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In 1996, a German family goes missing in Death Valley. 14 years later, a hiker searches for them...
- Thread starter Taki
- Start date
Mobile phones were around for years beforehand, but coverage may not have been good in that area of the country. Even now only a small part of Death Valley is said to have mobile phone coverage. The United States is not well suited to the rollout of mobile phone technology.
But even in the 1990s, if you went into a desert or up a mountain you could take emergency communication equipment, radio beacons, even rocket flares or marker balloons, to improve your survival chances.
Excluding the US and Canada, the majority of Hawaii tourists come from Japan, China, Korea, Australia, UK and Germany. Most of these countries are either entirely surrounded by ocean or have populations that primarily reside on the coasts. Therefore, their tourists are likely already aware of the dangers of the ocean and rip currents. Germany, however, is a mostly landlocked nation so it wouldn't be too surprising if their visiting tourists were more naive about the danger the ocean represents. Hence why they could be a disproportionate amount of the ocean fatalities.
You are welcome. And here is a summary without the filler, in case anyone wants to know what happened: https://www.strangeoutdoors.com/mysterious-stories-blog/2017/11/18/germantouristindeathvalley
In short, they lost 3 tires in the middle of nowhere as the road got worse, nevertheless kept driving for several miles until they got stuck in the evening, stayed in the car for the night, then started walking south the next morning towards an (unbeknownst to them, empty) military installation. They made it about 8 miles (12.8km) before dying.
Reading that story was creepy as hell. Seeing the photos they took...
That blog post you linked credits Tom Mahood, the guy who wrote the account in the OP, as instrumental in finding the remains. According to him they found the likely remains in 2009, but the case wasn't officially closed until 2010 when they were able to perform DNA tests. I don't see how any of this can be described as "click-bait".
Just read the whole thing. Amazing and interesting read. When he said that Les had found bones, I was like "oh shit."
Great story.
Funnily enough, this actually makes me want to go hiking, not in Death Valley of course :P
Great story.
Funnily enough, this actually makes me want to go hiking, not in Death Valley of course :P
Stories like these are why I never fucking go hiking or anything like that, even though I was a big boy scout and stuff as a kid and would spend days in the woods camping with my dad or friends. I'm happy to hike around town for hours on end just enjoying the magnificence of human architecture, but I live in the southwest and will only go a few hundred feet off the road into the desert (very easy, all around me) because there are millions of square miles of absolute empty space all around me and I am not getting lost in that shit.
My wife is also always mad at me for making sure we have a charged battery jumper and at least 3 gallons of water in the car all the time but I just can't believe people who don't prepare for the worst case.
My wife is also always mad at me for making sure we have a charged battery jumper and at least 3 gallons of water in the car all the time but I just can't believe people who don't prepare for the worst case.
"In 1996, a German family goes missing in Death Valley. 14 years later, a hiker searches for them..."
Picture of their stuck car; where did they go from there?
->Link to a page of text that links to 13 more pages of text you need to read until finally learning the outcome.
Actually the first time I've heard of/seen the images of the Kremmers/Froon disappearance.
Those pictures in the dark after 8/10 days... even just the idea is chilling and sad.
That's click-bait. Nothing prevents you from using spoiler tags.
The last thing we want is spoilerphobia infesting the reporting of facts.
Look, this isn't breaking news. OP was clearly more interested in bringing attention to this written narrative than raising a question and immediately answering it, and the post was written accordingly. You can even skip to the end if you just want to know what happened.
Sure, but we also don't want reporting to just be curt descriptions and quick, reductive answers. There is room for context and analysis.
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Must we now have TL;DR spoiler tags on all long-form journalism? Geez.
This.
OP shared something they thought others might enjoy doing a deep dive on and discovering themselves, teeing the whole thing up with an interesting hook.
Shame someone just decided to ruin it because waaaah must be clickbait.
We complaining about spoilers for news?
^ Yeah, this is a weird complaint.
