Any Conspiracy Theory About People Going Missing In National Parks Is Automatically Silly To Me. Like

Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

i once had a kid come up to me at work and tell me they thought i was getting paid extra to fake my accent.

i have a very, very heavy rural canadian accent. why would i sound think i sound like this if i had another option???

since y'all like enviro sci stories so much...

in one of our courses we were testing the water of one of the on-campus ponds. a quick, easy example of practical water quality testing without having to go too far.

unfortunately, this pond water was only accessible via bridge. not a deep pond, and not a high bridge, but that meant to get the samples, we would need a Contraption. and despite being a well-respected university with a lot of expensive lab equipment... our Water Sampling Contraption was a bottle on a rope (weighed down by a piece of metal, so it would sink). and it was... a well-used Contraption, to say the least.

so it should not surprise you when i say that when the very first person lowered it off the bridge, the rope snapped (it didn't come untied, it actually broke). and this bottle (weighed down by a sizeable metal brick) fell into the pond.

of course, everyone heard the commotion, and the entire class (which was not many) was faced with figuring out how we were going to get it back. (our prof, god love him, was about three hundred years old and of no help whatsoever).

but fret not! sure enough, one brave young man (not me) rose to the occasion. and by "rose to the occasion", i mean he took off his shoes and climbed onto the railing, preparing to jump into the pond otherwise fully clothed (labcoat and all!)

i wish this story had a cool ending where he actually had to swim to get the sampler. but the professor yelled at him to stop and this story actually ends with my lab partner and me running to find a groundskeeper, asking for something we could use to fish the sampler out, and him (very confusedly) handing us a tree trimmer.