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.” ...

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The quicksand depicted in films, when a daring adventurer is suddenly ensnared in a life-threatening vortex of sand, is largely a myth. But that didn’t make it any less scary when Mitchell O’Brien ...