Incidents in the mountains

Also, yeah. More bait for the charge-for-rescue argument. Thanks to internet, what were once local stories automatically become national stories. Thanks to social media and comment threads, all stories immediately become framed with random people's statements and opinions.

I think the "left behind" thing happens when people are struggling physically and have hut fever. They want the walk over and just hope for the best for tail-end charlie. Pretty poor form.

Another possibility which I have done in the past is to get to the hut drop pack then return to the slow person to carry his pack

i had one trip, i got sick at the start of the trip. the other guys ook a she'll be right attitude, despite knowing i was sick, they left me behind on a rough hard o find track. then my knee played up.. three days of that, essentially it became two seperate groups... Don't put up with that, if your grup members arent going to look out for one another, find other people to tramp with. because what you're tramping with is some people you're just sharing transport and accommodation with, you're not a group at all, that is very bad bushcraft.

That's fine as long as you've actually sighted them recently enough to have some clue of where they are and that they weren't in distress. From what I hear, it's not uncommon for people to just ditch others in their group and assume it'll all work out.

never leave a a sick or injured person alone...

@izogi If those are club trips you are thinking of, the club committee needs a rocket for allowing this to happen. If they're just casual meetup groups ... that sort of thing gives me big reservations about the calibre of the people you might be out there depending on.

I did a couple meetup walks and yeah one of those leaders was definitely not caring about leaving someone behind sadly, he/she just had no people skills and didn't understand why people would struggle on their first overnight walk when he/she was almost running uphill. Fortunately there were people who were familiar with tramping on that trip too, and so no one was left alone, but yeah depends on the organiser, and you don't know what the experience and skills of the organiser might be. So it's better to be prepared just like if you were going alone in a new area that you don't know. But I didn't really feel that tramping club were much better on that point, they too didn't seem to care to stop and wait for the tail of the group to catch up…

Hi @PhillipW. No, not club trips (of my own) and it's rarely happened to me that I can think of. We once had a trip member who decided to bolt ahead against clear agreements with everyone else, then got himself lost, but I don't consider it the same thing. I'm aware of one club trip that was partly organised via a meetup group, and had some issues which the committee then took seriously, but I didn't see that as being representative of the usual case. With my above comment I'm more extrapolating from the apparent number of occasions I've seen reports of people in groups getting lost or left behind, basically separated from the group. There must be numerous additional groups out there who do the same thing and simply get away with it by being fortunate enough to not have reported accidents. I can appreciate everyone not wanting to walk half a metre behind each other the whole time (ugh!). I've sometimes been in groups that spread out over maybe a kilometre or more. But I've never had the feeling that those at the front were disconnected from those at the back. That's mostly because those at the front and middle would always make a point of stopping and waiting at regular intervals as well as communicating with those behind, of not going past major decision points without ensuring people behind them could see where they were going, basically of not covering any distance which they'd not be prepared to turn around and backtrack to find out what's happened to those behind at the last known point.

Agree entirely with both comments above. It's completely possible to tramp in a group that is 'connected' and aware of each other without walking in lockstep a metre apart. All it takes is a bit of care from the more experienced members/leaders of the group. One of the more insidious traps is a group that 'thinks it has a leader, but really doesn't. Years ago AUTC had a rather amusing/notorious day trip at May Camp in the Hunua's. About 40 of them headed off for a simple Saturday womble up a ridgeline and back down a creek. Well just around dusk they realised that with no-one actually making any decisions they'd finished up in entirely the wrong creek. After a minor epic blundering down a small gorge with two dim torches between them, they finally made it back to camp around midnight. They even managed to get lost in a farmer's back-yard! They say inexperience in the hills is a dangerous thing, but to really cock things up you need (and I have to paraphrase here) 3 Life-Members, 6 Club Presidents, 18 Committee members, 6 Gear Officers, 25 Trip Leaders and a gaggle of Safety Officers.