Rescue at kahurangi

PLB is no good in your pack if you get seperated from your pack and get disabled by injury

Beyond luck ?. It was bloody lucky he was due to be picked up Thursday rather than days beyond that. Must have been some fall if he lost his pack ?. I hope he has a good recovery.

@waynowski The article did say that "He lost his emergency locator beacon in the fall." so that suggests the tramper did have it with him before he fell. I think your point is that if you need to use your PLB, the PLB is only useful if it is with you, which I agree with.

even if you have your PLB on you, its no use hanging or attached to the outside of your clothes if it can get ripped off, it needs to be in a secure pocket or under your clothes

After thinking a bit about it, I don't think @Pro-active necessarily has a point: this could have been part of his system: doing only a few days hike when alone, so if something went wrong, people would start searching quickly. Solo-hikes have additional risks, and it seems he was off-track, but yeah, staying home if you don't have a buddy surely has huge risks too.

Hi Bernard. You don't have mail access, so I have to respond in public. ""Searchers said the badly injured 74-year-old might not have survived another night ...."" So, it was fortunate that he was due out Thursday morning and alarm was raised later that day. If he had fallen Tuesday, he would have had to endure 2 nights & longer time with injury. Maybe he also had daily check-ins as part of his strategy ?. Thankfully, things worked out and I hope he recovers well.

The fall happened in a steep section, so I was assuming he planned that section 1 day before being due.

"it needs to be in a secure pocket or under your clothes" How do people handle this? I often have it in my pack because I don't tend to have a secure enough pocket in the clothes I'm wearing, plus an ACR ResQLinq+ isn't exactly the least bulky thing in the world for fitting in a pocket. Is there such a thing out there as some kind of body strap that's specifically designed for securing a PLB without it also getting in the way?

I don't know if the guy in the Kahurangi incident took his pack off beforehand ?. You'd think that arm straps, sternum & waist belts would make it a secure, over-sized holster ?. There's any number of pouches if you want to wear a seperate belt. There's cross-body & leg-strap holsters, but that doesn't seem tramping practical, unless you want to rig especially for something tricky you intend ?. I use pack-lid compartment for quick access essentials. In fine weather my camera is on a caribiner off a shoulder strap, or the camera tether is looped around my wrist if I'm taking shots on the move. I, personally, can't think of a more secure place than in a pack, whether full-size or day-pack for excursion (short of using a body cavity).