Windy Tops

Tag: mountaineering

  • Something to listen to

    I’ve not yet read Laurence Fearnley’s Going Up Is Easy, but it’s on my reading list. It’s the biographical account of Lydia Bradey as the first woman to ascend Everest without oxygen, and the only New Zealander to do so.

    Last Monday, Radio NZ began playing a 10 part audio adaptation of her story. It’s narrated by Lydia Bradey herself, and began playing on Monday as a daily part of Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme. The episodes will show up here as they become available over the next two weeks.

    Also of interest will be Kathryn Ryan’s interview with Lydia Bradey, from June 2015.

  • 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.

  • Terminal faces

    Radio New Zealand has the most detailed online report I can find about the coroner’s recommendations that follow the January 2009 accident where two Australian tourists died under the collapsing terminal face of Fox Glacier.

    The Coroner has recommended “restricted access” to the Fox, and possibly the Franz Joseph Glacier terminal faces, suggesting a new law and measures such as instant fines for people who get too close without a guide or some kind of official authorisation. So far the Department of Conservation has said it’ll consider the recommendations, but needs to discuss them with the Minister of Conservation. It’s already made changes to the signage, and worked with tourism operators to increase awareness with members of the public of the danger around glaciers.

    What this recommendation seems to be suggesting is that legal restrictions against approaching the terminal face of Fox Glacier, and possibly Franz Joseph Glacier, should be put in place because those parts of the New Zealand Conservation Estate have been made so accessible, and because many people (informed or not) hop the recommended safety barrier.

    It’s a terrible thing for all concerned when accidents like this occur, but I agree with Richard Davies, the President of Federated Mountain Clubs, who is strongly speaking out against what the coroner has asked for. Some of his comments are relayed through the first link at the top of this post. Richard is right when he points out that imposing legal restrictions for access would set a dangerous precedent. If such restrictions can be put around the terminal face of Fox Glacier, what’s to stop them from going elsewhere, and where does it stop? Would we see restrictions in something like walking up to the Crater Lake of Ruapehu, also popular with tourists, just in case the volcano burps again as it did in 2007? Why is it fair to issue fines to people who choose to take these kinds of risks, and how is that reliably enforced without missing scores of people acting silly for the wrong reasons, yet catching people who break the rules whilst being suitably careful?
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  • Commemorative feature naming and South Ridge

    I’m not too surprised that there’s reported resistance to renaming South Ridge on Aoraki Mount Cook to be Hillary Ridge. The official proposal and request for submissions by the New Zealand Geographic Board, complete with a report of considerations and policies on applying names, is viewable here.

    Ed Hillary did some awesome things, both in mountaineering and outside it. He held some strong viewpoints and didn’t hit it off with everyone, but he did much more with his life and influence than simply be in the first climbing team to reach the top of Everest. I think there’s little doubt that many people are much better off than they’d probably otherwise be. As for the naming of a feature after him, I’m not so sure.
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  • High Misadventure by Paul Hersey (my thoughts)

    I’m not sure how I’ve come to have a fascination with outdoor accidents, but possibly it’s to do with wanting to find out as much as I can about how things can go wrong. It’s a sensitive issue to discuss, but also important to be able to learn about how accidents occur and what might be changed, without going overboard, to reduce the chances of future accidents. I discovered Paul Hersey’s 2009 book High Misadventure, subtitled New Zealand mountaineering tragedies and survival stories, after some prodding in issues 178 and 179 of the FMC Bulletin, and also a comment on an earlier post (thanks Adrian). It’s easy reading but also a serious topic, and Paul Hersey has handled it well.

    The author has written eight essays about New Zealand outdoor accidents between 1966 and 2005. Most essays are centred around a single accident, but occasionally around multiple accidents that are related. They are typically decorated with further information about circumstances and additional experiences of the people involved. All essays have been researched thoroughly through coroners’ reports, newspaper and journal articles, books and biographies, and frequently through personal interviews with the people involved. The focus of the book is on mountaineering and climbing, which typically involves higher risk than regular tramping, but one which people choose to accept. An underlying theme put forward by the author is that the risk can be managed (perhaps better than it sometimes is), and that climbing is not as risky as it’s often made out to be from outside the mountaineering community. From the book’s conclusion:

    …whereas climbers are prepared to rationalise or accept the risk, non-climbers mostly are not. Society, as a whole, has become more and more risk-averse. Of course, 100 per cent safety and security is impossible. And to eliminate physical risk is to deny the ability to learn from personal experience.

    Climbers accept that risk is an element of their chosen activity, but that doesn’t mean they should simply ignore the mistakes or ill-fortunes of others. Gaining experience in the mountains comes from years of skill-gathering and decision-making, as well as learning from the actions of other climbers.

    There is a delicate balance here and climbers sometimes need to be reminded of that. By exploring a range of accidents in detail, including how they affected those left behind, it is hoped that climbers will continue to recognise that the choices they make above the snowline can be wide-reaching and permanent.

    Each of the essays contains maps and photos, and is roughly ten to twenty pages. The brevity makes it easy to read complete segments of the book in single sittings.
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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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  • I always knew they were crazy people

    Not that it’s a bad thing.

    I was browsing Bob McKerrow’s weblog this morning, which is typically fascinating reading, and he’s pointed out a 2005 study by Erik Monasterio, a psychiatrist, who suggests that over a four year period, 8.2% of experienced New Zealand mountain climbers might have suffered fatal accidents — that’s a mortality rate of around 1 in 12 in four years. Bob has also noted, through several quotes, that New Zealand mountains can be exceptionally dangerous due to their proximity to marine weather patterns, but are often underestimated due to their low altitudes when compared with mountains overseas.

    The details of Erik Monasterio’s study were published in the New Zealand Medical Journal some time ago, and although it was intended to collect psychological characteristics of climbers, it also produced interesting (albeit very preliminary) results about accidents.
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  • Good avalanche assesment

    Glenn Pennycook has written an excellent article titled All about avalanches over at Mountainz. It looks like a good summary of the theory behind avalanches, and leads into what looks like some good guidelines about how to assess avalanche conditions. Definitely worth a read. (Thanks shanec over at the wtmc forum for the link.)

    I haven’t done a lot around snow (yet), but I’m looking forward to a snowcraft course up at Ruapehu over the next few weeks.

  • Thoughts on the Barker Hut Trio

    I’m often behind on current events. I don’t spend much time listening to New Zealand’s news media, and I don’t have much respect for a lot of it. (Some of National Radio is an exception.)

    Over the weekend, I’ve been catching up with the plight of the three people who were caught at Barker Hut down in Arthur’s Pass National Park. Reportedly they were stuck behind flooded rivers and down to their last energy bar between them. They attempted to arrange a helicopter out via mountain radio, and even offered to pay for it, but were denied this after the Department of Conservation and Police decided their situation wasn’t an emergency. (Helicopters are banned in Arthur’s Pass National Park except for emergencies.)

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