Getting stuck in Big Bend, getting Yankee salvation — even when you're an idiot

If you get stuck in Big Bend, here's the guy who could be your ultimate salvation. And, he's a Yankee from Massachusetts.

That said, despite his big heart, there's info in the story that shows some people don't belong in the back country of one of the largest, and almost surely the second most primitive, of national parks this side of Death Valley. (The Maze district of Canyonlands is still well ahead, and may directly challenge some of the worst of DV, though not being as hot in summer as Big Bend, let alone Death Valley.)

Now, those ... idiots?

This:

In March, four college kids in a Land Cruiser got a flat tire on Black Gap Road, in Big Bend National Park, and were so low on gas that they couldn’t run the air conditioning. The road is technically closed due to flooding damage last year, so the chances were slim that anyone was going to drive by. At 4 p.m. on a 101 degree day, they were able to send a message to one of their dads, who joined several Big Bend Facebook pages and was directed to Cary. By sunset, Cary had contacted them and made a plan to meet up first thing the next morning with gas so they could at least stay cool. All in all, he spent seven hours fixing the tire and helping them get on their way.

First, riffing off the warning at the end of the piece, Land Cruisers DO have a full-sized spare. If you don't know how to access an under-carriage spare tire when you buy or rent such a vehicle, you should familiarize yourself well before driving a place like Black Gap Road, even when it's truly open.

For more on how tough Black Gap Road is? The Park Service notes it is "not maintained and requires 4-wheel drive." More here. Both links have multiple photos.

Second, you shouldn't be an idiot on running that low on gas in a place as big and as remote as Big Bend. I would have known that in college, even with a lot less money than these kids have. And,  yes, money and class are getting mentioned here.

Third, what would you have done without a cellphone signal? (This is likely to lead to a push to put even more cellphone towers — a totally wrong push, of course, and another reason to visit more and more non-national park federal land. The subreddits about national parks sometimes reinforce that idea.)

Fourth, yes, it's a stereotype, but things like this are the reasons stereotypes of Millennials more and more come off like generalizations, not stereotypes.

(Per my take on modern informal logic and its split of the old deductive vs fallacious on arguments into deductive, inductive and fallacious, an observation about a group that's more than 50 percent true, even if not 100 percent true, is a generalization not a stereotype.)