details of Tararau tramping trip fatalities

The "skills and experience" argument can also be added-to withe the fact that long distances in the Tararuas can be especially demanding due to the terrain in there. What I mean is that an 8-hour in that area can take longer (and take it out on you) a lot more than other areas (ie: up-down-up-down-up-down, etc etc, plus mud & weather). And that cant really be ascertained solely by looking at a map of the area - it can only be learned by understanding the mapped route, plus doing a least a couple of walks in there. I did this same walk with a couple of very experienced other walkers a couple of months ago. Once we were at Cone Peak - we scoffed at how long it would take to get to Mt Hector from there -but it did take that long. From Cone to Hector was a steady uphill grind all the way. Once we got to Alpha we realised it had taken us 11 & 3/4 hours to do that walk - and its not a huge distance on the map.....

@si-dog - but did't you see all those contours? Those thin ridgelines with steep dropoffs either side, hinting at hard scrambles round any obstacles? I mean people need to do a proper reading of the map, not a quick glance and count the squares. I'm with you to a point though - there are places that the map can't tell the full story - tangled fiordland scrub being a prime example. Or boulder choked west-coast river beds. The severity of neither of those shows up well on maps, easily catch out the first-time visitor. But the clear open Tararua tops, where terrain is your only impediment? No - there I'd say looking carefully at the map lets you know _exactly_ what you're in for. The effect of the weather, on the other hand, is much harder to read without having experienced the particular country you are travelling in. And that, I'd suspect, is what caught-out these two individuals.

Yea agree madpom but the issue I frequently have with the Tararuas is that anything thats less than 20 metres (and this includes many pinnacly-bits) in the Ruas - will not be shown on the map. A classic example for me is the section between Maungahuka Hut and Wright peak on the topo. I've done this route a couple of times and one time I was coming from Anderson Memorial (completely knackered by this point) and thinking that "the map looks OK, this wont be too hard".....and of course was then launched into a classic up-down-up-down Tararua thrillride for that section between Wright & Simpson on the map. Arrghh.

Tru that. The 20m contours hide a lot of info that those of us grown up with 10m contours miss greatly. Though I suspect so many parts of NZ would be solid orange if we went to 10m contours, so that wouldn't be a solution either.

I'd go with more or less what @madpom has said. On the map thing, my logic is that an appropriately skilled person would both be competent to read a map, and also to know when the map wasn't giving them enough information. If the information's missing then you'd know it's necessary to either make appropriate allowances in your plan, or to find more local knowledge, and make skilled judgements about how much to trust it, in order to fill the gaps. I'm sure skill *can* be derived from experience, but it's not guaranteed to be. The coroner's report for the 2009 Kime Hut tragedy showed a classic example of this. The person taking charge had simply convinced himself that he knew and understood what he was doing through doing it repeatedly and getting lucky. Then he and his friend got unlucky. Training, and sometimes diversity of constructive feedback from others, can be other useful factors for building skill besides experience. Maybe it's all semantics about what people consider to be skill versus experience, though.

you'd struggle to find a continuously slower ridgeline in the tararuas above the bushline than neill winchcombe... they may have been encouraged by fast travel getting to the ridge and just kept on persisting, as it says they had smiles in their photos, they enjoyed the difficulty to start with, but the slowness of the terrain was fatal and its not obvious on the map how rough underfoot the ridge is.

Arguably they did the trip the wrong way round; arriving at the exposed Dress Circle section already tired and with no easy options to reach safety. (Other than perhaps Elder, which would have been my Plan B in the circumstances). Wayno's right, Neill-Winchcombe is a hard, grubby slog; even on a nice day it takes it out of you. But almost certainly Pavel Pazniak and Mykhailo Stepura had no prior sense of this. And this combined with the insidious nature of exposure, with almost no sense of how risky the Dress Circle is on a cool, windy day with inadequate protection, when you are already tired ... plus a bit of bad luck ... and here we are pondering their sad fate and how close we probably have all come at some time to just the same outcome. As native kiwi trampers we all absorb a respect and wariness for the Tararuas. I grew up in Auckland and was over 30 before I set foot in them. Yet I already well knew what a wet, steep nasty place they could be, indeed I was probably over-apprehensive on my first Tararua tramps. But lacking that background I can well imagine how relative new arrivals to NZ might fail to understand the specific challenges of this otherwise apparently ordinary looking mountain range. Poor assumptions killed them. Yet I agree with madpom totally; over-simplified information, warnings and signs will not necessarily help. Every tramp into our hills is different; different people, skills, experience, terrain and weather and each must be assessed accurately on it merits. Sadly I don't know how this tragedy could have been prevented; they walked unawares into an invisible trap. Yet two different people with more experience, a day earlier or later, or just one warmer jacket each ... and it would have been a perfectly fine adventure. There is no reasonable 'safety regime' that would pre-emptively deal with so many variables, without killing off the entire purpose and spirit of why we go tramping in the first place ... to undertake an enterprise with risks, to make our own decisions and accept responsibility for the consequences.

> Sadly I don't know how this tragedy could have been prevented I think it can be prevented if everybody understood this simple message: cold, wind, wet: pick two.

@Berend Well yes that's the view encapsulated in my last sentence; but of course what I had in mind was the idea floated in response to the coroners report that DoC or some other govt agency should have done 'something' to prevent this incident. But beyond the obvious educational messages, such as you cite, I don't think there was much more any external agency might have done.

I havent read the coroners report on this but I have a couple of views on previous coroners' reports with some pretty incredible "recommendations" that I saw while I worked at DOC. The first, where an Israeli tramper who off the Routeburn (to get drinking water?) who ventured into a creek and then fell of a steep drop at the location of that creek. There, one coroner recommendation was that "great WALK" was potentially misleading to tourists (as it implies that these are quite easy) and DOC should change the name of these..... The second, where the son of a wealthy and influential family was speeding on a dangerous and winding gravel road to retrieve some of his gear. He drove off the road and was killed. The coroner initially did not find DOC at fault. However after said family "had words" with the coroner, he changed his findings to include that this road have speed advisory signs put on it. Making this road probably the only one I've ever seen with "50 K" advisory signs on it, this road being in the middle of nowhere. Its also a road where 90% of locals would drive as they would on any other gravel road - sensibly & to the conditions. I have learned to balance coroner's findings with common sense, as the two dont always align when he make findings on deaths in the outdoors.