The sun had not yet risen when Austin Dirks entered a remote canyon in Arches National Park on Sunday, seeking to complete a two-day, 20-mile solo hike, another one for his list of backpacking feats.
But as he ambled over a creek bed — one that those familiar with the park said was bone-dry most of the time but had a shallow layer of water from snow and ice melt — his left foot sank into the ground.
Shifting his weight, he freed the foot, only to find that his right leg “was fixed in place as if set in concrete.”
Mr. Dirks, an experienced hiker in his early 30s from Colorado, had stepped into quicksand, trapping him for a few hours in subfreezing temperatures until rescuers could arrive.
“The ground educated me better than any map or memory ever could,” Mr. Dirks wrote in an account of his ordeal that he posted on Reddit.
His retelling of the incident, corroborated by emergency responders, spread far and wide. Not just with hikers, but with ordinary people. To them, quicksand is the stuff of cartoons and movies. Think “Daffy Duck” or “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
No one else was near Mr. Dirks, who was trying to complete a small section of the Hayduke Trail, an 800-mile backcountry route crossing Utah and Arizona that the National Park Service describes on its website as challenging. There is no established trail, and hikers must use various forms of navigation to find their way, according to the Park Service.
Mr. Dirks did not have cell service, so he said he reached for a Garmin satellite messenger to send an SOS. He was unable to use Bluetooth to connect it to his phone, so he typed out his plea on the Garmin’s tiny keyboard.
One of the people on the receiving end of the message was John Marshall, a captain with Grand County Search and Rescue, which is based in Moab, Utah, who was the on-duty incident commander on Sunday morning. He was paged on his radio around 7:15 a.m., Captain Marshall said in an interview on Thursday.
“We always try not to be judgmental,” he said. “But you’re thinking, Quicksand, really? It’s probably some tourist with their foot stuck in the mud somewhere.”
The message automatically included GPS coordinates with Mr. Dirks’s location, which took about an hour to reach on a highway, dirt road and finally in the backcountry: 38°40’55.3”N 109°38’45.3”W.
Emergency responders brought a ladder, traction boards and a drone, which they used to confirm that they had found Mr. Dirks, whom rescuers described as composed.
“He looks up, he sees the drone, and I can only imagine what he’s feeling at that point,” Captain Marshall said.
Mr. Dirks’s leg had been bent at a 45-degree angle in the quicksand as he tried in vain to dig out using his trekking poles, according to his Reddit post. Exhausted and freezing from the water in the creek, he pulled dry layers from his pack to try to keep warm.
“His limbs had gone completely numb at that point,” Captain Marshall said.
Medics wrapped Mr. Dirks’s leg in a heated blanket and placed warm packs against it. The feeling came back in about 15 minutes, according to Mr. Dirks, who said he was able to hike away from the scene with the medics. They offered to carry his gear, but he declined, and he drove himself home.
In 2014, a 78-year-old woman who was hiking by herself in the same area was mired in quicksand for about 13 hours during the early summer, according to Captain Marshall, who said that was the last time he could recall a similar rescue.
His tips for anyone who might become stuck in quicksand?
“Get as flat as you can on the surface of the mud,” he said, noting that human bodies have buoyancy to them.
In the days after Mr. Dirks’s rescue, “people around town” have been “going, ‘Oh yeah, I got stuck in quicksand once,’” Captain Marshall said. It was not uncommon to hear about horses or cattle getting bogged down, either.
Still, quicksand has a reputation, one that he said was cemented by what people see on television.
“I still get those images of ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ ” he said. “Poor Skipper, he goes into quicksand, and all you see is his hat. It sends chills down their spine.”
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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