Freezing to death in the Tararuas

Another feature of these deaths is 'risk shift'. In this and other similar cases such as the deaths on Mt Taranaki not so long ago, the less experienced woman fell in with the decision of the more experienced guy - to their peril, when there was a better alternative.

I also agree with Wayne's earlier comment on trivialisation. There needs to be some care with this type of discussion, especially as the names have been mentioned here. The thread's potentially going to be archived and retrievable for decades or centuries. (Yay, Internet.) It'll be open to being discovered and read by anyone who's searching for their names for any reason, including but not limited to close family and friends and their descendents. Those people will see every insult and criticism and wild assertion, and it'd be a shame to contribute to framing the perception of many decades of a person's personality, their entire life, with everything good and bad about it, around a few unfortunate hours of tramping in the Tararuas. People lives involve more than that. Not that I mind talking about the actual incidents or the factors involved, because I don't. (It's valuable!) I just don't see much use in getting hung up over blame and getting personal about it with individual cases, compared with looking constructively at what went wrong, what could have been done better, and trying to use it as a learning opportunity. In the end, it's general human nature that people make mistakes. Let's try to make fewer of them or find more effective ways to compensate.