Two of the most angst-ridden days of my life took place hundreds of miles away and years apart, but they involved one common misstep: getting lost.

On one occasion, I was descending the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in a February blizzard when my friend and I strayed off the mile-high Lion Head Trail and realized our best option was to strike out across the Alpine Garden, where wind-whipped snow reduced visibility to barely a foot. We pinned our hopes on relocating the icy path, taking care to avoid tumbling down a sheer drop into Tuckerman Ravine.

Our disorientation, before at last stumbling upon a rime-ice coated cairn marking the trail, lasted about half an hour, which seemed like an eternity.

The other forlorn experience took place while mountain biking in the woods of Maine with my son, Tom, then 8 years old. Some miscreant had stolen the trail markers, so when we came to a fork in the path, there was no way to be sure of the right way.

We guessed incorrectly and before long had strayed deep into spruce thickets. Rather than prudently retracing our errant route, we forged ahead and were forced to carry our bikes, eventually abandoning them as darkness approached. A carpenter’s distant hammering, music to our ears, eventually led us back to civilization.

By the way, these events really happened, though I know they seem reminiscent of the prank fellow columnist Rick Koster and I played on our readers when we temporarily switched places in honor of April Fool’s Day. Rick, normally an arts/entertainment writer, wrote a fanciful Great Outdoors account about getting lost in the woods of New Hampshire and running into J.D. Salinger.

Obviously, Tom and I didn’t really encounter the reclusive (and long-departed) author, but — true story — on that hapless Maine outing, we eventually staggered up to a log cabin at the edge of the woods that turned out to be occupied by the grandmother of actor Kurt Russell. A delightful woman who offered us cookies and refilled our water bottles, she said we just missed Russell and his celebrated companion Goldie Hawn, who had been visiting.

Anyway, I thought about those episodes the other day after reading about an Oregon trucker named Jacob Cartwright who had been lost four days in the wilderness due to an increasingly frequent bugaboo among wayward wanderers: blindly following a global positioning system.

The navigationally challenged 22-year-old had been driving his 18-wheeler about 400 miles from Portland in the mountainous northwestern part of the state to the town of Nyssa near the Idaho border when the road got narrower and narrower. Evidently, Cartwright had punched in the wrong coordinates, and the GPS led him over a little-used forest road not designed for large vehicles. Eventually, the truck got stuck, and Cartwright was forced to set out on foot.

Initial accounts reported that Cartwright tramped 35 miles before a passing motorist picked him up and drove him home (a tow truck later retrieved his big rig), but authorities subsequently revised that distance to 14 miles.

Now, 14 miles is not a short hop, skip and jump if you had to scale jagged peaks, scramble over boulder-ridden escarpments and ford raging rivers, but I would think a determined walker could cover that distance on a smooth road in about four hours. Four days?

Cartwright said he carried three bottles of water but had no food, which raises another question: Why didn’t he break into the truck trailer? His cargo consisted of tons of potato chips. Admittedly, this snack isn’t the best sustenance for a long-distance hike, but hey, any port in a storm.

Cartwright wound up in the hospital, and I’m sure he experienced the same fear and self-recrimination I did while the dramas unfolded. We both made stupid mistakes that could have ended disastrously and now can tell stories illustrating our ineptitude.

Whenever I recall my shameful experiences, I think of those who survived far more perilous ordeals through astonishing acts of fortitude.

Ernest Shackleton managed to keep all 27 members of his crew alive during an ill-fated expedition to cross the Antarctic in 1915 after his vessel, Endurance, was trapped in pack ice and crushed. While some members of the crew hunkered down in a makeshift camp, the others embarked on a perilous, 720-mile voyage in a 20-foot open lifeboat and then had to climb an ice-covered mountain in order to summon rescuers.

Nearly a century earlier, Howard Blackburn, a fisherman from Gloucester, Mass., was aboard a fishing dory that became separated from its schooner during a mid-winter squall off Nova Scotia in 1833 and had to row 60 miles over five days to safety. Reportedly, he let his hands freeze to the oars so they wouldn’t slip and wound up losing most of his fingers. Blackburn, who recovered and went on to sail solo twice across the Atlantic, became known as “The Fingerless Navigator.” I’ve competed a couple times in The Blackburn Challenge, a 20-mile, open-water kayak race around Gloucester’s Cape Ann named in his honor.

Then there’s Beck Weathers, who was left for dead below the summit of Mount Everest during a blizzard in 1996 but somehow managed to survive the night without a tent and stagger on frozen feet into camp the next morning, near-blind and severely frostbitten.

I guess losing the trail for a short spell in New England or following the wrong route in Oregon is a far cry from spending the night in Everest’s Death Zone, being trapped for months on an iceberg off the Antarctic, or rowing a boat for five nights with frozen fingers.

I have no plans to climb Mount Washington in a blizzard again anytime soon, and in recent years, I’ve been a lot more scrupulous about following maps and staying on the trail.

I also hope Cartwright thinks twice about relying solely on GPS or any other electronic device the next time he gets behind the wheel. There are a lot simpler ways to get lost.