(Ron Lee) wrote:

What confuses me about this incident is how did he get in that
situation to start with. Stay on travelled roads and it would not
have been a problem. Then, could he not travel back on the road to a
more travelled one?

He missed the road he originally wanted to take to get from the interstate
to the coast, and saw an alternative on his map. To many people, roads are
simply lines on the map, and he probably didn't realize that it was not
very fast, wasn't paved, and climbed over a remote mountain pass.

He drove as far as he could along the road, and when he realized he
couldn't get over the pass because of snow, he turned around to retrace his
route back to the main road. He got lost, however, on the way back (it was
after dark, and snowing heavily) and mistakenly drove 15 miles up a logging
road that was normally closed for the winter. At 02:00 he stopped for the
night, but found he was snowed in the next morning.