Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • Changing Times

    It’s silly season again, where holidays collide with pre-February weather. An annual bubble of SAR-related incidents has hit the news-wires in the past few weeks.

    One story in particular first came out on January 2nd. It concerned a search for “five young trampers” in the Tararua Range who planned to walk to Penn Creek Hut via Table Top, then follow Penn Creek and the Otaki River back to Otaki Forks. They were reported overdue, and it was resolved quickly after Police sent a helicopter into the range, only to discover the group completely safe at Penn Creek Hut, drying out gear having turned around.

    For some time now, especially since the old track which sidled above Penn Creek was washed out, the route has become notorious for parties becoming stuck and requiring rescue. This group had not required a rescue, but that information was not available and so a search operation was launched anyway.

    Search officials use many factors to decide how likely it is that somebody might need help. There’s not enough reported context to fully explain why a search was launched when it was. My guess, however, is that a combination of “5 young people” plus “Penn Creek” plus “several waves of incoming torrential rain and certain flooding”, and very possibly some additional information, left doubts about the party’s ability to cope with circumstances on its own, and led to a conclusion of a reasonable chance that the group might be in trouble.

    From the moment of that conclusion, the situation needs to be resolved as urgently as possible. If a helicopter had not found 5 relatively-happy people drying their gear in a hut, it might have been necessary to inject ground teams into some awkward parts of Penn Creek, and lift them out again, during a short window of time prior to likely floods.

    The reports of this incident inspired an untypical amount of attention in social media. One of several examples is on Federated Mountain Club’s Facebook page. The main discussion, however, was neither about the details of the trip nor the actual search operation. The most common angle of interest has been on the comments from police afterwards.

    Specifically, Police spokesperson Andy Brooke was quoted as saying “it is a timely reminder to take at least two forms of communication with you when venturing into the outdoors.”

    The discussion has probably been prompted because this statement isn’t so much a recommendation to consider if taking communication is appropriate as a directive to take communication, on an implied assumption that the necessity of communication is now a foregone conclusion. The two particular forms of communication with Mr Brooke propsed were a PLB, and a Satellite Communication Device such as a SPOT or inReach.

    It’s sparked some informal debate about at least two things: (1) Whether a PLB would have made a difference in this situation given that the party had no actual emergency, and (2) whether parties should be obliged to carry any communication at all.
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  • NZ Tramping History in the works

    There are several good-looking books on my reading list right now. To add to it, last week I attended a seminar, by Chris Maclean and Shaun Barnett, who spoke about their upcoming book titled Tramping, a New Zealand History. The book received a grant from the Ministry of Culture & Heritage, who hosted this seminar.

    The new book is still in its draft stages, but it looks as if it’ll be a good and interesting read once it’s published. You can listen to a podcast of the seminar via the New Zealand History Online website, or here’s a more specific link. The authors have also created a Facebook page to help collate material and discussion of the book.

    Both authors are well accomplished. Chris Maclean has authored a variety of histories, particularly based around the Wellington region. He’s probably best known in tramping circles for his detailed history of the Tararua Range, titled Tararua: The Story of a Mountain Range, first published in 1991 and which continues to pop up on Trademe on occasion, but more recently he authored an historic biography—Stag Spooner: Wild man from the bush. Shaun Barnett has a collection of well-authored titles, including co-authoring the recent Shelter From The Storm. He’s also well known for his scenic photography, and for activities such as editing of Wilderness Magazine (formerly) and the Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin,

  • The Shaky Isles

    I won’t make too much out of the recent effects of Seddon’s seismic activity on Wellington, at least until it gets any worse. Yesterday afternoon I was traversing through part of the Tinakori Hill, trying to determine how long it’d take to walk between the CBD and Ngaio. There’s still quite a lot of tree-fall and other storm damage up there, and elsewhere around the town belt, from that storm a few weeks ago, which made it interesting.

    On this occasion I coincidentally ran into a friend from the Wellington Tramping & Mountaineering Club (Michael L). We were chatting for a few minutes, and the ground started to shift in a way that either of us could have perceived as general dizziness if we’d not confirmed with each other that it was an earthquake. Neither of us knew if there’s a protocol of what to do in an earthquake whilst in a forested area—maybe a worthy topic for another discussion—and then it stopped. Later, when I bumped into a woman walking her dog as she played on a smartphone, I was very surprised to discover that the shaking had been measured as magnitude 6.9 although it was later revised to 6.6. Somehow I’d felt nothing compared with what I’d have expected that to feel like.
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  • Staying put

    ACR ResQLink

    I’ve finally bought myself a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB; an ACR ResQLink in my case), which I obviously hope I’ll never need to use. I was on the edge of buying one a couple of years ago, but put it off for a while when things changed. It arrived in the mail a few days ago.

    Several SAR incidents were making the news on the day that my PLB turned up. One of these occurred in the southern Ruahine Range. In this most actively-reported case, a PLB was activated by a tramping club group which had taken a wrong turn in bad weather.

