Windy Tops

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  • 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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  • Clarity on not charging for Search and Rescue in New Zealand

    This incident occurred just over a week ago, but I’ve avoided posting until now. I was annoyed when I first saw it, and still am, but not for the same reason as most other people who have expressed their brief opinions in the comment thread below that article.

    A man activated a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB), sometimes called an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), whilst tramping in the Paringa Forest area of South Westland [map], and a helicopter collected him. The pilot later reported the man as having said “he had significantly underestimated the amount of time to get out of the area and was struggling with the challenging terrain”. This has become a media article with a headline that complains about the rescue helicopter being treated as a taxi service, and begins with a claim, not clearly substantiated by other information, which asserts the man was “running late and wanted a ride to his car”. Now, the Rescue Coordination Centre of New Zealand (RCCNZ), a sub-section of Maritime New Zealand, is “considering” whether to charge the man, threatening a possible penalty of up to $30,000.

    A carbon copied story has been replicated throughout the Fairfax eco-system of newspapers and websites within New Zealand and Australia. The Herald has an identical take. It’s identical because the journalists on all sides are merely parroting a Friday press release from the RCCNZ, including the headline and opening paragraph. [Update 12-June-2013: The RCCNZ has now cleared the man of any wrongdoing with regard to activating the PLB.]

    I’m disappointed with this press release and its inflammatory tone. The facts are not established beyond hearsay, and if Maritime New Zealand truly does plan to take the matter to court, I don’t think it should be spreading such things in the media. Thanks also to the one-sided nature of the text, comment threads on those media repetitions which host them are mostly one-dimensional hang’em brigades. Based on the press release they scream that the man is an idiot, and that he should be heavily charged for the rescue. If it’s enough to indicate that there may be another side to this story, however, the Nelson Mail’s rendition of the story (from the man’s home town) attracted a comment from a person who claims to know the man and the circumstances, and believes the RCCNZ’s information to be sensationalised.

    PERCEPTION OF COSTS

    Charging a person for search and rescue in the back-country is not easy under New Zealand law. It’s also unprecedented. One of the most important reasons is that if people are dissuaded from requesting a rescue when they need it, the situation can become much worse, and risk can increase for all involved.
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  • A Brief Question: Public Land Access Rights and DoC

    The introduction below was an opinion piece thefor the November 2012 Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin. With permission I’m republishing it, plus extra content that includes legal references and various opinions of my own. Please be mindful that nothing here is legal advice. I’m trying to learn about this and be accurate from my own research but would appreciate notification of any errors so I can correct them. As always, constructive discussion is welcome.

    Introduction [from Pages 40-41 of FMC Bulletin 190 (November 2012)]


    No it isn’t.

    We often take for granted our freedom to access public land, and over time I’ve encountered confusion about what’s meant when DoC labels places as “closed”. Some people ignore such directives, confident that reasons are often trivial and they’re not enforceable. Others would avoid a “closed” place, believing there’s likely a good reason, or through fear of being caught breaking rules.

    My layperson’s reading of the law (and I welcome correction) is that it emphasises the importance of free access to public land. DoC is not automatically permitted to close access to anything except specific maintained facilities like huts and bridges. Closing access within National Parks and Conservation Areas (including Forest Parks) requires the Minister of Conservation, although the Minister has confirmed a current ongoing delegation to DoC’s Director-General, who has further delegated this authority to Area Managers and Conservators. If part of a Conservation Area is “closed” under Section 13 of the Conservation Act, DoC must advertise the closure, and entering becomes an offence with a penalty of up to a year in jail or up to a $10,000 fine. Access restrictions within National Parks require the Minister to create a bylaw, which can’t be delegated away and which must be consistent with the park’s Management Plan. A person entering could potentially be fined up to $500. Severe penalties are unlikely, but the fact that it could happen is meant to convince us to avoid “closed” places.

