If you get lost in the forest, why can’t you make a 180 degree turn and walk back?
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You’re making the assumption that you:
1. Walked in a straight line throughout the forest.
2. Will walk back in a straight line.
To actually do that, you’d need visual landmarks that you can use to orient yourself or a tool like a compass, GPS, etc.
Forests, by their very nature tend to prevent you from finding easy to distinguish landmarks and also, trees, bushes, etc. don’t tend to grow in neatly organized rows.
This messes with your sense of orientation. That’s why you get lost in the first place. That essentially means you will not have been walking in a straight line and doing a 180 will not do much for you. You’ll also not be walking back in a straight line and also, not in the same directions you took before.
It can be hard to wrap your head around this until you’ve experienced it.
EDIT: See u/fried_eggs_and_ham ‘s excellent reply for why you won’t be walking in a straight line.
If you’d been walking in a straight line you wouldn’t be lost, but when you’re in a forest you’re constantly adjusting your path and steps to avoid obstacles. These adjustments add up to you deviating very far from simply walking a straight line. By the time you realize you’re lost you haven’t been walking in a straight line for quite some time. In fact, you may have turned around 180 degrees to try and walk back already, but by then you’ve deviated just enough that “walking back” just leads you in an opposite but equally lost direction.
When you’re walking through a dense forest or any area with uneven terrain, vegetation, and other obstacles, your path is not perfectly straight. You naturally curve and adjust your direction to go around obstacles or to find easier paths. This means that when you turn around and start walking back, you won’t be retracing your exact steps. Instead, you’ll end up on a parallel path that is slightly different from your original path.
As you continue walking on this new path, you might not realize that you’re actually moving alongside your original path, and you might not reach the point where you entered the forest in the first place. This can make it difficult to find your way out, even though you’re technically walking in the opposite direction.
Additionally, the forest environment can be disorienting, with similar-looking trees and features all around, making it challenging to keep track of your exact location and direction.
I got lost in a forest once and that’s exactly what I did. Unfortunately I had lost track of where I’d started relative to where I was, and what I thought was a 180 deg turn was actually more like a 30 deg turn from a direct line to where I’d started. Thing is you don’t walk in a straight line and you don’t retain coordinates in your mind. If you wander too far into a unfamiliar forest without keeping track of your path you lose awareness of where you’re actually heading relative to where you started so doing a 180 deg turn can point you just about anywhere, and again you don’t walk in straight lines through a forest.
This series of experiments demonstrates some of the difficulties people encountered with keeping to a straight line, using differing variables even including attempting straight lines while blindfolded:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12892/do-people-really-walk-circles-when-they%E2%80%99re-lost
It’s very difficult to walk in a perfectly straight line in the forest, you are constantly moving around obstacles. Additionally, you don’t have any major terrain features to guide you; so it’s super easy to start walking north and end up walking east without realizing it.
The best way to get out is to plan ahead and find a backstop that can allow you to find your bearings. For example, a long river or road that will always be to your east.
Yo ucould if you were going in a perfectly straight line. But if you were doing that you’d be on a path or something, because otherwise you’d have to be moving around objects a lot. and even if you try and stay going to same direction as you do, you’ll always be a bit off from it.
While a small change might not seem like much at first, walking in slightly different direction will eventually take you to a drastically different place.
And of course you’ll be having the same problem the whole time as you did when getting there: you won’t travel in a straight line. These things get compounded very fast until you have no idea where you are.
The definition of Lost is that you don’t have anybreference to where anything is, so a 180 degree turn wouldn’t accomplish anything in terms of orienting you.
There’s a good myth busters episode where they show what being blindfolded does to orientation and spacial awareness and explore some survival techniques to maintain orientation.
Nearly all people lack the ability to walk in a straight line for extended periods. Throw in obstacles like trees and topology and it’s even less the case that people can eye ball a straight line.
No one walks in a straight line in a forest. You have to move to avoid obstacles. As you keep moving, you eventually can get far away from that straight line and then you’re lost.
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