details of Tararau tramping trip fatalities

From the article: > When heading into any area, Kingstone says people should check the outdoor safety code list on the organisation's website. I googled for ["Mountain Safety Council safety code list"](https://www.mountainsafety.org.nz/resources/outdoor-safety-code/) and if you follow the link, what exactly where these people missing? They did: - Plan Your Trip - Tell Someone Your Plans - Be Aware Of The Weather - Know Your Limits - Take Sufficient Supplies One of them had slept in an igloo on Ruapehu, I'm pretty sure he thought he knew his limits and was aware of the weather. The other relied completely on him. If you drill down into Take Sufficient Supplies it gets a lot better, but I think it mixes critical with prudent. Nobody is going to die from lack of food, bad footwear, uncomfortable pack, all unimportant. I suggest they pare down the message to the survival essentials. And only then cover the "advanced" stuff like having extra food.

whats crucial supplies when you're a speed packer or mountain runner? enough to keep you going on the move without weighing you down. i've seen mountain runners on the routeburn with no wet weather gear racing the clock against a massive storm... any injury would have put their lives at risk.... the trend towards going light is killing people

I believe In all outdoors situations experience is key. Start at the bottom and work your way up. That really is the main key to me. Dip your toes in any area and go from there. It's a similar scenario in the hunting scene. These people have little exploring time during their year so just dive headlong during the roar and shoot eachother. People have limited time tramping in certain areas and want as much bang for their bucks as possible. Every now and then it goes wrong. We are all in a rush.

> I believe In all outdoors situations experience is key. Maybe it's semantics but I'd rate skill alongside experience. Appropriate skill would include being sure to know what's needed about venturing into any area. Merely having experience of doing things or visiting places over and over doesn't necessarily mean much if you don't have the skill to interpret that experience, and learn the wrong things from it. Re the Mountain Safety Code, I think it was always meant to be a general thing to give people a framework for thinking and discussing rather than any kind of specific list of stuff that's needed. It's intended to cover all sorts of outdoor activities, and context is frequently different depending on endless details, so being specific doesn't really work.

Skill is a by product of experience. Not vice versa. Learn how to hammer a nail by skill first. Not possible.

Yah. Risk/return. Not so much going 'fast & light' is killing people. Fast & light and getting it wrong means there might be a price to pay, which may be your life. Are people really prepared to gamble their lives on the possibility of the downside of their choices ?. Should you be concerned that they are ?.

The widow says: > She says people should be warned about the track and given complete information about the distance. I would say that is easily available, I have a map with all distances, see here:  Have circled all distances. Minimum time is an 11 hours trip, which is huge.

I'm with @izogi in the skill vs experience thing. Yes @gaiters, skill can come from experience. But I've worked with several people over the years who've accumulated a huge amount of experience, somehow without managing to acquire any skills along the way. And to a man they have appeared completely unaware of that fact. == Re the distance thing the comment @bernard quotes is symptomatic of a problem - though probably not the one that caused this accident). The more idiot-proof information you put out there (warning signs, time advisories, route difficulty descriptions) the more you encourage people to rely on that information, rather than assessing the risks, difficulty themselves by consulting a map. And we all know how time, difficulty, hazards vary greatly from person to person. Information is a double edged sword, and the more simplified it is, the more assumptions it encourages.

thres a limit to what you can do with experience, i wouldnt advise someone who's solely self taught to get into high alpine environment in winter, you need to still get training as well as building skill... training can be experience in a more controlled environment than gaining experience i wouldnt advise people to gain experience the way i did when i exceedd my level of training, I nearly killed myself a few times.