    Despite these provisions, the law’s tone is that restricting access is serious and genuine closure of public land shouldn’t be easy, which is consistent with a view that DoC is a caretaker and not a gatekeeper. How, then, is a term which represents an offence used by DoC so frequently? Often the “closed” label is applied for discontinued maintenance, or a heightened risk for certain classes of visitors but not for everyone. It’s also commonly attached to tracks, as if they’re facilities which define where we may go rather than impressions on the land of where we have been. “Closing” a track makes little sense to someone who’d happily tread on public land alongside it, but referring to a track as “closed” may still impart to the less initiated that entry to the land beyond, or to any non-tracked land, is illegal. In most if not all cases it seems unlikely that closure is official, but with official looking signs, alerts and press releases being used by DoC to communicate about such “closures”, how can we know the difference?
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  • Heuristic Traps of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing

    295010007_a9ffecce88_n-9281801
    Leaving South Crater near
    the end of spring.

    A rescue that may have been inevitable occurred in Tongariro National Park on Saturday, when 16 people were rescued from the Tongariro Crossing, at least four of whom were in early stages of hypothermia. Present media appear to be pushing an angle that assigns much blame to a shuttle operator (who also has a side of the story) for giving the group incorrect advice about weather, although that’s something I struggle to accept. [Update 5/5/2012: This morning the Dominion Post also weighed in with an editorial, which largely blames the shuttle operator, but which I also think ignores much of the problem.]

    “It got very nasty very quickly, and we became separated into three groups.

    “We had the strong wind at our backs and we didn’t want to turn back into a headwind.”

    Their hands became so cold that it became too difficult to open their packs to find food.

    It was not until a woman collapsed with hypothermia that they decided to head back, he said.

    Two Auckland trampers, Ghaz Jabur and Graham Plows, found the confused and hysterical group late in the morning and helped them off the mountain. They also contacted police by cellphone.

    “The visibility was down to 10 to 20 metres; it was a freezing wind and we were crouching behind this boulder when we saw this hysterical person coming towards us,” Mr Jabur said. “We asked him if he was alone and he said he was with a big party who were trapped further up.”

    The men grabbed their packs and climbed up to find the group huddled together. “They were hysterical; they had minimal clothing on – puffer jackets, hoodies, jeans, tights and sandshoes.”

    The men gave spare clothes they had in their packs to the worst-affected and tried to get them out of the wind.

    “All we could do was grab them and pull them down the slope. We did this for about 10 to 20 minutes, it was totally exhausting.

    “Two guys and two of the girls were in a really bad way. They were shaking involuntarily, they had hypothermia and their eyes were rolling. They couldn’t put food in their mouths; they would have died for sure.

    “The only way we could get their attention was to scream at them one at a time and tell them what to do.”

    For me, it’s a reminder that the Tongariro Crossing is one of the wackiest places I’ve been in New Zealand in terms of seeing unprepared people in a wild, potentially very isolated, changeable and dangerous environment. I wrote about this problem of inexperience combined with popularity at the Tongariro Crossing a couple of years ago, and this TVNZ Close Up story from a few months before impresses the extent of the problem.

    It’d be premature to try to comment on specifics of exactly what happened with regard to advice given, but I’m not entirely sure it’s relevant. While it’s good to have responsible people on the edges, assigning blame to operators for dropping off and collecting people who aren’t prepared also ignores the bulk of the problem.

    That said, it also feels simplistic to just assign blame to people themselves and go no further—there are bigger things happening. Even if 16 people found themselves in trouble and had inadequate clothing and weren’t properly aware of the forecast and nearly died, and even if it is their own fault, they still weren’t doing anything especially different from what a substantial proportion of people have been doing before them and will likely continue to do in the future. In that respect, these people just happened to be the unlucky ones out of the crowd. For me, that is a much bigger problem, and this incident is merely symptomatic.
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  • A Crossing to Remember: A Tararua Southern Crossing in 1920

    Several days ago, I noted that it’s almost 100 years since the Southern Crossing Track was completed, which is pretty cool. This, however, was only the beginning of a significant tourism venture for both the Otaki and Wairarapa regions. At a time when the northern parts of the Tararua Range had barely been explored, the next phase of the project would be to market the walk across the southern end to potential tourists, convincing people that a visit to the Tararua Range could be a relaxing escape into the outdoors, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

    Earlier, in 1907, Willie Field and Frank Penn (editor of the Otaki Mail) had combined with a botanist, Bernard Aston, to enthusiastically promote and raise funding for the cutting of the track. The track was completed in 1912, and committees were formed on both sides of the range to plan for building of huts specifically so that walkers could stay the night. The committee on the Wairarapa side was more successful in raising funding, with the original Alpha Hut complete by 1915 and Upper Tauherenikau Hut in 1917. Tramping clubs soon began to form—the Tararua Tramping Club (TTC) having its inaugural meeting in 1919 thanks to the efforts of Willie Field and Fred Vosseler. Young members of a fledgeling Victoria University Tramping Club were also exploring, with an allegedly less mature attitude than a more “refined” TTC.

