Quicksand won’t swallow you whole, here’s how to escape

(InvestigateTV) — As kids playing outside, a lot of us were afraid of running into quicksand. But as it turns out, quicksand is not a bottomless pit like in the movies. It is a mixture of sand and water that appears solid.

According to Scientific American, quicksand can look solid, but the moment a person steps on it, the sand grains lose their grip and the ground turns “soupy.”

Quicksand then flows like liquid, and sand starts sinking to the bottom. The more a person struggles, the more fluid quicksand becomes. Research shows it will not swallow a person whole.

Matt Bloomfield, a professional guide based in Phoenix, got stuck in quicksand last year during a canyoneering trip with friends at Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah.

“It’s one of my favorites, for sure,” Bloomfield said.

In Bloomfield’s videos, the canyon floor becomes bouncy, like jello.

“So then we started to, like, kind of squish around in it and noticed that there was a lot of quicksand around,” Bloomfield said.

Bloomfield said he recognized the quicksand immediately because he had encountered it before.

“No, that was a big surprise,” Bloomfield said. “It kind of shocked me at first because it was up to my waist when I first fell in. But then once you start to struggle a little bit more, you start to sink. You can get stuck if you don’t know the proper way to free yourself. It can be very, very difficult to pull your legs out.”

In quicksand, the more a person struggles, the deeper they sink.

Bloomfield sank to his chest at one point.

“At this point, I had been, like, struggling to keep my cameras out of the mud,” Bloomfield said. “So I was staying upright, which is exactly what I shouldn’t have been doing. So I was sinking in a little bit deeper.”

Bloomfield said he flattened himself and leaned forward to get his arms out in front of him.

“I was able to kind of wiggle my legs and get them closer to the surface and then just kind of army crawl my way out,” Bloomfield said.

The current quicksand alert applies just south of the Grand Staircase Escalante area at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The area spans more than a million acres of Arizona and Utah and includes Lake Powell, where dropping water levels are exposing more areas to explore on foot.

The quicksand alert is intended to raise awareness rather than alarm. The danger comes from getting stuck for hours and becoming exhausted, rather than from sinking completely underground.

Bloomfield said sinking stops before a person goes fully underwater.

“Yeah, it feels like that’s going to happen, but generally I think you get to like your lungs and you have more buoyancy where you actually can’t go any further,” Bloomfield said.

Bloomfield was with other people during his encounter. Park rangers recommend hiking with someone else in case of encountering quicksand in the area.

If a person gets stuck, officials recommend staying calm and applying the methods described to escape.