With thanks to Dave at Folk Dancing who heard me tell this story and said I should write it.

When I was an undergrad majoring in statistics (yes, I count beans) I ended up in two honors societies: the Statistics Honor Society and the Mathematics Honor Society (also called the Euclidean Society). To become a member of either, you had to be nominated by a faculty member based on outstanding scholastic achievement. To get into the Euclidean Society, I accidentally got a 100 on my first exam in Differential Equations (DiffEq). My next exam normalized back to 89, but it was too late; I had already been accepted into the Society.

While these clubs sound like two of the same things, there were differences. The Stat Society met at bars and drank a lot of beer. We spent our time trying to figure a way to win at greyhound racing. There was no initiation: they just told you where the next meeting was to be held and, if you showed up, >poof< you were in. The Math Society met in the basements of various math professors, was tea-total, and had a competition to find obscure scientific factoids. There was a spooky initiation in a darkened basement (meant to simulate the ancient Euclidean caves) involving candles and geometric theorems. They actually had a national quarterly journal that you could submit erudite articles to for publication. (Needless to say, I never published in that journal.)

Two things both clubs had in common: a lack of physical activity and a lack of respect from other student organizations.

The statisticians didn't care. The mathematicians apparently did. Sometime in the depths of a Colorado winter the mathematicians decided to do something athletic to garner respect from other student organizations.

The natural Colorado activity in winter is, of course, skiing. Everybody in Colorado skis.

Everybody, that is except the Mathematics Honor Society members. Not one of us were skiers. And the thought of us all joining the kids on the bunny slope for a class didn't sound like the sort of thing that would earn respect from other student organizations.

Cross-country skiing was beginning to be popular, and that sounded more like an adult activity that might not involve much training, but still... skiing... we visualized the entire Math Society on crutches. Again, no respect there.

Finally somebody had the great idea: snowshoeing! That sounded safe and with a fast learning curve: we already knew how to walk!

So, snowshoeing it would be. Some member of the group found a place that had a trail and rented snowshoes, and in mid-January we all met at the house where they rented snowshoes, were tutored in how to strap them on and how to walk without one snowshoe stepping on the other (a pretty tricky process, actually!) and we ventured forth to prove that mathematicians, too, could be athletes!

The trail was an unused road that ran next to the house. A mini-forest was on the other side of the road. We felt like nordic pioneers. About a mile further on was a cross road. We turned right.

About two hours into our adventure, one of our party stepped off the trail into what was, unfortunately, a ravine. Snow extended out beyond the edge, so she didn't realize she was stepping into snow-covered nothingness. She tumbled into the ravine, there was a loud "snap!" and she started screaming in pain.

Yes, even on snowshoes, we had our first broken leg.

The guys in our party lifted her out of the ravine (see, mathematicians CAN do athletic stuff!)

She was in a lot of pain, none of us had anything beyond rudimentary Boy/Girl Scout first aid, and it was too far and there would have been too much jostling to carry her back to the snowshoe house.

I volunteered to stay with her while the others went back for help. Since we had walked two hours, we knew it couldn't be any less time for the rescuers to walk back to the snowshoe house and bring help back to us. We were both ex-Girl Scouts, so we sang all the old campfire songs (we really could have used the campfire...) Then we sang popular songs. We had left the snowshoe house at about 11:00am. By now, it wasn't exactly getting dark, but let's just say it was getting "dim". The breeze intensified. We were freezing. We cuddled together and tried to visualize a nice campfire. With marshmallows - we were also getting hungry.

Meanwhile the rescuers were busy rescuing. Unfortunately, they were (after all) mathematicians. They pointed out that our trail was a right angle. The shortest route back to snowshoe house would, then, be the hypotenuse of the right triangle. But, someone pointed out, you would need to know the proper angle for the hypotenuse or it wouldn't work. Disaster might result. Of the nine members of the rescue party, 7 wanted to try the hypotenuse hypothesis. Two felt it would be safer to just retrace our path down the right angle and set off following our outward tracks.

Those two got back to the snowshoe house in about two hours. The lady of the house plied them with hot cocoa and called the ambulance service while the husband got out his jeep to come to our aid. About 3:30pm the welcome sound of an engine began to be heard. We were saved!

The husband decided my friend should not be moved except by professionals, walky-talkied his wife, got us wrapped up with blankets and applied hot cocoa from a thermos. About 4:00pm (as the sun sank below the trees in the mini-forest) the ambulance arrived, scooped up my wounded friend, told me where the hospital was, and departed with siren and lights. I rode back with the husband, got my car from the parking lot, and drove off to be with my friend in her hour of need.

But the other 7 mathematicians were nowhere to be seen. The two that had gotten back safely wanted to stay at the house until the others were found.

Apparently there had been differences of opinions as to the proper angle to be used to return to the house efficiently. Two had argued for a less acute angle, and had taken off on their own to prove their hypothesis. They finally came to the road the house was on, but no evidence of the location of the house could be seen. They decided to split up, one going one way down the road and the other going the other. One of them would eventually find the house and yell back for the other who would backtrack and eventually find the house. One found the house at about 4:45pm. The other finally rejoined him at about 5:15pm.

Still, 5 were missing. As you can probably guess, they had also had a difference of navigational opinion and had split into two groups, three in one group, two in another.

One of the groups discovered a statistical truism: a random walk always returns to its starting point. A member of the group swore they had passed the same oddly-shaped tree three times. Apparently the other group just wandered deeper into the forest.

While the husband was trying to rescue the rescuers, both groups discovered some important acoustical principles: 1) trees are net absorbers of sound. They muffle cries for help as well as cries of "Stay where you are, dammit!" 2) snow, on the other hand, can be a good sound reflector. You can't tell where any sound is coming from in order to move toward it. In other words, the best strategy is, as the husband knew, to "Stay where you are, dammit!!!"

So, it was about 8:00pm before everybody regrouped at the hospital to pat our wounded friend's hand and say, "There, there." One member of the lost groups had to be treated for frostbite: his ears had swollen to about twice their normal size.

Needless to say, we did not broadcast our tales of athletic prowess among the other student organizations. The Euclidean Society remained the bastion of the geeks.

But, I still think the thing that was the most mortifying to us all was that the math (hypothesis of a right triangle) HAD NOT WORKED!! If math doesn't work, what can be trusted??