    In 1920, to fan the potential of the Southern Crossing as a major tourist attraction, particularly for his own Otaki region, Frank Penn produced a 40 page booklet, forwarded by Fred Vosseler. The first part of the book was titled Across The Tararuas and explains the wonders of a Southern Crossing in detail and with photographs. The second part was titled Beautiful Otaki, and describes a history of the Otaki district. The complete book was designed as a marketing tool to entice tourists to visit the district, then to take advantage of the excellent railway transport on both sides of the range by walking the amazing route across the range between them. Scattered throughout the booklet, especially during the latter section, are a variety of enthusiastic advertisements for local holiday businesses and the New Zealand Government (“a holiday once a year is a good investment!”) Tourist Bureau.

    Across The Tararuas, the first half which I’ve reproduced below, is one of the very early comprehensive descriptions of a typical Tararua Southern Crossing in existence. The text is clearly written with a marketing intent, from the perspective of an anonymous protagonist being guided in a group by an anonymous guide. The wonder and glory of the Tararuas is expressed repeatedly, albeit with caution regarding how to react in situations of potential bad weather. It’s likely that the photos and descriptions are collected from several experiences. The remainder of the book, although not reproduced here in text, can be read via scanned pages in the gallery below. My personal favourite feature is the one digit phone number in the advertisement for the local Motor Garage and Livery Stables, on page 36. (Phone 7—Otaki.)
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  • Let’s acknowledge some Avoidable Mistakes

    Last week was a very media-busy time for people being rescued from the New Zealand back-country. That time of year again, perhaps?

    4741849268_7192a6f9cd-1053977
    Just a general kind’a day when the weather’s not so happy.
    This eventful day, where our actions were strongly influenced by conditions, was the 27th of June 2010, near McKinnon Hut in the Ruahines.

    For instance:

    There will have been other call-outs during the same time-frame which haven’t been reported. That last one, which involved an injury evacuation, occurred several days later and I just threw in for show. Out of all of these media reports that describe distinctly different incidents, the 30th July incident was the first to describe a rescue from a situation that probably couldn’t have been easily prevented. The rest all involved bad judgements or decisions, and people losing awareness of where they were. In short, big storms sweep the country and many people who are unfamiliar with the conditions make mistakes.

    I think it’s great to go out when there’s stormy weather, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes I only notice it once I’m back, but I appreciate seeing places in ways that many people simply don’t see them, plus it can help to gain and retain familiarity and a better appreciation of what the environment can really be like when it’s not playing nicely, as well as how to cope with it. That said, stormy weather presents new risks and challenges that need to be managed very carefully. Decisions need to be taken with great care, and that’s a separate issue which I wrote about some time back in a post titled The Next Three Hours. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to build up a collection of friends whom I trust my life with and learn from. In my case it’s been through my association with the Wellington Tramping & Mountaineering Club.

    With this post, however, I wanted to focus on the 25th of July rescue near Arthur’s Pass, listed as the fourth bullet point above.
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  • How the Cave Creek Accident shaped DoC

    If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might have noticed me comment occasionally about ways in which the NZ Department of Conservation’s safety policies influence an experience in the back-country. I refer to things such as asset numbers being stamped everywhere, gratuitous warning signage, and removal of bunks from huts to comply with a law intended for urban environments. When I’ve discussed these issues with tramping friends, the Cave Creek Tragedy of 28th April 1995 has usually been cited as the reason, and it’s not so much a presumption.

