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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