Getting lost

This information is required to plot a course designed to reach a destination (previously known or unknown) or to return to a home base after wandering.

If a destination is known but is not directly connected by a path, road, or track to the origin, successful travel may involve search and exploration, spatial updating of one's location, finding familiar landmarks, recognition of segment length and sequencing, identification of a frame of reference.

[6] Getting lost is particularly problematic for children (who have not yet developed tools and strategies for maintaining their bearings) and for the elderly, particularly those experiencing the onset of dementia.

[7] People experiencing dementia also get lost more easily in poor visibility conditions because the mind fails to appropriately fill in cues as to missing landmarks.

[7] Getting lost in unfamiliar terrain can lead even an adult with a healthy mind to panic and engage in unthinking behaviors that make the situation even worse.

[11] John Muir wrote in his journals of an occasion when a visiting artist named Billy Simms "went forth to sketch while I was among the glaciers, and got lost - was thirty-six hours without food".

[12] Mentally ailing Church of England mission priest Alexander Mackonochie died after getting lost on December 14, 1887, while walking in the Forest of Mamore, near Loch Leven, Scotland: the circumstances were later commemorated in a poem by William McGonagall.

[13] In September 2014, Soviet and Russian mathematician Alexey Chervonenkis got lost in Losiny Ostrov National Park; a later search operation found him dead near Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow.

In the mythology of the British Isles, the culprit making someone get lost—being pixy-led, fairy-led or pouk-ledden as it is called—can be a fairy, Robin Goodfellow, Puck, Hob, a pixy or one of the gwyllion.