Lost In Puna

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

If someone wrote this story as fiction, I doubt I'd believe it was possible.
Lost in Puna on an area 6 acres in size?
A few excerpts:

She was trying to avoid a small group of very large feral pigs.

She encountered the critters the previous day at about noon while walking home from the bus stop. Fearing what the pigs would do to her if she walked by them, she went into the bushes to hide until the pigs left.

Unfortunately, the area she entered has somewhat of a small incline and she slipped, dropping her bags and everything inside. She became disoriented while looking for her bags and the items that had fallen out.

The woman told Ah Chong later that she could see flashlights at that time and hear people calling out so she responded. 
But the woman said she got excited and tried to pull herself up through the bushes, grabbing a tree branch. The branch broke, causing her to fall and be knocked unconscious.

https://bigislandnow.com/2022/09/29/offi...eral-pigs/

[kalianna]

Yeah... Something is off about this. Perhaps her navigational skills were impaired by ingestion of an unknown substance?

[sistersue]

Yeah...  Something is off about this.  Perhaps her navigational skills were impaired by ingestion of an unknown substance?

There's an old song that comes to mind: "One Toke Over The Line".   

[Rob Tucker]

Some few years back a tourist from Texas got lost on the lava fields of Kilauea for four days.

[terracore]

One time I was exploring our jungle lot and a piece of the forest fought back and whipped a tiny twig at me that just barely grazed my eyeball with the exact amount of caressing needed to knock out my hard contact lens but left me otherwise unaware anything happened.

My vision at the time (I've since had corrective surgery) was so bad that missing one corrective lens was enough to make navigating the lot almost impossible. Mostly because the dense vegetation already limits one view to several feet at best and having that reduced substantially made finding my way out during daytime hours incredibly difficult. If it was nighttime I would have been stumbling even more blindly through it.

I had training at a young age how to navigate through forests with only access to a compass and the sky, and most of the time didn't need a compass. I'm guessing the subject in the story didn't have that. But I can empathize with her having my vision greatly affected.

[microage97]

I hear Captain's trail has had many hunters lost and confused.

[Punaperson]

A story from back in the day:

The coqui infestation was in its very early stages here in OLE, but the quarantine for shipping plant material inter-island had gone into effect.  I had a shipment of large plants ready to get sent to Oahu in the greenhouse that was in the far back corner of my lot when I heard several coqui chirping in the ohias in the surrounding lots. Wanting to make sure my shipment would get through quarantine,  the next night I  went with a friend to catch the coqui - one of us to hold a flashlight while the other grabbed the noisemaker.  We'd done this several times before in the preceding weeks.  Chasing one particularly quick culprit, we got disoriented  (but we did catch the buggah!) We couldn't see my house lights, there were no neighbors within shouting distance, and tall ohias and lots of cloud cover  so we couldn't use the sky/stars for reference.  We ended up waiting about a half hour until we finally heard a truck drive by and could tell where the road was.  After this, I always hung a lantern high in my greenhouse that could be seen from a distance when we went out 'hunting'. 

So while there seem to be some holes in the story, I can understand being totally lost when off the beaten path in your own neighborhood.

[DoryGray]

There was the guy lost in Hilo & days later they found his body in a lava tube in his back yard. I've been caving in Puna & very easy to get disoriented.

[AaronM]

Every year there are hundreds of outdoor enthusiasts who are found disheveled or even sometimes deceased 1/4 mile or less from a major trail.