Founded in the 1950s, the resort is hemmed in by steep, dark evergreen forest and is the only structure in the Ross Lake National Recreation Area, a stretch of wilderness surrounded by North Cascades National Park. Getting to the unreachable-by-road resort is where the fun begins: After a three-hour drive from Seattle along the North Cascades Highway, we had boarded an old-fashioned Seattle City Light tugboat at Diablo Lake—bearded, pipe-smoking captain at the helm—and then chugged 30 minutes to a flatbed truck that hauled us two miles to a small dock on Ross Lake. From there, a runabout shuttled everyone and everything (bring your own food; there’s no restaurant) across the lake to the resort.

We’d settled into our rooms—accommodations at Ross Lake range from two-person cabins equipped with kitchens, wood stoves, and bedding to a modern, nine-person chalet with enormous picture windows overlooking the lake—and rented our own skiff for the weekend ($70 per day). A few easy hiking trails lead to Ross Lake Dam and 6,107-foot Sourdough Mountain, but we fixed on the view north of us and planned to climb 6,102-foot Desolation Peak. So we boated—followed by a family of four traveling in kayaks ($31 per day)—to the trailhead, casting for rainbows and cutthroat en route. At the summit, the kayaking family caught up with us, and the two youngest members of their expedition surveyed the lake for the best swimming holes to test at sunset.

The Winnetu

Martha’s Vineyard, MA

With miles of untrodden island coastline and a web of bike trails, Martha’s Vineyard is the optimal family getaway, but until recently, with area zoning laws limiting commercial construction, there wasn’t a decent family resort. That changed last summer when Mark and Gwenn Snider opened The Winnetu Inn and Resort at the south end of Edgartown. They demolished the shell of a run-down hotel-cum-condo-building and made a grand shingled New England-style hotel in which every spacious suite affords ocean or dune views.
My family first met Mark as he pulled up in his 1945 fire truck, ringing the bell. This father of three will do almost anything to entertain children. He’s organized pee-wee tennis clinics that start in summer at 8 a.m. and activities like scavenger hunts, arts and crafts, sand-castle contests, and bodysurfing on adjacent three-mile-long South Beach. In the evening, kids can go to the clubhouse for food and games while parents opt for fine dining at the resort’s seaside restaurant, Opus, or head into Edgartown, the island’s oldest settlement.
We favored getting on our rented bikes and hitting the trails. One day we pedaled to Edgartown and took the two-minute ferry across to Chappaquiddick, and then rode to the Cape Poge Wildlife Refuge, a stretch of coast that’s home to threatened piping plovers and ospreys. On our final day, we ventured ten miles to Oak Bluffs, stopping at the windswept dunes of Joseph Sylvia State Beach to swim, and ending at the Flying Horses Carousel, the country’s oldest operating carousel, built in 1876. Not surprisingly, Snider picked us up by boat to escort us back to the resort.

Steinhatchee Landing

Steinhatchee, Florida

Cottage industries: Steinhatchee lodging

As we neared the sleepy fishing town of Steinhatchee (pop. 1,100) on the southeast end of Florida’s Panhandle, my family and I half expected to see Tarzan come swinging through the tangle of moss oaks and silver palms. Far removed from Mickey and his perky pals, we’d ventured into what tourism folks call “Old Florida”—a pre-theme-park haven of lush vegetation, snoozing alligators, and wild turkeys.
Our base in this unhurried paradise was Steinhatchee Landing, a 35-acre resort on the Steinhatchee River, built to resemble a 1920s village of two-story vacation cottages, many of them Cracker-style (the term “cracker” refers to the state’s early settlers, who cracked long whips to herd cattle). Each has a tin roof, a big front porch, and all the modern conveniences—microwave, stereo system, washer and dryer, VCR, and even a refrigerator pre-stocked with soda. Though just 12 years old, the place enticed us to savor the syrupy-slow pleasures of past generations: listening to crickets, fishing for shiners off the dock, and watching the sun melt like red sherbet into the Gulf.

When my husband, daughter, and I felt like budging from the porch swing, we found much to do: We swam in the riverside pool, paddled canoes, and rode bicycles on the dirt trails through the resort into town. On a sunset pontoon cruise, our guide pointed out rare brown pelicans guarding their nests. One afternoon we drove 50 miles and soaked, under a canopy of cypress, gum, ash, and maple trees, in the clear, 72-degree waters at Manatee Springs State Park, where an industrious spring churns out 81,250 gallons every minute. Entrance fees at some 30 natural springs and state parks, all within an hour of the resort, are waived for Steinhatchee guests.

Park Places

National parks often get the drive-by treatment: Vacationing families cruise in for the day, climb out of the minivan at a few major vistas, and then high-tail it out for the night. These lodges, in five of America’s most revered parks, will guarentee you linger.

