Windy Tops

Tag: link propagation

  • A nice New Zealand LandSAR documentary

    I may be late again, but it’s nice to discover that someone’s recently made a sane, down-to-earth documentary about New Zealand’s voluntary LandSAR Organisation. It makes a nice change from some of the overseas Search and Rescue videos I’ve come across which often seem to be artificial self-promoting noisy-overvoice and patriotic-music productions that focus on SAR being an heroic high risk profession, and which emphasise elevation of SAR above common people, to be left only for professionals. This NZ LandSAR documentary, on the other hand, spends much time interviewing people who take part, and emphasising how LandSAR is made of regular people with normal jobs. It provides actual information, instead of slow-motion closeups on actresses hopelessly weeping about lost husbands. Hooray!

    Courtesy of Morningside Productions for the Open Door Series, the documentary’s available for viewing in the ether, in two parts.

  • Tramping Hut Users’ Survey

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    Howlett’s Hut is one of
    my favourites.

    If you follow this blog (yippee!) or perhaps if you’ve just stumbled upon it, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re a user of New Zealand’s Back-Country Huts. You might like to consider taking part in an online survey for some researchers working on a project within the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, who are “seeking to understand the significance of tramping huts to their users”. It’s being conducted because they “are interested in the role of tramping huts as symbols and resources within New Zealand’s ‘back country’ landscape and the way they facilitate a particular type of tourism”.

    It’s 21 questions, with plenty of space to comment with thoughts about old huts versus new huts, obligations of hut users versus providers, Great Walk huts, hut prices, and various other aspects of New Zealand’s back-country-hut network and its use.

    Enjoy, and tell your tramping and hunting and tourist and other hut-using friends to answer it too.

  • Te Araroa to open (officially)

    If you’re in Wellington on Saturday December 3rd, you could pop over to Shorland Park, Island Bay at 10am for the official opening of Te Araroa—The Long Pathway.

    Te Araroa is a magnificent effort that’s been in progress for decades now since it was conceived as one of the goals of the NZ Walkways Commission in 1975. Since 1994 the goal has been administered through the Te Araroa Trust (combined with several regional trusts), to link the length of New Zealand with one continuous, officially recognised walking trail. People have walked (or run) the length of New Zealand using various routes and for many reasons throughout history, and in the last few years the unofficial Te Araroa route has been walked more than a few times. This official opening is symbolic of the route’s “completion”, after nearly endless work, frequently by volunteers, covering manual labour, legislative changes, negotiations with national and local government entities, private landowners, clubs and organisations, and any number of other problems, to allow for public walking access along the entire route.

    It’s an impressive feat by all involved that this connected walkway exists at all. Few people will walk the entire length of New Zealand (although some certainly will), but countless people will benefit from all of the walking access opened as a consequence of the project.

  • Keep an eye on the Tararua hut books

    Don’t be too surprised if you get pushed over from behind by a few hut-baggers racing through the Tararuas during the next couple of months. Lower North Island LandSAR is running a Tararua hut-bagging contest for its members. (Specifically with entry being open to lower North Island LandSAR, the Police SAR Squad, and Airforce BCF.) Until 7th December 2011, entered teams will be allowed three 48 hour “trips” to clock up as many points as possible. This will probably encourage some non-stop no-sleep rogaining techniques by the more committed teams.

    The competition’s only open to people associated with LandSAR, but the rules and points table are amusing to read all the same. As well as bagging huts and points of interest, points are being awarded for providing GPS tracks, and for logging in Mountain Radio Skeds. There seems to be nothing in the rules to prevent a team from calling into all three of the Wellington, Central North Island and Hawkes Bay skeds in an evening, but I guess they might also need to decide if it’s worth another 10 points to stop moving for another 30 minutes, given how long it can take to properly get a mountain radio aerial up and down.
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  • Nostalgic Exposure (aka Such a Stupid Way To Die)

    I should have posted about this when it came out, but missed it at the time and have since not had a suitable excuse. I still don’t have one, so I’ll just post it anyway with the expectation that it may be new for some.

    Forty years ago, in 1971, the New Zealand National Film Unit produced this educational video designed to terrify young people with the horrors of “exposure” (aka hypothermia) and, with luck, teach them how to avoid it. I was never subjected to this film during my educational years, but as recently as 1997, some schools were reportedly still petrifying their youth with the words:

    “Thomas Cougan will tomorrow night be DEAD!”

    Two years ago, NZOnScreen digitised the film and put it online. (There’s a press release here.) Happily the entire thing is available for all to see, from mountain mules, disgusting breakfasts and fashion of the late hippie era, to a relatively young Ray Henwood who draws concise diagrams on a blackboard as he expertly pronounces the symptoms and causes of “exposure”.

