Incidents in the mountains

she planned a four day trip, so she should have had at least four days food and she could have padded that out for a bit longer

The thing is how to forage when you've got an injured leg unless she was living on huhu grubs and other small critters. In the movie, the injured one had his young assistant.

once your energy intake is limited your metabolism drops and you're more vulnerable to hypothermia, who has every died of starvation in NZ?

Spot on, Wayno. T4, the storage form of the thyroid hormone gets converted more to Reverse T3, rather than T3, the active form that the body uses (absorbed from the thyroid receptors on the surface of our cells). Reverse T3 (RT3) will block those receptors and stop T3 docking on them as well. It's called euthyroid sick syndrome and can also be induced by severe restriction of carbohydrates in some people as well as just calorie restriction. This is why people on weight loss diets eventually plateau. The trick is to do cycling of calorific intake apparently.

Just putting food in your mouth will trigger metabolic changes that increase energy burning by 5%. Even before you swallow the food. Your body is hard wires to conserve energy once your stomach is getting empty until it knows food is coming in again.

Shelley Crooks interview http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11798164

Pitched her tent two and a half hours from campground. Decided to hike back but after few days realised she was just going around in circles? Doesn't the track just follow the river! Then there is also bullock creek road. Experienced tramper with bush skills, brought up in the bush? Why do people believe this story?

for whatever reasons she hasnt absorbed the information she needed to in her time in the bush, perhaps she has mental learning difficulties.

It says she walked in, pitched her tent 2 1/2 hours in, then walked out, stayed the night at the campground, walked in again and then got lost at that point. If she walked directly in from the Punakaiki Campground, she presumably went in up the Pororari Gorge. If she finally ended up at the Dilemma Creek - Fox River junction, she must have got beyond the Pack Track / Mt Bovis track junction before she got lost. Did she take the Mt Bovis track by mistake or intentionally where it branches off in Bullock Creek, then lose her way off that track and end up in the head of Dilemma Creek and Fossil Creek before eventually making her way down Dilemma Creek to it's junction with Fox River? She could have also wandered off the inland pack track somewhere where it curves east towards Fossil Creek and ended up in that flat but gorgy area to the North West of the pack track. http://www.topomap.co.nz/NZTopoMap?v=2&ll=-42.083463,171.418385&z=13 Even the journalist is seriously geographically challenged, picture of Fox river in the article shows the Fox river that flows out of the Fox Glacier... Yes, some serious geographical confusion, (for 6 weeks!), but some serious determination and effort to survive on huhu grubs and the like for so long.

Interesting to consider if you could get enough calories from the forest floor to sustain yourself if you got over your squeamishness, went at it seriously and were prepared to eat every grub and worm and crawly thing you could find in the leaf litter / rotted logs on the forest floor. I guess there is a reason a few places around NZ were named Kaitoke and similar, and explorers who wouldn't eat the creepy crawlys but would BBQ their faithful dog became known as Kaikuri. I've been out of food a couple of times in the NZ bush, but always known where I was and figured it was better to do three hard days on no food to get out than to waste time trying to forage.