    In the Pohangina vicinity (here’s a map) they’d planned (according to the club’s trip schedule) to head up Shorts Track, follow the tops over .1380, .1405, .1350 and down to Ngamoko Hut, before eventually returning somehow via Toka Trig and down Knights Track. A navigation error in bad weather on the first day, however, in the vicinity of Whaingapuna (.1405), resulted in the group ending up in Piripiri Stream. They changed plans to attempt to follow it out to farmland, but found themselves bluffed by a very high waterfall.
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  • Protecting our place in silence

    In my recent trip report, which described several days in the northern Ruahine Range, I referred to the presence of whio (pronounced fee-oh), also known as New Zealand’s Blue Duck. The bird has evolved in an isolated fashion and is not closely related to other ducks. It’s a strong swimmer, and one of very few birds in the world that lives its entire life on fast-flowing, bouldery mountain rivers. It’s most active during the edges of the days, and sometimes overnight, and it’s named after the feee-oh sound of the male’s call… moreso than the responsive squalk of the female. Whio are not as iconically popular as some of New Zealand’s other birds such as the kiwi or the kea, yet if you turn over a New Zealand $10 note, you’ll see a pair of whio on the back.

    Whio are also listed as vulnerable to becoming extinct. They nest for three months a year in caves, log jams and under other vegetation, so the eggs and chicks are vulnerable to both spring flooding and introduced predators. The total population is hard to count, but a current estimate is for as few as 2,500 individual birds, scattered throughout the country and dropping. Being exclusively territorial they’re usually seen in pairs at best, which doesn’t help towards improving numbers. Occasionally, however, there are also good stories.

    Its requirement for clean water and a high diversity of aquatic insects means the presence of whio is considered a key indicator of a genuinely healthy river, something that’s all too uncommon in New Zealand today. If you find whio, it means you’ve found a waterway that’s in a fairly pristine state. Keep this in mind next time you’re thinking of leaving a mess that will seep into a waterway, or throwing unwanted food-scraps into a stream, or washing dishes in a river outside a hut or camp-site. You may well be making life harder or impossible for vulnerable species such as whio, not to mention all the insects it relies on.

    It’s fortunate to be able to see such birds in the Ruahine Range, but it’s something I’ve taken for granted that I can report having seen them without putting the very birds I’ve seen in danger. Sadly it’s not always the case. Despite being at risk of eventual extinction for several reasons, the whio is, at least, not generally in danger from people of malicious intent simply knowing where they live. From this point on, I’m going to write about lizards.
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  • My submission about increasing maximum penalties on the Conservation Estate

    I’ve finally put my submission in for the Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill, which (if successful) will increase maximum penalties available for many crimes on the Conservation Estate by about ten-fold. Often this will be good. For example, judges have commented on the frustration with the low penalties they’ve been restricted to when sentencing international criminals who’ve been caught smuggling out protected wildlife for sale on the black market. Enabling a higher penalty will increase the risk, set a much higher black market price on our wildlife, and hopefully make the practice less common. The Bill has cross-party support for these types of reasons, and will most likely enter law. You can read everything they said about it when it had its first day in parliament over here.

    My main concern is that the existing indirectly-specified $10,000/1-year-jail penalty for entering “closed” Conservation Areas was already disproportionate and inconsistent with the $500 fine for a nearly identical National Park situation. Following the Bill, that inconsistency will be magnified to a $100,000/2-year-jail penalty compared with a $5,000 fine. This is part of what I discussed in my earlier post regarding DoC and the word “closed”.

    The Bill is now at the stage of receiving public submissions, which will be considered by the Local Government and Environment Select Committee (a selected committee of sitting MPs) to make recommendations for any changes to the Bill before it’s sent back to Parliament to be voted on again. If you’d like to make a submission, which can be as short or lengthy, formal or informal as you like, and you don’t have to agree with me, the closing date for submissions is February 28th 2013. A submission can be completed online by visiting Parliament’s status page for the Bill, clicking the Make a Submission link on the right hand side (it links to here), scrolling to the end of the page and following the instructions to make an online submission.

    Anyway, I’ve included the text of my submission below.
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  • The entry restrictions of Matiu/Somes Island

    My previous post criticised some aspects of closed public land, and how DoC sometimes handles it, and so I found it interesting to read a report on Tuesday of DoC rangers being verbally abused in a comparable scenario. It occurred after they instructed two divers to immediately leave the shore of Matiu/Somes Island, in the middle of Wellington Harbour, and return to sea. To be clear, this is not the type of land closure I referred to in my previous post. It happened in a Reserve rather than a National Park or Conservation Area, and the land is legally closed (except for entry under strict entry rules) for reasons appropriate for the purpose of the reserve.

    The highest concern here with people landing uncontrolled on the edge of this island is a biosecurity concern for the Scientific Reserve, whereby unwanted pests could enter the island and wreak havoc amongst its local eco-systems that rely on the island’s status for their protection. Scientific Reserves are specifically set aside “for the purpose of protecting and preserving in perpetuity for scientific study, research, education, and the benefit of the country, ecological associations, plant or animal communities, types of soil, geomorphological phenomena, and like matters of special interest”. (That’s from section 21 of the Reserves Act.)
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  • Feather-weight safety protocols

    As I was writing that previous post about how PLBs aren’t automatically everything that they’re sometimes made out to be, an incident was unfolding in the Tararua Range where a PLB would probably have been really really useful. Fortunately things worked out well, with a high portion of luck, as reported by TVNZ (including a video), via Stuff, and the NZ Herald. Wellington LandSAR, one of several LandSAR groups to be called in to help, also put out a press release.

