Windy Tops

Tag: mountain safety council

  • Learning and Instruction

    Today I attended an outdoor first aid refresher course, which is the regular course required every two years to retain an existing outdoor first aid certificate. This instance of the course was run by the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council, an organisation dedicated to encouraging safe practices outdoors. Members of the MSC help to design and to teach courses on a variety of topics, of which First Aid is only one.

    Anyone can sign up to an MSC course, as long as the course pre-requisites are met. For those generally interested in outdoor safety, however, the MSC encourages people to join as instructors. Presently throughout New Zealand the MSC has and handful of paid staff, but its main strength is in over 1000 volunteer instructors. Researching best practices, designing and running the courses and comprehensive training material helps to spread the knowledge further among the outdoor community, but encouraging people to train to be instructors also helps to reinforce and embed what skills are learned. It’s a really cool philosophy and culture in which people continue to use the skills by learning to teach the skills.
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  • Benefits of self-arrest

    A couple of very lucky people have been in the news in the last few days. Both involved slipping, sliding for hundreds of metres down icy mountain slopes, and unusually getting away with it. Reading about them both prompted a few thoughts. This post is not a criticism of either of these people, but I think their accidents help to illustrate some useful things about what can go wrong.

    The first in the news was a Wellington man who slipped whilst descending from the summit of Mt Tapuae-o-Ueneku, slid about 400 metres, and managed to walk away with little more than a few bruises. This strikes me as extraordinarily fortunate. The second is the case of Victorian government minister Tim Holding, who spent two nights disoriented in freezing conditions near the top of Mt Feathertop in the Victorian alps, after he slipped off the track and slid several hundred metres. He was lucky to be found, and now he’s recovering.

    One valuable quote from Tim Holding’s insights into his experience was in the above-linked article.

    “I slid very, very fast and if you’ve ever slid in the ice before, you’ll know you start slowly and you slide faster and faster and you gather huge momentum.”

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  • Thoughts about river safety issues

    427987563_d39a33e0c0_m-1877303
    The Waiohine River in flood,
    seen from Totara Flats.
    It’s probably not a good idea to
    attempt a crossing.

    In the past few days there’s been another river crossing tragedy in New Zealand, this time at Eggie. Once again, as often seems to be the case, it sounds as if it was someone quite experienced who may have simply made a bad judgement call about whether or not to try and cross, possibly distracted by the bad weather, as well as the thought of being so close to home compared with possibly having to spend another night out.

    Drowning accidents are one of the most common ways for people to be killed in New Zealand’s back-country, especially after cases of hypothermia have fallen with the advent of better gear for keeping warm. This is why, I guess, it seems a good idea for anyone who goes tramping a lot to get properly educated in river safety, and to get as much experience as possible. I’ve been working on trying to learn about river safety for a while now, partly through experience and I also signed up to a river safety course about 18 months ago. I’m still nowhere near being an expert, but I’ve noticed a few things I find interesting.

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