why carry an ice axe when local rocks do the job?

Selt arrested with a warratah on one occasion. Well, one of two occassions ... the second slip the warratah predictably got ripped from my hands taking much skin eith it, and the old FBS (fingernail breaking system) combined with steer for the scrub had to be the fallback. Interesting escape down to Arete Forks in awful conditions. I bought an iceaxe when I got out.

On the stories theme, when i was very young and, ahem, less wise, i did an up and over Mt Taranaki around Christmas with no ice axe. There was a slight icy bit near the south entrance which i negotiated with care and a few knee wobbles, but i made it up. Then on the way down the north side, I got to the snow bowl, and had this really bright idea that it would be a nice easy way down. I got about half way down on my backside, when it suddenly got firmer, then a bit icy then quite icy, and i started to accelerate like you wouldn't believe. This was before i knew anything about snowcraft. By chance i hit a patch of lone rocks which brought me to a stop, and i was just standing there with shaking knees wondering how i was going to get out of this one. Then i noticed that near one of the rocks was a broken wooden snow pole, with one sharpish end. That became my ice axe and i was able to slide down in a more controlled manner... i mean to say, in a less uncontrolled manner. Or something. Survived to learn a good old lesson that day.

terminal velocity sliding on a snow slope in a PVC raincoat was always impressive... in any scenario when you go for a slide on a steep slope, you can pick up speed alarmingly rapidly.

About 1986 a group of us were descending off Maori Saddle between the Blue and Okuru Rivers when I took a what started out as minor slip on a rock slab that was covered in a slimey moss of some kind. I wasn't moving all that fast and tried for some seconds to self-arrest with my ice-axe ... but it turned out not very good as a 'rock-axe' at all. I wasn't stopping. After a bit more of this I looked down and realised I was heading towards this pretty damn big bluff and an unsurvivable fall. One of my mates who'd been ahead of me and a bit lower down was looking on in in a gape mouthed horror, and I had time to look across at him and say "This'll be a cracker". Still bumping my way down in slow motion towards certain death I decided to take a look at my fate and pushed myself over onto my back to see where I was going. At the moment my feet went over the edge, my pack caught on a lip of rock. Needless to say I backed up out of there very, very carefully. And like zoneblue above ... learned a valuable lesson that day.

@phillipw - ok you got me. What lesson did you learn from that? Staring certain death in the face and surviving by some incredible, rediculously unlikely quirk of fate! You gotta have come away from that with something more profound than 'watch out for slimey rocks'

Funny as I was typing that out I was thinking of your fall on Karangarua. A similar scenario where we'd gotten past the 'hard' part and I'd relaxed, wombling along admiring the view instead of looking where I was going. It didn't feel like an objectively risky spot; it was just one greasy step between two perfectly decent lumps of tussock, my mate had already gotten past with no issue, and the slab didn't look all that steep. The bluff was a good 20m downhill and there wasn't any real sense of exposure. I say the lesson was that you can never really afford to let your attention wander too far from your footing at any time.

quite a few top alpine climbers have had bad accidents in scenarios where they werent in a particularly dangerous spot but didnt consider they needed to give their full attention to staying safe and have taken a fall which caused serious injury or death. you can become so habituated to dangerous terrain that you can start playing down how much precaution you should take