Quote Originally Posted by rocketsocks View Post
This whole story will never make sense to me, I’ll never understand how someone could take a pea break and end up 2 miles from where they need to be.
First of all, Inchworm was not 2 miles away from the AT.
Using Google Earth and images from news stories indicating where her last campsite was found, she was "only" 650 yards (about 1/3 of a mile) from the AT.

Second, apparently you've never dealt with people who have a poor sense of direction.

When I was growing up, my mom had issues on long interstate drives. She would pull off the interstate for dinner or gas, and then get confused about which way to go to get back to the interstate... and then wouldn't be sure which direction to continue on the interstate.

So back when the search for Inchworm was still on-going, the moment I heard she had issues with her sense of direction, I knew what had happened... she hadn't been attacked or fallen off the side of a hill or mountain. She simply turned of the AT to use the bathroom and couldn't find her way back.

While I don't know where she stepped off the trail, if you look in Google Earth in the general area between the AT and where Inchworm's campsite was found, there's large sections of thin forest canopy. LNT principles state that you should deposit waste 200' from the trail. But with the thin forest, I could easily see where Inchworm might have walked 100 yards to find some privacy. When finished, rather than walking back towards the trail, she continued away from it. If she traveled 100 yards off trail to find privacy, she likely walked an additional 150 to 200 yards before she first thought she might be lost. So by the time she fully realized she didn't know where she was, she was already 300 yards from the trail. During the time she wandered around trying to get a cell signal, she only managed to double her distance from the trail relative to the position she was in when she first realized she was lost.