Posted on 03/09/2026 10:30:30 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
It may not be the human-swallowing horror of Golden Age Hollywood films, but quicksand is a real-life hazard for hikers. It pays to know what it is and how to escape.
Like many people who have survived being trapped in quicksand, Dirks noted that there was nothing unusual about the sand to suggest danger. As he told writer Mary Beth “Mouse” Skylis: “I’ve hiked in conditions almost identical to that…There were no immediate red flags that stuck out.”
Quicksand, as it turns out, is very real, and more than a little dangerous. No, it may not be “the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life, behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky,” as John Mulaney famously said, and despite what cartoons and Golden Age Hollywood movies suggest, it can’t swallow you whole, leaving just your pith helmet floating on top. But getting stuck in quicksand can pose genuine risks from hypothermia and lack of circulation, and can even endanger lives in rare occasions, such as in 2023, when a 20-year-old man drowned after becoming trapped in quicksand-like mud flats near Hope, Alaska. As our colleagues at Outside wrote last week, the National Park Service warned visitors that it had received reports of the hazard in parts of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah and Arizona.
If you need a primer on quicksand, this overview on it is a good place to start. The substance forms when just the right amount of water mixes with fine sand, reducing the friction that individual grains of sand exert on each other and reducing its ability to bear weight. Danger zones for it include the inside curves of rivers and dry washes. Flooding—and, oddly enough, salt—can exacerbate the problem.
Quicksand is “something to be aware of when you’re hiking, but maybe not something that should be outright feared,” Zion National Park Chief Ranger Daniel Fagergren told us when we talked to him in 2022. While Hollywood may depict quicksand pits as a danger you’d mostly find in the jungle, in the US, the desert southwest is ground zero for it, though it can occur in other places as well. Fagergren explained what hikers should watch out for and how they can avoid getting stuck in it.
As we’ve written, quicksand isn’t usually dangerous on its own. But add in cold temperatures and precipitation, and trapped, sodden hikers can be at real risk of hypothermia. That was Ryan Osmun’s biggest concern when he became stuck in quicksand during a hike in Zion National Park. As he related to Backpacker‘s Out Alive podcast, he would end up spending 10 hours unable to move while his girlfriend, with whom he had been hiking, went looking for cell reception to call for help.
Dirks’s story, which he originally related on Reddit before speaking with Backpacker, is important reading for any solo hikers headed to the desert as well. While he was able to get in touch with rescuers through a satellite communicator, he would ultimately spend two hours waiting for help to arrive, his knee bent at a painful angle that entire time. “I worried about the knee more than the cold,” he wrote. “I did not know how long it could stay bent like that before something tore or dislocated.”
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Explored in the 1960s by the great Motown group....
Quicksand
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flvZTCvUVVo
Sounds like our driveway now that mud season is here.
Desert soil, when it gets saturated, becomes slick as dog spit and can indeed swallow people and cars. Been there, done that.
It can also be cold and can steal your core body heat in a flash.
“ slick as dog spit”
Harkens back to my favorite line in “The Missouri Breaks” — “slipperier than snot on a doorknob”
Well that was lucky! Doggone near lost a $400 handcart!
Mud, sand, even dry dirt can be a trap in an instant and I have pulled out a couple of co workers out of chest deep mud in a large tract housing development.
During one such incident myself, a co worker AND the guy we were digging out were almost crushed by a huge Caterpillar Sand Hopper. Operator didn't see us waving and screaming at him until the last second.
I rode my horse into quicksand once on the beach near where the Salinas River entered the ocean. My horse figured it out right away and got us out of there without my asking. Good horse!
Don’t forget about the giant clam on Batman. That one sent me right round the bend first time I saw it. LOL
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