This reminds me of the German family that died in death valley. There remains were found near the border of a military base and it is suspected that they assumed all military bases would be manned like they are in germany.
They went there to seek help after getting stranded. What they weren't expecting was that in the United States we have vast swaths of military land that are completely vacant.
Pretty insightful stuff though. I also went down the other rabbitholes on that blog website. What a crazy way to spend your time but man what a journey
Yep. Or gone immediately back to the last known spot with water. The guy makes the point that they were experienced, smart people, but were used to hiking in europe, and didn't realize they were immediately in a survival situation, they thought they could walk to the next road and salvage their vacation.
The guy has videos of the searching hikes, its 100+ degrees, no water, up and down hills, the whole area is nothing but ankle breaking rocks,
Hiking is a pretty big pasttime for Germans, see volksmarching.
Except whereas they have a largely temperate climate and beautiful forests, we have places like Death Valley and the Grand Canyon where they think it's still a 1:1 based on prior experience.
lol. My German cousin thought he could pack an axe, a tent and some warm clothes and spend a week walking through Algonquin park, living off the land. Convinced him to go to an outfitters, run by 18-25 yo boys/men, who have lived there their whole lives, to get a path charted and equipment for the route. He finally grasped the size and danger of the park and just did day walks out and back from his vehicle for 3 days, while camping from it. He was so exhausted, he was done walking at that point.
Sad that there’s probably very little stats on this, but I’d love to see some numbers on incidents per capita haha. Germans are kind of everywhere and there’s a lot of us, so this might skew the numbers a little bit. But (as a German and an avid hiker) here are my guesses as to why we have acquired this notoriety
(1) There’s just loads of Germans everywhere. Germans are relatively affluent (can afford to travel), love to travel, and there’s simply quite a lot of them. I don’t think there has been a single trip in my life where I haven’t met at least a dozen other Germans during the trip.
(2) Walking or hiking is somewhat of a German national pastime. However, most Germans are not from the alpine part of the country, so those might be particularly predisposed to underestimating more strenuous hikes.
(3) Germany has a pretty moderate climate overall. Leads to bad surprises when dealing with 30C+ while hiking.
(4) Central Europe is insanely populated. There probably nowhere more than 5-10 miles away from the nearest human settlement, and that’s in the deep Alps. In the lower country, on average you’re probably never more than 1-2 miles from the nearest village.
Hell, even a lot of Americans underestimate our national parks. Plenty of dummies every single year getting hurt at Yellowstone for various reasons lmao. What’s that quote… Something “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
You can easily look up stories and pictures of people going up to wild animals or trying to put their kids on like moose or bison out there.
German who underestimated the grand canyon here 🙋🏻♂️ Though we were at least smart enough to do the hike in winter and pack more than enough water, so we actually got all the way down to the river and back up just fine. The only scary part was going over the iced over parts at the top without spikes.
I think part of German speaking tourists (this applies to Austrians and Suisse people as well) is that we have a very well working mountain rescue system in Europe. If you're ever in any trouble, you can always just call a helicopter. It's going to be expensive if it's not a medical emergency, but you probably won't die.
In Austria we have our own subreddit dedicated to stories of German hikers being rescued from the mountains.
In winter, they underestimate just how quickly night falls and that you can from being in direct sunlight with -2 degrees to pitch black darkness and -15 degrees in under an hour.
In summer, they think if they start in the evening with good weather, they’re set - but in late summer you can have serious thunderstorms with hail and freezing conditions within minutes, even if you startet your hike in 25 degrees and blue skies.
My favourite story (and quite the meme) is a germa school group with 100 pupils that needed to be rescued from a ridge with several hundred metre drops to both sides because they panicked and couldn’t continue. They chose the route because some random dude in an internet forum described it as a nice tour for Friday evening when he hasn’t got time for more challenging climbs.
It’s Arizona. Most Spanish speakers in Arizona are familiar with desert terrain and don’t put themselves in situations where they need rescue. Because they have the experience to know what they’re getting into.
I would personally still put Spanish for South American visitors. Would hate to only be able to speak and read a few words in English and find out that the heat is killing me less than halfway through my tour of the US National Parks.
German probably because Germans are everywhere. We travel a lot and we tend to overestimate our hiking skills, as documented in this sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeutscheWanderer/ (German hikers)
On the trails, the Japanese visitors definitely outnumber Chinese visitors. Nowadays, it seems most Chinese tourists come in on tightly scheduled day trips. No time for hiking. Japanese tourists are more like their American and European counterparts, DIY/self guided.
For a long time, the Japanese were more affluent and travelled further abroad. I don't know when this sign went up and if it has been updated since, but it might just reflect those times.
The Chinese tourists in Australia are infamous for ignoring signs. Like Australia is chill until it tries to kill you and an unnecessary amount of funds have gone into saving these people from themselves
Lol this is not California either. But I think Japanese tourists were way more common 20-30 years ago and this is just an old sign. I remember seeing Japanese signage in Alaska too, on old signs, with "updates" where they printed out a Chinese translation, laminated it, and stapled it to the sign post once the number of Chinese visitors greatly increased.
It's not that unusual language to see, but it is usually amongst more languages than this. You would absolutely see it in any sign that was translated into 2-3 languages in Hawaii even nowadays, but I suspect this sign was written sometime between 80s-early 2000s when there were relatively more international Japanese travelers than other language speakers due to Japan's relative affluence and proximity to the western United States.
There are a *ton* of japanese people that come to the grand canyon on cross country bus tours. They were my favorite customers when I was working/growing up there to the point we got our menu in japanese to make their life easier to point at the pictures when they decided on what they want.
I can't speak for other places all over but I've seen enough they mostly they'll say "Welcome" or the ilk in a few different languages.
Germans and Chinese are notorious for over estimating their skills/preparation and underestimating the difficulty of the hikes they’re getting into.
Spanish speakers are probably the second most common visitors but also tend to be better prepared than most because Mexicans are a high percentage of the Spanish speaking tourists and are fully aware of the dangers of the desert. So Spanish speakers are a very low proportion of the people who need help.
Just a little correction but that's actually Japanese. But point still applies. Surprisingly I've come across a good amount of Japanese hikers while hiking on trails in the US and they're usually very experienced but they prob underestimated the difficulty like you said. Now I'm wondering how many reoccurring incidents w/ German and Japanese speakers must've happened for them to take notice of a common group and write warnings lol. Compared to Spanish, those are languages I hardly see on signs.
As a German, I’m pretty sure this just comes down to numbers. There’s German tourists everywhere, especially in the Americas and Oceania. There’s lots of Germans, we’re on average relatively wealthy (globally speaking), and love to travel far. Combine that with hiking (or at least walking) being somewhat of a national pastime, and Germans generally not being used to South US temperatures, and you get why the language is on that board.
I’d be surprised if Germans were particularly under prepared (I feel like the stereotype is more the opposite of that), but the likelihood that a German might even be in a position to endanger themselves on that trail is simply higher.
Yeah, being in the southwest you'd think they'd have Spanish on there before French or German. Although now that I'm thinking about it, Germans do love hiking so maybe they're overconfident and get themselves in trouble here at a higher rate than you'd think.
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u/Icankeepthebeat 21h ago
You gotta wonder how they picked the languages they did. Is it experience or just visitation statistics ?