Yosemite National Park

LeConte Lodge
Rugged folks once farmed much of the rocky ground that Great Smoky Mountains National Park occupies, and their abandoned homesteads remain the park’s most popular attractions. But only at LeConte Lodge can you live as the pioneers did. Getting to the lodge requires a 5.5-mile hike to the top of 6,593-foot Mount LeConte, on the Tennessee side of the park. Once you;re there, you’ll find rough log cabins, lantern light, and family-style Southern cooking. The lodge sits at a crossroads of trails, making it an ideal launchpad for day hikes. ($82 per adult, $66 per child, including breakfast and dinner; 865-429-5704; ; open late March to mid-November)
Montecito-Sequoia Lodge
At Montecito-Sequoia Lodge, near California’s Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, children head off for supervised riding, boating, swimming, hiking, or tennis, while parents are free to enjoy the park on their own—perhaps hiking among the giant sequoias or granite domes. Families rejoin for meals and to sleep in basic rooms in a 24-room pine lodge or one of four cabins, with sweeping mountain views, arrayed between a small lake and a swimming pool. ($760-$855 per week per adult, $690-$800 per child; 800-227-9900; ; open year-round; reserve a year in advance)

Bear Track Inn
At the doorstep of Glacier Bay National Park is the Bear Track Inn. With its huge-log facade and vast fireplace warming the common room, it’s got Alaskan ambiance down pat. It’s also the area’s most luxurious accommodations, offering elaborate meals and 14 high-ceilinged guest rooms with down comforters. Bear Track Inn looks out on a field of wildflowers; beyond lies the ocean and the community of Gustavus—a springboard for sea kayaking among whales, fishing for salmon and halibut, and taking a boat ride into the park to see the glaciers. ($432 per person per night, including ferry from Juneau and all meals; 888-697-2284; ; open May through September)
Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort
Pure bliss is found in the Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort’s marquee attraction after a day of exploring Washington’s Olympic National Park. The three geo-thermal pools are a mineral-water delight following a hike along the Sol Duc River—where salmon jump the crashing falls—and up through mossy forest to tree line and the tiny alpine lakes above. Kids may prefer the freshwater swimming pool to the hot springs. When everyone has reached prune state, retreat to your cabin in the rainforest. ($130 for two people in a deluxe cabin with kitchen, $110 for two without kitchen, $15 per night for each additional person; 360-327-3583; ; open March-October)
Tenaya Lodge
At the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park, Tenaya Lodge offers a national-park experience that’s more like a California resort vacation. The lodge sits like a mansion on land surrounded by forest and park, and its rooms have niceties like plush chairs and Gold Rush脨 heirlooms. Tenaya脮s kid-only activities include a twilight flashlight hike&3151;or take the whole family to ride horses into Mariposa Grove, swim in two pools with underwater sound systems, and cruise on a nearby steam railway. ($209-$299 per night, double occupancy; 800-635-5807; ; open year-round)

Slope Sides

Ski resorts have realized how perfect their alpine playgrounds are for summertime family getaways. They’re opening their slopes to mountain bikers and hikers, ratcheting up adrenaline levels at kids’ adventure camps, expanding day care, and offering lodging deals in the off-season. Here, four of the summer’s best.

Utah’s Wasatch Range

Westin Resort & Spa, Whistler
In summer, Whistler’s still-snow-covered Blackcomb glacier attracts planeloads of serious skiers and boarders, and an equal share of vacationing families who love the novelty of British Columbia skiing in the morning and rafting the Class II Green River撰or hiking in Garibaldi National Park, or soaring in a tandem paraglider脩in the afternoon. The Westin Resort & Spa (888-634-5577; ) offers posh suites with kitchens that start at about $118 (American) a night. Splurge on a body wrap at the hotel’s Avello Spa and Health Club while your children play in the Whistler Kids program (18 months to 12 years, about $43 per day or $25 per half-day, including lunch; 800-766-0449; ).
The Mountain Suites at Sundance Resort
A sanctuary of handsome, weathered buildings in a quiet canyon outside Provo, Utah, Sundance Resort has a mission: to foster creative expression, communion with nature, and environmental stewardship. In that spirit, youngsters at Sundance Kids camp (ages three to 12, $50 per day) begin the day with yoga, followed by photography, jewelry, and pottery sessions. Mom and Dad can take similar classes at the resort’s Art Shack studios. Stay in a Mountain Suite and you’ll be steps away from horseback riding, lift-served mountain biking, and hiking trails in the Wasatch Range. Decorated with Native American textiles, each one-bedroom suite ($450 per night) sleeps four and has a kitchen (800-892-1600; ).

Condos at Sun Valley Resort
Idaho’s Sun Valley, escape of the rich and famous since 1936, becomes a laid-back, family-friendly hiker’s paradise when the snow melts. Eighty miles of trails zigzag through Sawtooth National Recreation Area, and lifts allow even the youngest children to reach the incredible vistas on 9,000-foot Bald Mountain. Parents can go cast on the holy waters of the Salmon River while kids rock climb and ride horses at Sun Valley Day Camp (ages six months to 14 years, $59-$90 per day and $49-$64 per half-day; 208-622-2288; www.sunvalley.com). You’ll have room to spread out when you rent a condo through Sun Valley Resort (800-786-8259; ) or Premier Property Management (800-635-4444; ). One- and two-bedroom units cost $180-$300 per night.
Steamboat Grand Resort Hotel
With 50 miles of steep, boulder-strewn singletrack, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, vies with Mammoth as one of the country’s primo downhill-mountain-biking hot spots. And Steamboat Kids 国产吃瓜黑料 Club’s mountain-bike clinic lets nine- to 12-year-olds get in on the fun. Younger kids are also welcome at the 国产吃瓜黑料 Club (ages three to 12, $48 per day; 970-871-5390; ). For easy trail access, stay at the 328-room Steamboat Grand Resort Hotel. Each luxurious one-bedroom suite sleeps six and costs $225 per night (877-269-2628; ).

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