    This Thursday will be the 16th anniversary of the Cave Creek Disaster. Besides the impact it had on many people and families, the accident also had a profound impact on DoC and its management of much of New Zealand’s outdoors. At the time it was the most serious accident to have occurred in modern times on the Conservation Estate, short of aircraft accidents. The implications were not shaped just by the accident itself, but in the numerous factors and fundamental faults in DoC’s design from the beginning. These flaws created a situation that would very likely have led to a serious accident sooner or later.

    From time to time I’ve met people (often from outside New Zealand) who needed explanation of what happened at Cave Creek. Despite having followed news at the time, and remembering bits from a television documentary that screened in 1998, I was also young when it happened. It’s only after trying to explain the significance of the event that I found I really didn’t know as much detail as I thought I did. Therefore I’ve tried to research things from (easily) available sources, and collated it here. I’ve attempted to present things accurately and hopefully opinionated bits will be easily distinguished. With a few exceptions I’ve removed names because I don’t think they’re relevant, but all of that should be fairly easy to discover for those interested. As always, I welcome any comments or corrections in the comments section.

    THE ACCIDENT

    In 1995, Tai Poutini Polytechnic continued to develop its Outdoor Recreation course for those wanting a career in outdoor pursuits, with training in a wide range of outdoor activities. 40 students took the course that year. To make things manageable they were split into two groups of 20. Between the 27th and 28th of April, Group A and then Group B would take part in a field trip meant specifically for non-recreational studies. In essence, it was a guided visit to the bush, to learn a few things and foster an appreciation of the environment in which they’d likely be working. This time they’d visit an area that included the Cave Creek Resurgence, and a platform located 30 metres above a chasm would allow viewing of the point at which Cave Creek emerged from an underground cave system (here it is on a map).

    On the day before the accident, Shirley Slatter, the Information Manager of DoC’s Punakaiki Visitor Centre, accompanied course tutor John Skilton and 20 students of Group A to the platform. As people stood on the platform, Ms Slatter thought she noticed it move slightly. This concerned her, and afterwards she managed to persuade Stephen O’Dea, the new manager of the visitor’s centre who’d not yet seen the platform, to return with Group B the following day and check it out. Ms Slatter even went as far to suggest that people probably shouldn’t be allowed to crowd onto the platform at once. It simply never occurred to her that the situation had been so serious, and for then at least she was content with reporting her concerns.
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  • The Next Three Hours

    Last weekend, when four of us bailed out of our trip through Leon Kinvig Hut in the Ruahines, part of the reasoning was the weather forecast. All things considered I think we made a good decision, and it started me thinking about the role of weather forecasts in outdoor recreation, especially tramping.

    Something I’ve heard about New Zealand is that for the next three hours, a good judgement on the weather from looking out the window is likely to be more accurate than a forecast issued by the MetService. After three hours, probabilities switch around and the forecast becomes more accurate than what you can typically judge on your own. Coming from me this is just an out-of-context statement taken from anecdotal rumours of random research, but I find the essence believable. Obviously it depends on how you interpret statistics and the “correctness” of forecasts, not to mention how good you are at judging the weather. A more important point to draw from this is that there’s a lot of information available from observing what’s around you, especially regarding what’s about to happen during the next few hours.

    Forecasts in New Zealand are also fallible thanks to limited data, proximity to the sea, endless micro-climates, and the need to simplify the colossal amount of information and expertise into a way that can be conveyed to people not trained in meteorology. A sunny forecast doesn’t guarantee sunny weather, and vice-versa. Even the isobar charts, which I think can convey some of the most useful information if applied well with local knowledge (something for which I’d like to improve my skills), are a gross simplification of all the information considered by forecasters who draw them.
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  • Re-living The Sutch Search (Part 3 of 3)

    Following from part one and part two.

    “It is, therefore, reasonable that the actions of Trampers who become—or are believed to be—lost should be thrown open to examination, and, if necessary, to criticism. When a party that was expected to return in about three days does not return for about fifteen days, and then says, it was “never lost,” a difficult precedent is created.”