    The digitisation comes in two parts, followed by the credits. (Part Two is below if you’ve clicked into the full post, or you can just wait for Part One to finish.)

    http://www.nzonscreen.com/nzonscreen-player.swf

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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?

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    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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  • FMC Bulletins now available online

    Something I meant to write about a few months back (but became distracted) is the recent achievement of Federated Mountain Clubs in managing to get all of its FMC bulletins online, and available for download, all the way back to FMC Bulletin 1 of May 1957, when then-President Bill Bridge introduced the newsletter almost as an anti-climax.

    As of late last year, all older bulletins have been scanned from paper to PDF form, and the current online archive now contains 182 issues and is growing.

    The archive is available here, and a complete downloaded collection of bulletins from the beginning amounts to approximately 360 Megabytes. Most of the older bulletins are only photo-scanned at this time and thus aren’t text searchable with regular tools, but it’s still a great resource.

    This is awesome. It’s a great history of many things back-country in New Zealand, and browsing through the bulletins I’ve found it interesting to compare what made the issues of the day (mining, roads, dams, fears of user pays with Rogernomics and the new Department of Conservation, support for the re-naming of Mt Taranaki), and how the style has changed over the years. Accident Reports, for instance, were once presented in a somewhat more direct way (often naming names) than today’s bulletin’s Back-Country Accidents section.

    There’s a lot to get through, and I think the lasting benefit of this will be a large library of information on back-country issues now being more easily available when researching past events.

  • Remembering the LandSAR Yeti

    I guess it’s partly a consequence of not watching much TV (too much tramping) which meant that I never caught this advertisement for Land Search & Rescue when it came out in about July 2009 — so apologies to everyone for whom this is old news.

    I’m not entirely sure what the purpose is. It’d be great for raising awareness of LandSAR and hopefully attracting volunteers, but the advertisement seems to be specifically aimed at people who might get into trouble as opposed to attracting LandSAR volunteers. People in trouble probably don’t need to know that LandSAR exists so much as the Police, who’d then call in LandSAR and volunteers when needed. I suspect that if there was money allocated towards resolving outdoor accidents (without the charity bias), LandSAR wouldn’t have had a mention and the money would have been aimed at encouraging people to be safe in what they do in the first place, and then to know that the Police are the ones to go to first when there’s a problem.

    Still, it’s a treat to watch and kind’a neat. Kudos to LandSAR and to the people who made it.

    Thanks to davidm in the NZ Tramper forums for bringing it to my attention. As was later pointed out in that thread (by mrfizz), the ad was made pro-bono by Colenso BBDO with the help of Weta Workshop, and then given free airtime on TVNZ, so it’s not exactly money out of LandSAR’s budget.

    In addition to the ad itself, there’s a 2 part behind-the-scenes video, also up on Youtube, that describes the making of the commercial, about 16 minutes total:

  • Tragedy near Kime Hut, part 3

    Also see Tragedy near Kime Hut and Tragedy near Kime Hut, part 2.

    Amelia recently pointed me at a lengthy feature article in last Saturday’s Dominion Post, which expresses a detailed investigation of what happened when two people died in a blizzard near Bridge Peak in the Tararuas, prior to reaching Kime Hut in July 2009. The article is online, courtesy of Stuff:

    Lost: how tramp turned to tragedy

    The article uses sources such as the Police inquest file, witness statements and various SAR resources. The author’s also filled in some gaps with likely presumptions. It’s more detailed than regular news articles, and worth a read.

    This incident has been covered a lot in various places on this blog, beginning with:

    Discussions that relate to the incident also exist under:

  • New documentaries on New Zealand Rivers

    I’m not normally one for watching television, but there are a couple of worthwhile television documentaries out right now that document various New Zealand Rivers, and may be worthwhile watching.

    • A Tale of Two Rivers is a 30 minute documentary that looks at power schemes and the west coast, focusing on Meridian’s plan to dam the Mokihinui River, and HDL Stockton’s plan to dam and generate power from polluted mine water.

      The documentary is currently screening on the digital only TVNZ 6. At this time of writing, the two remaining screenings on TVNZ6 are Thursday 16th September (7pm to 7.30pm), and Saturday 18th September (7.30pm to 8pm). The documentary is also available on DVD for $15.

    • Rivers is a new series presented by well-known New Zealand scenic photographer, back-country explorer and calendar salesman, Craig Potton. For each one-hour episode, Craig travels the length of a major river in New Zealand, talking to people and examining its past, present and future. The five episodes screen on Prime TV, Sunday nights between 7.30pm and 8.30pm. (The first episode, looking at the Clutha River, screened last Sunday.)

    Enjoy.