The Weminuche Turned Deadly
Our beautiful ride in the Weminuche Wilderness quickly turned deadly. I was with my sons on a ride up to Emerald Lake near Durango. We had been riding for about six hours up a narrow mountain trail and had just reached the lake when we started to encounter huge, downed trees blocking the trail. We had invested so much in getting this far and were hypnotized by the campsite just on the other side of the lake. After some deliberation, we decided to push forward.
For hours, we struggled to go only a few hundred yards. Pack saddles fell off and went toppling off the trail. While helping one horse, another horse got tangled in his reins and fell down the mountain scraping his legs badly. The most severe accident involved a beautiful white mustang. No matter what we tried, we could not get her to cross a large rock. She kicked me in the arm as I pushed from behind while the boys pulled. We even fired a gun off behind her, but nothing worked. When she finally jumped over the rock, we were horrified to watch as she missed the trail and tumbled 30 feet down the mountain. She stopped just before plunging over a cliff and into the lake. In the 30-second video clip, you can see her as a tiny white speck far below the trail. She did not move for several minutes as we climbed down to her. We were sure she was dead or had a broken leg, but miraculously, she finally got up and scampered back up to the trail, relatively unharmed. This jarred us into the realization that continuing was foolish, so we headed back down the mountain and collapsed exhausted at a different campsite after 10 hours in the saddle.
As we debriefed around the campfire, my older son had the answer from one of his business school classes. We had fallen for the “sunk cost fallacy,” where you continue pursuing a course of action because you have already invested so much in it. The Vietnam War is a tragic example of leaders doing this. Documents show they continued to send young men to die years after they knew the war was unwinnable primarily because of concern for the terrible sacrifices that had already been made. If you stubbornly stick to a failing course of action, pray you come off as lucky as we did, with just a bruised arm and ego.
