Preventing Separation in the Outdoors

Another Black boy is dead. For the past nine days, the name Nolan Xavier Wells has been plastered all over my Threads feed. The chant-like repetition of his name in the news and across social media stirs up a strange mix of emotions in my body. Sadness swirls in my chest before sinking into my belly. My brain is foggy with exhaustion, and rage blurs my vision. Yet at the risk of sounding insensitive to some of you, I also feel a little proud. If you’re not a Black person, that probably doesn’t make any sense—you might even think it sounds downright perverse. But that cacophony of feelings is all too familiar to people who look like me. The pride I feel comes from seeing my people’s, and our allies’, collective outrage. Knowing that people actually give a shit about us feels good. But still…another Black boy is dead.

A Boating Trip Ends in a Devastating Loss

Group adventures are supposed to be fun. But a boat trip bound for Horn Island, a barrier island off the Mississippi coast, over the Fourth of July weekend ended in tragedy.

On Saturday, July 4, 18-year-old football player Nolan Xavier Wells from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a town in Jackson County, and three of his friends, all of whom were white, traveled to the island to celebrate the holiday. Wells was the only one who didn’t come home.

On Saturday around 11 P.M., one of Wells’ friends reported him missing. At approximately midnight, his mother, Christine Wonsley, contacted the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and said the same. A search ensued. On Monday, July 6, a U.S. Park Service ranger found Wells’ body on the northwestern tip of the island, and his family identified him. On Tuesday, July 7, Jackson County Coroner Bruce Lynd confirmed Wells’ identity using dental records.

Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter said Wells’ friends left Horn Island without him. “From what we understand, he chose to stay there,” he said in a statement to ABC News. On Monday, July 13, one of Wells’ friends, Tracestin Shepherd, told ABC News that Wells stayed behind because he met a girl and planned to return home on another boat.

Authorities believe that Wells drowned and “don’t suspect foul play.” However, the full account of what happened on the trip is still under investigation.

Wells’ Family Enlisted the Help of a Civil Rights Attorney

I’ve followed the Wells saga as it has progressed from a breaking news piece to a national news story to a topic of intense debate on social platforms. I’ve read multiple posts on social media that speculate that racism or foul play contributed to his death. While law enforcement authorities have not revealed any details that hint at racially motivated wrongdoing, I understand why people intrinsically assume this.

Mississippi’s history is fraught with racial inequality brought about by chattel slavery and bolstered by Jim Crow laws, decades of redlining, racial zoning, segregation, and the insidious—and often disturbingly overt—pervasiveness of anti-Black stereotypes.

It’s a history that created an environment that’s not unfamiliar to me. As a kid, my dad’s favorite cautionary phrase that he’d say in response to any news of a Black person being harmed at the hands of, or in the presence of, a white person echoes in my brain: “They will always screw you.”

On July 7, the Wells’ family retained renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump to conduct an independent investigation and autopsy. Crump has represented families in several high-profile cases, including that of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.

Crump recently shared three pieces of information. The first is that video footage of an altercation between someone believed to be Wells and another person has surfaced. (Shepherd told ABC News that it was he and another person yelling in the video, and that “Wells is not in the video.”) The second: Wells’ friends returned with the teen’s phone, and messages have supposedly been deleted. And third, Wells’ father, Elmore Wonsley, said his son was an “elite athlete” and can swim.

Whatever happened leading up to Wells’ separation from his group proved deadly and serves as a reminder that the most dangerous moment in any flavor of group outdoor adventure is when people split up—or when someone gets left behind.

The High Cost of Separation in the Outdoors: What the Data Says

Togetherness is the thread of a group trip. If someone notices the group headcount has dropped by one (or more), it prompts a question that alerts the remaining members to the fact that something has gone very, very wrong: Where did so-and-so go? 

When people are separated in dangerous situations, their chance of survival drops, experts say. Whether people become separated in the mountains, on the trails, or out on the water, the broader data outlined below on outdoor separations, particularly those that occur while hiking, tells a bone-chilling story that we can use as a proxy for the cost of splitting up anywhere—such as on or near a barrier island.

That data culminates in one overarching conclusion: parting ways, no matter the reason that leads up to it, is statistically dangerous.

A well-known case in which separation cost someone their life is the one involving Michelle Vanek, a 35-year-old mother of four from Colorado, who went missing during a hike in 2005. Vanek separated from her hiking partner while trekking Mount of the Holy Cross, a nearly 14,000-foot summit located on the northern ridge of the Sawatch Mountain Range.

Outside journalist Ted Katauskas, who helped find her remains and penned a story about the recovery of Vanek’s body, revealed a few of those gnarly statistics after he spoke with Robert J. Koester. Koester is a mission coordinator at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management who created the International Search and Rescue Incident Database (ISRID), which hosts data on over 145,000 search-and-rescue (SAR) incidents from across the globe, dating back to 2014.

After analyzing numbers regarding lost and missing hikers, Koester determined that out of more than 3,000 people who hiked solo or got separated from their group, roughly 91 percent were found alive; nearly nine percent were found dead. Predictably, the numbers are better for people who never separated: about 98 percent were found alive, and two percent were found dead. Katauskas summed up the math in one sobering sentence: hikers who separate from a group statistically are four times more likely to die than group hikers who become lost and never separate.

