Location Taken: North side of Lake Superior in Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010
Step one of not dying in the wilderness: don’t run off any cliffs!
I know, it seems pretty simple really, but people do it all the time!
I mean, it’s just a sudden lack of land where you were going to stop, nothing more. And if you’re not being careful, that slight break in the trees might just be a slight hundred-foot plummet. No big deal, right?
At least cliffs aren’t too common. I mean, do you really think you’d find a cliff in Nebraska or something.
Well, aside from all the cliffs by Scotts Bluff in western Nebraska, but those are pretty obvious ones, and they’re mesas rather than simple cliffs anyway. You’re not going to just randomly walk off one of those unless you randomly climbed to the top of one first.
Most cliffs are formed by water carving away at the rock for long periods of time. That’s why you find a lot of them in very wet places like this part of Ontario and very dry places like Wyoming. The dry places have no trees holding onto the ground, while the wet ones have enough water going through that the trees don’t matter much.
You also need a decent gradient to the ground. If there’s a two-foot difference between the top of the cliff and the bottom, well, you might get hurt falling off it, but otherwise it’s not really a cliff. More of an embankment.
And the ground also has to have rock near the surface. If it’s all dirt or sand, that cliff face will fall down rather quickly and become a slope or a sand dune. Hence the lack of cliffs in places like the coast of Lake Michigan, despite the wet climate and multi-hundred foot dunes dotting the coastline.
So hopefully the next time you’re being chased by zombies at night in a dense forest, you’re in Minnesota or something, where all you’ll do is fall into a lake.
