Originally Posted by
colorado_rob
Not going to quote your post FP, too much screen real estate... I understand where you're coming from, but I see a couple of serious flaws in yours and others' arguments, at least from my perspective.
First, in terms of "danger for a hiker per hour (day, month, year) on the trail" I see no actual evidence that section/thru hikers are in any more danger. Am I missing something? Is there evidence that, say, someone who camps along the trail vs. just hikes for a day is in any more danger? I suspect there is some correlation, but is there evidence to this? When lacking evidence, but suspecting something is correlated, I'd start with a factor of 2, just to start, meaning you're twice as likely to die hiking and camping vs. just hiking. Very flaky, but really, we're just looking for an order of magnitude here.
One serious flaw is the statistical significance of a very small number of murders (7 in 45 years, right?) vs. the thousands in a big city per year. This one little fact is probably a deal killer in terms of any meaningful results, but heck, we'll ignore it for now (not being sarcastic).
Also be very careful about your thru-hiker count. Lots of us, myself included, don't register either starting or finishing my long hikes. I probably should, it would help trail organizations know better about trqaffic, but I just get lazy and don't. This probably only makes a 30-40% difference; I quote that number after discussing this with the ATC some years ago, they estimate about 2/3rd register. This difference is minor w.r.t. order of magnitude estimates.
What I do not see is any way to compare safety on the trail to safety in the big, relatively dangerous cities like Baltimore or Chicago. None of the arguments that I read below make sense to me in trying to form this comparison. I'll think more about it.
I believe the only reasonable way to estimate the danger to any given hiker in terms of his chance of getting murdered for any given length of time on the trail can only be done using a Monte Carlo analysis. I'm probably copping out saying this, but I'm biased because that's what I did for roughly half of my 30 year engineering career in the rocket biz. Basically when it's too hard to figure out a given statistic, just make some rough assumptions, throw them in a pot, make a couple billion random draws and collect the results. It's really easy to do, in fact, next bad weather day, maybe I'll try just that.
Back to work....