Part 1 of a two-part series on Lost Person Behaviour
When someone becomes lost in the wilderness, they don't move randomly. They make decisions. They react to fear, terrain, injuries, sounds, weather and what they believe will lead them back to safety.
Those decisions create surprisingly recognizable patterns. Search and Rescue actually studies them. It's called Lost Person Behaviour, and Search Managers use decades of data from real incidents to help predict what a missing person might do and, ultimately, where we should look.
Stanislav Volo's six days lost and injured on Mount Habrich give us an extraordinary opportunity to look at both sides of this.
In Part 2, we'll look at his movements through the lens of Lost Person Behaviour: the decision point where things went wrong, why lost hikers often travel downhill, why people follow features such as drainages, how injuries change someone's mobility and how all of that influences a search.
But first, there is another fascinating question: What did Stanislav do RIGHT that helped him stay alive for six days?
Because Lost Person Behaviour isn't only about where someone goes. It's also about what a human being does when they realize they are lost.
1. HE DIDN'T GIVE UP HOPE
Never underestimate the psychological side of survival. We spend a lot of time talking about the physical necessities: shelter, water, warmth, food and equipment. But there is another survival tool you carry everywhere: your brain.
Becoming lost can create an enormous stress response. Fear, pain, hunger, exhaustion and isolation can affect attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility and decision-making — exactly the abilities you need to reassess a situation and solve unfamiliar problems.
Stanislav later described something emerging in himself that he hadn't known was there: “It kind of brought up inside me this sort of other personality that I never knew even existed, a sort of animal instinct that came in.”
Whatever we call it — determination, hope, instinct or resilience — he kept trying.
2. HE FOUND A WAY TO CALM HIMSELF
One detail from Stanislav's story might sound almost ridiculous as survival advice: he smoked a cigar. He had a lighter with him, and at one point he sat down, lit a cigar and thought about what he was going to do next. Don't judge. What matters is what that familiar ritual may have done psychologically. He stopped, calmed himself down and gave himself time to think about his situation and make a plan.
This matters in Lost Person Behaviour. A frightened person is still making decisions, but acute stress can make those decisions more reactive. The urge to do something can become the urge to keep moving, even when you no longer have reliable information about where you are going.
Finding a way to interrupt that response is a genuine survival skill. For somebody else it might mean controlling their breathing, drinking some water, eating something, talking themselves through the situation, praying or simply sitting still for a few minutes.
Calm yourself enough to think before you decide what happens next.
3. HE GAVE HIS BRAIN A JOB
One of the most fascinating details Stanislav shared was what he did while sheltering: “I would try to do stuff. For example, I would try to pile rocks…”
He described piling rocks until the task became physically difficult, then moving them and making another pile. It sounds almost pointless, but psychologically it was anything but. He was injured, alone and uncertain whether anyone would find him, so he gave himself things to do.
Some of those tasks had obvious survival value. He found water, found shelter, looked for food and tried to signal rescuers. Others simply kept his body moving and his mind occupied.
This is something worth remembering if you ever find yourself in a survival situation. An enormous problem such as “I'm lost, injured and nobody can find me” can feel impossible to solve. A small problem is different. Improve the shelter. Collect water. Make yourself visible. Inventory your equipment. Prepare for nightfall. Solve one problem, then find the next one.
Sometimes survival is simply finding the next thing you can control and doing it.
4. HE MADE A PLAN
Stanislav found a small cave near a waterfall that protected him from the weather and gave him access to water. He assessed what he had, what he needed and what his injured body could actually do.
As he later explained: “If I have the plants, and I know where to stay, I have my little hut where I am hiding from the rain, I think I can wait here a few more days to get my heel back in a working state.”
That sentence is survival psychology happening in real time. Instead of trying to solve the enormous problem of How am I going to survive and get off this mountain?, he broke it into manageable pieces. He had something to eat. He had water. He had shelter from the rain. His heel needed time. For the moment, staying where he was made sense.
His behaviour also changed when he became injured, and that is important from a Lost Person Behaviour perspective. A mobile lost hiker and an injured person sheltering near water present two very different search problems. The missing person's behaviour evolves as their circumstances change. The next post will dive into this.
5. HE KEPT TRYING TO SIGNAL SAR
Stanislav could hear and see helicopters searching for him. When he heard them, he came out of his shelter, waved a white shirt and blew his whistle.
We didn't see him. We didn't hear him.
Imagine how discouraging that must have been when you know rescuers are somewhere above you. Dense Coastal forest is extraordinarily good at hiding people, and a helicopter or ground team can pass surprisingly close without seeing or hearing them.
He kept trying anyway. Never assume that because rescuers didn't respond to your first signal, nobody is looking. We will not abandon you, we will keep trying.
6. HE KEPT REASSESSING
Eventually his heel improved enough that the equation changed. Stanislav described the decision simply: “You have two options basically, you wait for the helicopters to come and rescue you … or you have to do something about it.”
Eventually he decided: “Basically I decided to take a chance and get out of there.”
After nearly six days, he worked his way out to the Indian River FSR, where he encountered workers and was finally able to tell someone who he was.
This is another important part of Lost Person Behaviour: people don't necessarily behave the same way throughout an incident. They move, stop, shelter, become injured, recover, change strategies and move again. Every one of those changes affects where SAR should look.
YOUR MIND, IS A SURVIVAL TOOL
There is no single reason Stanislav survived. Water mattered. Shelter mattered. Weather mattered. His physical condition mattered. Luck mattered. Psychology cannot overcome every injury, exposure or wilderness emergency.
But human psychology is an enormously important part of survival. If you want a masterclass on this, read about the Shackleton expedition - keeping people alive meant managing their minds as deliberately as their food. Shackleton imposed routine, jobs, duties, created games to play - Stanislav gave himself little jobs.
Fear can make us react rather than think. Panic can send us moving when we should stop. Despair can make us stop trying when there are still things we can do. Finding a way to control that fear enough to think, plan and act can change what happens next.
For Stanislav, sometimes that meant finding water or shelter. Sometimes it meant waving a shirt at a helicopter. Sometimes it meant waiting for an injured heel to recover enough to move.
Sometimes it meant piling rocks.
For six days, he kept calming himself, thinking, adapting, solving problems and trying again. He never stopped participating in his own rescue.
In Part 2, we'll follow Stanislav across the mountain and look at something most people don't realize SAR studies: where lost people actually go, why they go there, and how Lost Person Behaviour helps us decide where to search.