    —The Evening Post, 1st May 1933.
    From Evening Post, Issue 100, 1 May 1933, Page 10 (additional):
    RECALL OF SEARCHERS
    A LONG PROCESS

    It is expected that it will be several days before all the searchers can he recalled. A party consisting of Messrs. H. Anderson, B. McGregor, and W. E. Davidson, of the Tararua Tramping Club, and Mr. F. A. McNeil, of the Radio Emergency Corps, left Wellington yesterday for the mountain house, and will remain there until the withdrawal of the search parties has been completed.

    About thirty-five members of the Tararua Tramping Club and a number of others belonging to kindred clubs are still on the ranges, and arrangements have been made with the Railway Department for trains to sound three blasts on their whistles between Otaki and Levin on the west side and Carterton and Masterton on the east side as an indication to the searchers that they should return. It is stated that train whistles can be heard from almost any point on the ranges under normal circumstances.

    About 150 trampers have taken part in the search. Most of them belong to the Tararua Club, the other clubs represented being Paua, Victoria College, Hutt Valley, Levin-Waiopehu, Manawatu, Carterton, Wairarapa, and Masterton.

    The four missing people were finally safe, but a lot of cleaning up and analysis was still to be done. It took about three days for the last search party to return from the range, but criticism of the group began immediately, firstly in an editorial context on the same day in which their return was reported, and then with additional criticism from members of the public, fanned by the media. At least one searcher had sustained an injured foot, potentially serious in the back-country of the 1930s, and this at the very least highlighted that those who obliged others to search for them can put those people at risk. Comments that had been made on a whim by the rescued party about “never being lost” were now being taken out of context, and were received by some as insulting.

    Fred Vosseler, who’d played a large part in organising the search effort, made comments while wearing his authoritative hat as President of the recently formed Federated Mountain Clubs organisation, publicly criticising virtually everything the group was reported to have done. In a war of written words waged through letters to the editor, his criticism provoked responses from the party members, who claimed that he’d been mis-led by media reports and inaccurate assumptions about their situation.

    Eventually the arguments died down and fell out of the media, and what followed was a larger analysis, now beginning to be recorded in minutes of meetings and annual reports, of how the search effort had worked and what needed to be improved upon and done differently before there was need for another search of a similar nature. The structure for New Zealand’s largely voluntary and club-based Land Search and Rescue system that was set up in the 1930s, following what was partially learned from this event, lasted for 70 years.
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  • Re-living The Sutch Search (Part 2 of 3)

    This post follows part 1 and is continued in part 3.

    From Evening Post, Issue 100, 1 May 1933, Page 7:
    TRAMPERS FOUND IN THE TARARUAS

    After a fortnight in the ranges

    AFTER A FORTNIGHT IN THE RANGES.— The four trampers who have been travelling through the Tararua Ranges since Easter Saturday, having been delayed by bad weather and swollen rivers. From left, Mr. A. H. O’Keefe, Miss M. Williams, Dr. W. B. Sutch, and Mr. E. Hill.

    On the 30th of April, 1933, a large group on a Sunday walk, from a recently formed Carterton Tramping Club, happened to look over the Waiohine River. They spotted a party of four trampers on the far side, trying and failing to wade across. The group was soon recognised as the four missing people who had left Te Matawai Hut more than two weeks before. Once they’d made their way to the nearby cable-way and been ferried across, they were quickly fed and given warm cups of tea.

    The story of the group’s plight was finally known. Bert O’Keefe had slipped whilst sidling the Broken Axe Pinnacles, after wind prevented them from going over. He fell about 40 feet, dragging Eric Hill with him as he fell. Mr Hill was protected when he fell onto his pack, but Mr O’Keefe sustained a gash to his face and was unconscious for about an hour. From then on he wore a balaclava perpetually, to protect the wound. Despite this injury, the unforeseen problem brewing was the loss of time. With two fewer hours of daylight, they were unable to reach Holdsworth before dark, and had to camp on the bush-line.

    They had expected they might need to camp somewhere for a night, but the weather then deteriorated severely, bringing snow and biting winds to the tops that would prevent them from accessing what were typically referred to as trampers’ highways of the time. Their situation became serious, especially when the weather lasted for the better part of two weeks. Having left with about two days of food between them and anticipated no more than a single night out, they were faced with miserable and extremely slow travel, attempting to escape through land below the bush-line that was not well known and (at the time) barely tracked at all.
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