THe article is in the first post. It's safe to assume all posts after the first will be people discussing what;'s in the post.
The whole reason I stopped watching local news. They kept spoiling what the weather was going to be for the week.
I rode a bicycle through it when it was hotter than 125, but there were support trucks checking on us.
And Death Valley has every temperature record not related to high humidity. The most impressive to me is that the ground temperature has been as high as 201F.
After skimming over this, I'm never going hiking again. As if I needed any more reasons to stay indoors.
I was driving a rental BMW 430i hardtop convertible through Death Vally in October. It was "only" 105F. Was hot as balls to me. I had the top up.
Met an Australian tourist at Stovepipe Wells. He also had a rental 430i hardtop convertible. He had driven out from Vegas, with the top down. To go for a 10 mile run in the middle of the valley.
Met an Australian tourist at Stovepipe Wells. He also had a rental 430i hardtop convertible. He had driven out from Vegas, with the top down. To go for a 10 mile run in the middle of the valley.
Very thorough write up on the search effort. And also very sobering as a reminder that we haven't mastered nature by any stretch of the imagination. I can see how people would think getting stuck with a flat tire or three wouldn't be such a big deal, since it "feels" like civilization is just an hour or two away, or at least it was when you had wheels. And as it slowly becomes clear "This is called Death Valley for a reason," that initial motivation to save a few bucks on a staying at a motel has escalated into costing your family their lives.
News? This happened years ago. It was news once, 14 years ago, now it's an in-depth feature written by someone investigating what happened, the expectation being that folks might want to follow the whole thing through.
I don't even know why that needs explaining.
I mean, look at ALL those comments openly discussing what happened after the first post.
What would have been nice was if the abbreviated story was dropped in so folks had a choice to read it if they wanted a condensed version literally based on OP's link.
But oh well. It's just news. Let's not waste time on this.
They only made it 8 miles before dying? What a terrible way to go, poor kids :(
Yeah we are!
Where is this beach exactly? Have to go there like tomorrow.
Well I'll be hiking alone in the mountain in March, if I don't post again please send search party, thank you.
Yup. Thats the Mojave. Used to play in that shit everyday made rock forts, but always lost them, because they looked identical to the surrounding area from a distance. Even outside of Death Valley Its no joke.
It shouldn't be solely a curt summary, but an accurate summary should be provided in the original post. This isn't a maybe, maybe not situation. Don't post clickbait.
I am now remembering the time my father deliberately drove down the side of a mountain off the road on my grand canyon field trip.
Families can sometimes do some crazy crap on field trips and go into some dangerous places because they think it would be a fun time for the family. But as seen here, sometimes it goes very, very wrong.
Families can sometimes do some crazy crap on field trips and go into some dangerous places because they think it would be a fun time for the family. But as seen here, sometimes it goes very, very wrong.
There are no advertisements on any of the pages. Also the OP doesn't receive anything for trying to remain mysterious. Clickbait is usually called clickbait because there is a value to a web page request for the people hosting the content. I don't see how this is the case here.
The motive doesn't matter. The effect is the same. Just don't obfuscate because you think it'll be more fun to read if people don't know what happens. It's bloody patronising.
I've experienced getting stuck on narrow mountain/forest roads, where the path gets so bad you just want to turn back, but that's also a major pain in the ass so you just keep going expecting things to get better, except they get worse and worse until you can't go on and can't go back. That's probably my biggest fear.
Realising you've gone too far to turn back in death valley and your only chance is racing forward hoping you'd find someone sounds absolutely terrifying, especially when your kids are with you.
Realising you've gone too far to turn back in death valley and your only chance is racing forward hoping you'd find someone sounds absolutely terrifying, especially when your kids are with you.
Do you just read the first few chapters of books and skip to the ending? It's also super shitty that some folks are derailing the thread with thread whining. There's a report button for a reason, stop shitting up threads.
Christ.
My dad is from Holland, and he told us that German tourists would regularly drown in the North Sea.
