![]() ![]() ![]() I got about 20 feet from shore and realized it wasn’t easy moving my feet, so I started turning around. I said, “Oh, I’ll go.” Getting Stuck in Quicksand A couple people would check it out and then the others would follow. It looked as though you could walk on it without hitting any water. We spotted a bank in the river where sand and mud were exposed. About 12:30 P.M., we came to a point where we could no longer walk on the shore because the canyon wall had come to the river’s edge. We moved along the eastern shore of the river toward an area where we’d meet everyone the next night. The instructors went their own way, and a few other groups of students went theirs. On the morning of November 23, I began hiking with three other NOLS students along the Dirty Devil River in Southeastern Utah, just outside of Canyonlands National Park. That was exactly the situation in which Rob Tesar found himself stuck. A person in a river canyon in the Western United States might be susceptible to hypothermia. Without help, a victim near the ocean might be susceptible to drowning in an incoming tide. ![]() The bad news is that once the sludge fully settles around an intruding object, the strength needed to retrieve it would be equal to the might needed to lift a Ford Taurus. The scientists said a human would respond likewise, sinking only up to his or her waist. To test how far someone might sink, Bonn and colleagues put aluminum beads that were the same density as a human body on top of quicksand in a giant box. In 2005, University of Amsterdam physicist Daniel Bonn and his colleagues concluded the stuff, which consists of fine sand particles lightly held together by friction in a water and clay gel with the consistency of yogurt, simply doesn’t work that way. Forget the corny black and white movie scenes of a jungle explorer getting swallowed whole in a pit of quicksand. ![]()
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