A hiker in Utah’s Arches National Park became trapped Sunday in something most people have seen only in old movies or TV shows — quicksand.
The hiker, who was not injured, was trapped in the substance for several freezing hours, stuck up to his thighs in a canyon area Sunday morning, his rescuers said.
There was a quicksand case in the same area, about 2 miles away, in 2014, but Sunday’s call at around 7:15 a.m. was still a surprise, Grand County Search and Rescue incident commander John Marshall said.
“The page went off and I kind of shook my head and said: ‘Did I hear that correctly? Somebody is stuck in quicksand?’” Marshall recalled in an interview Tuesday.
Rescuers used a ladder and vehicle traction boards to reach the hiker, Marshall said. The boards allowed rescuers to work next to the trapped hiker safely, he said.
Quicksand can trap people quickly, Marshall said, but because of the body’s natural buoyancy, people rarely sink deeper than their waist.
“It’s got a good bite. The more people struggle, the deeper they go,” Marshall said. “So, one or two footsteps into that sand is really all it needs to initiate that initial stuck factor.”
Video captured the hiker’s rescue. Searchers used a drone to help pinpoint his location.
It was a frigid morning, around 21 degrees, rescue technician Jake Blackwelder recalled.
“Where this person was, there was just no sun shining down in this canyon area,” Blackwelder said. “And so I was just taken aback by just how cold the ambient temperature was.”
Blackwelder contacted the hiker from a cliff. The man was trapped in a wash — which like a riverbed that is mostly dry but channels water when it rains or there is other moisture — and the team made a small scramble down to reach the area by foot, he said.
Rescuers used the traction boards and backboards to spread out their weight so that they didn’t also become stuck, and they helped dig him out, Blackwelder said.
“One of the first things that we said was just, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Blackwelder recalled. “He was pretty tired and stuck and ready to get out.”
The man was not a novice hiker, telling rescuers that he had hiked trails in other parts of the country, as well as in Utah, Blackwelder said.
“He just got into some innocuous-looking wet sand that happened to be quicksand,” Blackwelder said. “And so for him, I think he was as surprised as we were to get the call.”
In 2019, a hiker at a different national park in Utah, Zion National Park, became trapped in quicksand for a day until he was rescued and eventually airlifted during snowy weather. That hiker was trapped up to his knee, park officials said, and the woman he was with hiked three hours to get a cell signal so she could call for help, officials said at the time.