    In short, a mountain runner entered the range at Holdsworth Lodge on Saturday with the reported intent of running around the Holdsworth/Jumbo circuit. He didn’t, instead changing his mind to run up the Baldy Track to South King, and presumably then around the Broken Axe Pinnacles, back past McGregor and Angle Knob, and back to the original circuit. This is a significantly longer and more remote route by comparison, on which he’d have been likely to meet fewer (if any) people depending on the conditions. If you want to check this all on a map, start about here and then scroll around.

    As it happened, he became completely disoriented on South King. When standing on a high point with cloud in all directions, he probably thought he’d turned around to go back the way from which he’d come. Instead, however, he was following the complete opposite direction into Dorset Creek on the other side, and into an even more remote part of the range. He sheltered for Saturday night under an improvised rock bivy, somehow then made his way along Dorset Creek into the Waiohine River, breaking a toe in the process and “having a particularly nasty experience in the river where he went under”. Upon noticing an orange track marker he eventually found Mid-Waiohine Hut some time after 2pm on Sunday after much hunting around in heavy rain, at which point he was finally able to determine where he was.

    He left a note for possible searchers, started a fire and ate half a jar of peanut butter that had been fortuitously left behind by someone. By now it was Monday and the first helicopter had finally been able to fly in, having previously been restricted by weather. The note was discovered, and soon after the man was spotted and collected, climbing up the track towards Isabelle and back to Mt Holdsworth. Meanwhile, multiple teams of searchers had started by scouring other parts of the range, based on information that he’d intended to run the Holdsworth/Jumbo circuit. With his decision to deviate from the route, it’s no wonder that the man wasn’t found on Sunday.
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  • PLBs and Media

    Lately there’s been an obvious promotional push from Police, the RCCNZ and SAR officials to tell people to carry PLBs (Personal Locator Beacon) when they visit the outdoors. This makes sense as a progressive way to be able to indicate distress, but I’ve found it interesting to watch how the message is injected into the media machine.

    It’s now standard, in a New Zealand media article about a back-country search and/or rescue, to see a comment about whether or not a person is believed to be carrying an emergency beacon. For better or worse, those who aren’t are often criticised as if they should be. The latest story to be pushed into the press is this one, repeated in several media outlets, which uses a recent incident in Milford Sound as an excuse to advise everyone to carry beacons. Browsing the comment thread under the above-linked article, the initially expressed public opinions mostly seem to be one-dimensional about how great and useful beacons are and how people are idiots not to carry them. Until the second wave of responding comments from readers, there was no acknowledgement that a PLB is effectively an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff which transmits no message except “fly a helicopter here to find out what my problem is”.
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  • A New Trusted Contact Service for Outdoor Safety in New Zealand

    About a year ago, DoC announced that it was pulling out of the business of taking intentions for visitors to New Zealand’s back-country. It was only ever doing so inconsistently anyway, through ad-hoc arrangements at various visitor centres, but the announcement still created controversy. One way or another, all of the nominated alternatives (encapsulated by directing people to the AdventureSmart website) required people to have their own trusted contacts.

    For a New Zealand local, arranging a trusted contact is generally manageable. People here know other people here, and those people are generally in the same time zone, speak the same language, know the important phone numbers, and are usually familiar with New Zealand’s systems, conditions and expectations. For visitors to New Zealand, however, finding trusted contacts is often not so easy, especially for visitors who simply don’t know someone who can be trusted to reliably report if they don’t return on time. Some visitors don’t even realise how important it is to have a trusted contact.

    I’m perfectly happy with DoC not being in the business of taking people’s intentions. It’s a very time consuming and expensive thing to do, especially when many of those people were never bothering to properly sign out, resulting in needless efforts to chase up and ensure they’d safely exited. It’s never been a clear statutory requirement for DoC to look after people in this way. Nevertheless, the fact that the staff of some DoC offices in touristy places have been acting as trusted contacts until recently has ensured more reliable oversight for some people visiting the outdoors than would otherwise have existed.

    A year ago I wondered if there might be room for a business to set up for taking and managing people’s intentions as a trusted contact. Very happily, it seems that someone else had a similar idea, and actually acted on it. This afternoon a random press release popped out, from a company/website called Safety Outdoors.

    According to its press release, the Safety Outdoors service, due to launch tomorrow (Thursday) and accessible via http://www.safetyoutdoors.com, will allow people to sign up for a trusted contact as a service, with a fee per activity. [Edit 9-Dec-2012: It seems to be taking longer than advertised for the SafetyOutdoors website to get underway. Meanwhile, you could also check out Adventure Buddy, which is an alternative (and free) service which is also now available.]

    From the Safety Outdoors press release:
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