Windy Tops

Tag: accident

  • The Price of Great Walks

    Last month an incident occurred, out of season, on the Milford Track. I’ll reflect on a few things before getting to it.

    In New Zealand we have an enshrined legal right to enter most parts of the Conservation Estate. (I wrote more about how this works, over here.) By design in law, it’s difficult for people to be fenced out for their protection. In exchange visitors are considered responsible for their own safety. After all, one person’s dangerous place could be another adequately skilled person’s source of adventure.

    Great Walks, however, don’t always fit nicely into this framework. Similar concepts have existed previously, but the modern idea of “Great Walks” began with the Department of Conservation’s effort towards its mandate of fostering recreation. The idea has been to consolidate and market several of the most iconic tramping trips, and make them relatively accessible for a large number of people of varying abilities.

    Over time they’ve become intensively used. By the latter end of the 1990s, booking systems were being introduced to control overcrowding. A booking system can’t restrict anyone’s entry to the land, but tactical limitations of facility use (especially huts), combined with bylaws to disallow camping in certain areas, now makes it impractical to walk some Great Walks without booking ahead.

    The Milford Track is one such Great Walk. In the booking season, between November and May, it becomes a beautifully iconic conveyor belt of tourists. The speed at which you might want to walk it doesn’t matter, because “the track takes 4 days to walk“. This is thanks to the requirement of booking all three huts at once for sequential nights, with these huts being the only legal place to stay. If this doesn’t work for you, you could either search for a way to camp further than 500 metres from the line of the track (difficult with the geography), or run the entire track without stopping.
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  • The tragedy over the long weekend

    People who read this may have heard about the climbing tragedy up Mount Taranaki over the weekend, within Egmont National Park. I’ve wandered around the park a few times, and I walked to the top of the mountain in late 2010 (via the most direct and easiest route). I guess this accident feels closer to home for me than some others, despite me not being an alpine climber.

    So far, this article is the most down-to-earth media collation I can find of what is and isn’t known.

    I’ve checked my photos from my own most-recent visit. The following two photos respectively show the area near the top of The Lizard, standing with the camera at 2435 metres, but on a nicer day. The Lizard veers around to the right (in the second photo) below this rocky spine. The two climbers reportedly chose to dig themselves into the ice, located at about 2400 metres, slightly below where these photos were taken, having climbed the East Ridge and come down from the summit. On a topo map, that would have placed them about here, give or take.

    5295509263_75408263db_z-5459048
    Looking up.

    Looking down.
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  • A reflective account of an accident

    There’s an interesting article on the NZ Alpine Team blog. It’s courtesy of Rose Pearson (thanks!), one of two people who suffered an accident near Zit Saddle, within 1 km of Top Kokatahi Hut, late last month. The pair were ultimately located and rescued after eventually being reported overdue. This followed several days and nights of struggling to survive, with serious injuries, in the open, and with luck on their side as far as weather was concerned.

    Emphasis is my own:

    So what were our mistakes? We didn’t turn around when we reached the icy south side of Zit’s Saddle, which had significantly more snow that the northern side. At this point we could have still extracted ourselves. The second mistake is my own. I began rushing and didn’t act appropriately given the danger of a fall.

    Finally, should we have had a PLB? In our case yes. I had just spent $700 on one. I purposely bought the smallest model so it wouldn’t matter if I always carried it. Why didn’t I carry it? I bought it two weeks prior for mountaineering or solo trips. I did not consider user error, or the possibility that all party members could be immobilised. I also didn’t consider the difference in time between rescue due to being overdue versus rescue as a result of PLB activation. In our case, Nelson’s broken and dislocated wrist became much worse as it began healing crooked and he suffered from frostbite as a result of our five days out.

    I also didn’t consider that SAR might act differently as I owned a PLB. They knew I had a PLB and I was told by both the West Coast Police and West Coast SAR that they would have come a day earlier if I didn’t own a PLB. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t activate it.

    It’s normal to make mistakes, and hopefully those who do can learn things as a consequence. Unfortunately, for those who haven’t yet made mistakes, there are too few reflective accounts from others in public, and this can obscure some of the most useful learning insight for others. It’s for understandable reasons, but it also means that when someone manages to write about their experiences so that others can learn, it’s valuable material.

    The article’s definitely worth a read. It contains some very good, and insightful reflections of the immediate consequences, and on what went wrong, both as individual mistakes and what combined to make a risky situation much more critical.

  • Not much to say

    I won’t comment much about the recent tragedy to befall one of the Wellington-based clubs over the new year, except that my thoughts are with them and the affected families and friends.
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