An Ordinary Hike Turned Terrifying When Quicksand Trapped This Colorado Man in Arches National Park

At 6:45 a.m. on December 7, 2025, 33-year-old Austin Dirks experienced something that he thought happened only in horror movies. His fingers were numb. Water was rushing around his leg, “cold as ice.” His knee was bent to a painful forty-five degrees above his foot, and he couldn’t straighten it. After thirty minutes of restlessly flailing his arms, he had made no progress. He called for help, but his screams remained unanswered. He had to make a decision.

There was no cell phone service, no Bluetooth connection. With frozen fingers, he typed an SOS message on his Garmin messenger app and waited for help. At about 8:40 am, he heard the whirring of a drone above his head, and out of the morning mist materialized the figure of Devon, a ranger from Arches National Park. When Dirks shared this episode of his park trip in Reddit’s r/backpacking group, viewers were left rethinking what they knew about quicksand.

Dirks described himself as a 6-foot-tall “fairly experienced and fit” backpacker from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, who has logged hundreds of trail miles over the past decade, including the Arizona Trail, Colorado Trail, and John Muir Trail. Hailing from the western slope of Colorado, Dirks is no stranger to getting his feet wet or trudging through the mud, he told Backpacker magazine. Initially, he said, the quicksand didn’t strike him as unusual. There were no immediate red flags.

“Before this trip, I honestly thought quicksand was more of a folklore or a legend,” Dirks told FOX 13 News Utah. “I have hiked thousands of miles through the desert,” he said. But this episode challenged the best of him. The seemingly ordinary quicksand betrayed him, and he almost became a fossil, as one Reddit user described it. The episode happened on the Courthouse Wash in the Hayduke Trail of Arches. “I've been bogged down in mud and sand countless times, but never like what happened today,” Dirks said on Reddit, likely horrified by the uncanny morning hike.

It was the second day, and the traveler was hiking on a 20-mile section along Hayduke when this happened. “The air was in the upper twenties. The stream running through the canyon carried about an inch of water, barely more than a film of cold melt,” he described. When his foot sank into the sand, he didn’t expect to get trapped. But when he did, every moment turned into a ticking clock. His left foot dropped first, to the ankle. He shifted his weight to the right, and that leg went to the knee immediately. He freed his left foot, but the right stayed locked in place. “I had been in deep mud and deep sand before. I thought it was the same. It was not,” he recalled. Soon, realization struck him that his right leg was trapped, and it felt like concrete was hardening around it.

It wasn’t until Devon and the SAR team arrived on the spot, he felt some relief. With ladders, boards, and shovels, they pulled him out. By this time, his legs were numb, his shoes shredded, and he just collapsed on the ground. Devon rode him back to his home.

In conversation with National Geographic, Amsterdam-based physicist Daniel Bonn agreed that it is possible for people trapped in quicksand to get out on their own, though the process is slow. “The way to do it is to wriggle your legs around. This creates a space between the legs and the quicksand through which water can flow down to dilate [loosen] the sand,” he explained. As a reminder, Dirks urged visitors to remain cautious of the slippery trap that dwells in the murky depths of seemingly innocent quicksand. “It does not care how experienced you are. It only cares that you stepped in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.