Slowly Dying of Starvation and Exposure While Trekking In Mountainous Back Country

By most accounts Winston Churchill was a troubled soul. Not that Winston Churchill — although he was pretty messed up, too.

We’re talking about Winston Branko Churchill, a former disc jockey and coffee shop owner in Denver, Colorado who had some weird fascination with nature. W.B. Churchill set out on a hike last June saying he was going to walk the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango, a little jaunt of about 340 miles or roughly three-quarters of the way across Colorado.

At some point, he purposefully left the trail to wander around in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. As you might expect, this wasn’t all that an intelligent of a plan. Sometime in November or December, Churchill died, seriously frost-bitten and emaciated. The official cause of death was attributed to starvation and exposure.

The obvious question here is: why would someone do something like that? In this case, the answer seems to be some kind of crazy protest suicide.

According to those who knew Churchill, he “hated the materialism and greed that, in his view, prevented people from connecting with nature.”

You know, that same materialism and greed that helps prevent you from dying of starvation and exposure.

“He couldn’t figure out how to make people change so they were not so caught up in money and cars and big houses and all that,” said his sister, Jovanka.

And it’s a good thing, too. Because it really wouldn’t do anyone a whole lot of good if we all died an agonizingly slow and painful death.

I think the lesson here is clear: Always trek in an urban environment.

That way, if you get in trouble, at least there are people around to help.

Even if it’s winter in New York City, you can hang out in the public library and increase the chances of not getting frostbite. Plus, there’s all kinds of books about wilderness and nature so you can look at pretty pictures of canyons, wildlife and sunsets without risking life and limb.

It really is much more convenient than foraging for beetles and trying to start a fire with two sticks and a rock.

See, this is kind of what that whole march of progress of civilization is all about: building really nice houses, supermarkets and and Patagonia stores so you don’t have to live like a caveman.

So, no. Thank you. Slowly starving to death while hiking is not a way I want to die … ’cause that would suck.

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More perspective on camping from Jim Gaffigan…

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Post from: EveryJoe

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