Incidents in the mountains

Seriously? Another dumb-arse gets lost in this area?! Expletive, expletive, EXPLETIVE!!! Bloody half-wits! Experienced my arse! My giddy aunt, this shit pisses me off!!!

"Experienced tramper with bush skills, brought up in the bush? Why do people believe this story?" Media typically just ask family and friends, so claims of 'experience' are nearly always subjective, plus even having lots of experience could mean someone's simply been doing something isolated and badly for ages. The more objective thing media should be asking about is skills, not experience, but they usually won't. With the exception of a few very specific areas, modern media culture is more about asking available people about stuff and printing what they say than about understanding it. Also, from a media perspective the main "story" here wasn't about whether or not she knew what she was doing, so (for them) there's not much value in focusing on that. It was about somehow miraculously lasting 6 weeks without dying. I'm glad she made it out. It's not her fault she was described as something she mightn't have been, even if there are things she could have done better. Hopefully she's learned something for future occasions.

Lets put it this way ... she now has experience a lot of us don't have. :-)

Yep. More experienced than most of us.

I find it extraordinary how all these people seem to have no ability to recover from a situation were they are just a little lost / confused as to where they are and keep blundering on, get into real trouble. At some point she must have been just a little lost / a few metres of the track, confused about which way to go. I always tell people to stop at the very first moment they feel unsure about the situation they are getting into, take their pack off, think back to the last moment when they were not lost and figure a strategy to get BACK to that un-lost position / situation. Don't get up and put your pack back on till you are calm and have a clear strategy to get back to a comfortable situation. If you stop at the first moment of uneasiness, it wasn't very far / long ago that you weren't lost and it should be easy to get back to that un-lost state. People (or at least the ones we hear about in the newspapers) seem to blunder on much too far, but then stop right in the middle of a complete mess. There was that woman on one of the long distance American trails who got lost, they found her remains in her sleeping bag in the middle of a dense clump of trees some years later. If she'd stopped the moment she became lost, she'd have been fine, if she'd kept going and gone about 5 km in a straight line in any direction she'd have hit a road or trail and been found. Similarly with that mother and daughter on Kapakapanui. If they'd stopped the moment they became confused, they'd have been found quickly, if they'd kept going from where they did eventually stop for less than a km they'd have been back at their car.

The thing that was highlighted for me by Crooks, as well as this weekend, is the number of people who fail to leave clear intentions or use intentions books. Yesterday, my partner and I saw two idiots floating down the Nina River in Lewis Pass - at the time they were going through rocky rapids on warehouse single air beds. They were wearing done up packs, heavy boots, multiple layers of clothing, and nothing to keep them afloat over than the beds. The river was calm but is deep, fast in places, and cold. The kicker for me was that these two muppets had not filled in the intentions book anywhere along the track - had one or both of them drowned, no one would know where to start looking.

@Ian H - A lot of that comes down to a lack of fitness (and obviously the least fit in the bush are usually the least experienced too). When you're buggered there's a tendency to just blunder on. And if you're on a hill and uncertain of your route you either don't want to admit that meters you just fought for now need to be given back, or that the slope you just descended now has to be re-climbed. The American mother and daughter stated that they descended a long, steep hill, realised they were off route at the bottom of it, but the hill was too steep to re-climb. Sorry, but anything that can safely be descended can more safely be climbed. They were just too buggered to climb back up and so chose to blunder on.

Interesting about getting lost as opposed to stopping and retracing back to where you weren't lost: Frank and I were coming down from Worsley Pass to the Poulter years ago. I sent him on ahead as I was dawdlindue to having to stop and put my ice axe away so I had both hands free to grab vegetation to stop myself slipping. We had been following a barely-there track with very occasional markers. Suddenly at the bottom, I realized I must have lost the track some time before and thought, now what am I going to do? I intially panicked as I'd arrived in a swampy grove of manuka and imagined in there I'd lose my sense of direction and go round in circles. However, I calmed down and oriented the map, using my compass then followed the shape of the hill to where it met Enchanted Stream then followed this stream down to its junction with the Poulter where Frank was sitting, waiting for me. Interestingly, he and I went back and retraced most of that track and cut and marked it. Where I had emerged and realised I had lost the track was actually still on the track but it was completely obliterated by the manuka that had grown in that swampy bit! We've restored it now. When Frank came to the bottom, he pushed through that swampy stuff and mostly followed what little was left of that track on a boggy open plateau and then dropped down to the Poulter. He remembered seeing the odd track marker on his way down to the river. We wouldn't have been able to follow the advice of going back to where we were last on the track as we wouldn't have been able to find the proper track as we were on the track but it was unrecognisable as a track! I think I would have had trouble finding my way up the hill to the last known marker. Anyway the important thing was not to panic but calm down and use what you already know and logic.