What Causes People to Get Separated?

Those stats tell us what happens when people leave or are left behind, but they don’t explain why. It turns out that there are a few answers to this question, some logistical and others psychological. I called up Koester and a psychotherapist for some insight.

Drawing on his personal experiences and his leadership of SAR missions, Koester identifies differences in capability among group members as one of the biggest causes of separation. “Some people hike faster than other people. So, unless you’re trying to control [not separating] for a pretty long time, the group will get strung out,” he said. He also cites a few other relatable yet pretty benign causes of separation: not everyone wants to go the same route, most of us want to pee in private, or sometimes someone needs to fill their canteen with water.

Another cause is more nefarious. Some “friends”—even romantic partners—purposely desert those they came with. For example, the act of abandoning someone in the woods or other outdoor landscape has occurred frequently enough that social media coined a term for it: alpine divorce. The term’s usage spread after a woman posted a TikTok recounting how her partner left her alone in the mountains.

Incidents of separation might also be the result of carelessness or worsen if someone, or everyone, is under the influence of alcohol or another kind of mind-altering substance, Dr. Suzanne Wallach, a psychotherapist and outdoor enthusiast with an obsession for wilderness disaster documentaries, based in Los Angeles, California, told me.

Interestingly, just because someone realizes that a group member has gone missing doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll do something about it. This is called the bystander effect. “It’s just a part of human behavior that shows up in any sort of a group dynamic where it unintentionally reduces the likelihood that any one person is going to step forward and take action,” Wallach said. As a group becomes larger, she said, “the easier it can become for each person to believe that someone else has taken action or someone else is taking charge.” Two psychologists, John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, described this phenomenon in a landmark paper in the sixties, dubbing it “the diffusion of responsibility.” And in some cases, the outcome is that no one does anything.

There is good news. Koester said it’s rare for separation to lead to a serious incident requiring a SAR team. “I’m just thinking back to all of my hiking experiences, and we got separated all the time, and it never led to a search,” Koester said.

Wells’ disappearance and eventual death unfortunately were one of those rare and devastating occurrences.

Prevention Should Be the Baseline Standard of Safety on Any Group Adventure

When a tragedy such as the one in the Wells’ case occurs, we’re confronted with one question: How do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?

“The real answer is don’t get separated,” Koester said. But that is easier said than done. For anyone with an affinity for group adventures, prevention is crucial.

According to Koester, everyone in the group should agree to stay together. He says this should take the form of a discussion before the trip, where people explicitly state their commitment to that goal. He advises that everyone agree on a meeting place to which people should return if they become separated. Other family members and friends who aren’t on the trip should know where you’re going and when they can expect your return. Additional pieces of advice include keeping children in sight, allowing stronger hikers to take up the rear and carry a heavier pack if there’s group gear. Also, “an FRS radio isn’t a bad tool to have,” he said. An FRS device, which stands for family radio service, functions like a walkie-talkie, and you don’t need a special license to purchase one.

And according to Wallach, simply being aware of the bystander effect can help prevent it by offsetting “pluralistic ignorance.” In an outdoor adventure situation, she said, pluralistic ignorance could look like realizing someone is missing and making the grave assumption that everything is fine just because others haven’t noticed or aren’t panicking.

Alas, even if everyone takes all the above precautions, the unfortunate reality is that someone can still become separated from the group. So, what then?

The first thing to do if someone from your group goes missing, Koester recommends, is to follow the STOP mnemonic: stop, literally; think about what’s going on; observe all the information you have (i.e., Where was the missing person last seen? Did they mention anything about leaving?); plan for what to do next. The plan could involve calling the missing person if cell service is available, he said.

“The counteraction to the bystander effect is for someone to actually start assigning people tasks,” Wallach told me. One person can take charge, assign two or more people to return to where they last saw the missing person, and have two or more people stay put in case the missing person returns to that spot.

Near the end of our call, Koester shared the ultimate prevention tool everyone should have in their arsenal: not believing that separation can’t happen to you.

It’s worth taking his words seriously.

With each passing day, more news about Wells’ death becomes available to the public, and I can’t imagine the depth of his family’s grief as they cope with their loss while also navigating a winding legal system, making attempts to squash misinformation from spreading, and being poked and prodded with questions. The racial tension in the discourse also weighs heavily on this case. I’m heartbroken for them and for the Black community who have to grapple with yet another death. The pride I feel, stemming from the collective outrage I mentioned in the first paragraph, gives me hope that the family will receive answers.

Again, we don’t know exactly what happened or why it happened, but something went very wrong on that boating trip. Three white boys and one Black boy went out for a day on the water, and only the Black boy didn’t return. It’s another situation that helps reinforce a perspective that myself and other Black outdoor lovers have had to grapple with: the outdoors is neither inherently neutral nor safe ground for Black people. I know I’m always looking over my own shoulder when I’m in predominantly white spaces; the skill of hypervigilance has been drilled into me since childhood. It’s a skill not unfamiliar to any Black person on the planet.

About the author: Ayana Underwood is the senior health editor at Outside. She previously wrote a personal essay detailing what it’s like to be a Black person navigating outdoor spaces, which you can read here.