Not a good time to be lost in the Tararuas

This comment over on Flickr is very interesting. Thanks to Amelia who owns the photo for pointing me towards it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anakiwa_forever/2271868241/#comment72157621430805976

Yalnikim, I had the same experience as yours. At some times I neither saw the loo at Kime nor the hut on the way back. Low clouds came in and out so quickly. It was very cold in the hut even in Feb-Mar. Imagine someone was stuck out there in July. I am also interested in the issue of a mobile shelter. I always carry a tent on overnight walks. Once, where my tent was pitched is just about a couple of minute walk to a hut. I knew that I was very close to the hut and wished I would have a much better torch; however, decided to camp there because it got dark and I heard of water flowing near by. Did not want to loose the track because the area was so like a jungle and I was on my own.

Have travelled from the end of the main ridge to Kime: about 800m, but time to go from gusty but clear to whiteout blizzard conditions. I can say it's barren and featureless area when you can't see 10 yards in front of you. When I finally struck the hut I couldn't see as far as the toilet. Not a good place to be in a whiteout. Even with a tent. The decision to stop and camp: an easy decision on a warm evening in a sheletered valley, warm, alert and overtaken by dark. But cold, tired, disorientated, possibly already partially hypothermic and facing the prospect of excavating a platform and pitching a tent in blizzard conditions? 'Give it another 10 minutes and I'll stop ...' - ever said that? And how much further down the hypothermic slope from rational decisionmaking towards incoherence can you travel in those 10 minutes? It's not the despair that kills, it's the hope.

It's really neither hope or despair that kills. In the end it's being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We all know that bad weather and back country remoteness is dangerous combination. The science of weather prediction, however, is not exact. We are known to gamble. I've been in parties were the weather has turned bad. Once or twice we turned around because one or more people thought it prudent. There were the looks of disappointment and comments later that it probably would have been OK if we'd carried on. On other occasions we tramped on, got very wet, and very cold but survived. At what risk? I still couldn't say to be honest. In hindsight, had the weather been even more severe on the odd occasion then it may have been touch and go. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Bottom line is we are all capable of making good and bad decisions. Experienced and inexperienced.

Amen to that

Saturday 12th July showed the Tararua Tops at their most treacherous. The savage weather - blizzard, low visibility, extreme low temperature + wind chill, took the lives of 2 trampers. I do agree with BackCountryBoy and bigpaul that it is not easy to make the decision to turn around and go back. I'm unsure if the trampers concerned were aware of how far they had to go to reach Kime Hut. Having been there numerous times over the last 30 years, I know that 1 km out there are rounded, lowish knobs with tussock and low alpine vegetation cover - no protection at all from a screaming SE gale. Maybe they thought Kime was closer. Another important factor was the weather forecast. That Saturday I was skiing at Turoa, concerned that the wild weather forecast for about midday would send us home. Before I left Wellington on the Friday I was fully aware of the severe weather that was forecast for the whole of the North Island. Surely the tramping pair who set out on that Saturday morning had made an effort to hear the report. I'd like to think I would have canned out before leaving the carpark but I haven't always made sensible decisions in the past.

Carry a decent pocket radio, the headphones and try listening to the unit in open-air and/or high situations . Mine takes only one AAA battery.

Those offer pretty useless forcasts. They also work better down in the valleys at night time(i.e better reception). If I were to go tramp up there and seen how it was like by the time I got up above the bushline I would have some serious doubts and WOULD have turned back if it was a blizzard etc. Amazing how the media keeps saying they are experienced WHEN THEY WENT OUT IN THE ALPINE ENVIRONMENT WHEN THE WEATHER WAS THE WAY IT WAS! So much more media coverage of this since they are famous people while MadPom got so little coverage I hardly knew it had happened till they finally put him on t.v.

In the end the media coverage around this wasn't about two trampers dying of hypothermia in the Tararuas, it was about the Chief Exec of Te Papa dying suddenly and being remembered by everyone who knew him in that role... and by the way he had a family friend with him who also died. That's newsworthy too for different reasons than an outdoor accident, I guess, and maybe it concerns a wider range of the population. I felt uncomfortable about the coverage too, but to put my views in context, I also feel uncomfortable about the popular media's coverage of most things. It's difficult to know what experience means when it's such a subjective term. I don't class myself as exceptionally experienced in the outdoors (especially compared with people here and people I know), but many of my friends think I'm experienced because in their world, I am. Someone could have decades of experience in the outdoors yet still not be familiar or comfortable using a compass for off-track navigation, or reading the weather, or going to high altitudes, or tramping in winter, or visiting the tops during a drought when there might be no water in the tarns, and so on. This is fine, because it comes down to what interests a person, as long as you know what your boundaries are and are extra careful when you approach them. I don't know exactly where these two people fell in the experience spectrum, but it doesn't really matter in the end. They were almost certainly qualified and experienced and knowledgable enough to make a good decision. For whatever reason they simply didn't, and they probably made additional mistakes in preparation, which happens every so often despite people having the means to prepare well and make good decisions. This time there was sadly no life-line to be able to learn from it. It's not as if they'd make the same decision again if they could look back in hindsight knowing the consequences. If they'd survived, they might even be amazed at how they came to the conclusion they did and got themselves into such awful trouble. Even the most experienced people in the world make mistakes in judgement. (eg. That's why so many internationally renowned climbers kill themselves on Taranaki either through mis-judging weather, or mis-judging a local farmer's knowledge of it.) All you can really do is prepare as much as possible and hope that the preparation will compensate.

Well said izoqi. I guess we just now need to wait to hear what the reports have to say. I certainly continues to make me uneasy that beause 2 experienced people died it will be reported that maybe what they were doing was unsafe or that he place they were going (the big bad outdoors) is in some way unsafe. A quote that I heard recently rings in my ears. Apparently it was said by Arthur Lydiad. "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing." I guess if man can walk on the moon then that is definitely true.