Quicksand turned from movie trope to real hazard for a hiker in Utah over the weekend. Officials say a man trekking through Arches National Park on Sunday morning became stuck up to his thighs in quicksand and spent several hours trapped in below-freezing temps before rescuers managed to pull him out. Grand County Search & Rescue got the call around 7:15am, the group's John Marshall says, per NBC News. "Did I hear that correctly? Somebody is stuck in quicksand?" he recalls thinking. The rescue team used a drone to locate the man in a narrow canyon wash—essentially a mostly dry riverbed—and then scrambled down from a nearby cliff to reach him.
Backpacker identifies the hiker as 33-year-old Austin Dirks of Colorado, an experienced hiker who was on the second day of a 20-mile backpacking adventure. In a Reddit post, Dirks says that his trekking poles "sank to the handles the moment I leaned on them." When he tried to use them to dig his way out, he just made things worse—"the stream filled every hole instantly with sand and tiny stones. My knee bent to a painful 45 degrees over my foot, and I could not straighten it."
With temperatures hovering around 21 degrees Fahrenheit and no sun reaching the canyon floor, rescuer Jake Blackwelder tells NBC he was struck by just how cold it felt where Dirks was stranded. To avoid getting trapped themselves, rescuers laid out a ladder, vehicle traction boards, and backboards to spread their weight over the unstable surface. Working from those platforms, they freed Dirks' legs and pulled him out. Video captured the operation, which ended with a tired but otherwise uninjured hiker.
Dirks told rescuers that the wet sand looked ordinary until it suddenly wasn't. Marshall noted that quicksand can seize a person's legs in just a step or two, and that struggling tends to draw people in deeper, though the body's buoyancy usually keeps them from sinking past the waist. Quicksand incidents in the park are rare: A similar case occurred about 2 miles away in 2014. In a separate 2019 incident at Zion National Park, also in Utah, a hiker trapped in quicksand for a day had to be airlifted out in snowy weather after his companion hiked three hours to find a cell signal and call for help.
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