MSC number crunching on NZ outdoors recreation

"Also, did anyone else notice that the document has 103 instances of the word 'tramp' (or variation) and 0 instances of the word 'hike' (or variation). Awesome." Nope, didn't. but agree, its is Awesome!!

the readers digest version of the report https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/they-assume-its-only-going-couple-hours-rescuers-plead-common-sense-trampers

After a quick read, the only conclusion I could come up with was "When more people are tramping, the incident rate goes up". Out of 770,000 trampers, only 3146 have notifiable injuries... Or 0.4% of all trampers get injured. Which if my number crunching is correct is about the same rate of injury as most field sports. When a large number of people do any activity, injuries happen, mistakes happen, things go wrong. It is impossible to have perfect statistics.

skiiing 13,000 ACC claims a year...

Interesting that the majority of deaths are due to falls, not river crossing, hypothermia or avalanches. Lots of material / courses run by MSC and others on river crossing / hypothermia / avalanche awareness, is that effort and focus misplaced, or are the lower fatalities from those causes a result of good work on those areas? Interesting also to note a lower injury rate per participant and zero death rate from trail runners. Perhaps the concern trampers have for the safety of these very lightly equipped people running past them on the Tararua tops or through the Routeburn and other great walks is misplaced? It may be hard to distinguish some day trip trampers from trail runners, which category do I fit into if I do a day trip to Conical Hill on the Routeburn in my running shoes but only break into a jog for some of the flat bits in the valley? The woman who drowned in the Mingha River (IIRC) a while back was a trail runner (doing Coast to Coast training), was she not?

When my muscles get tired of walking, I sometimes run wearing my tramping boots and a full pack, would that make me a trail runner. I suspect the average trail runner is a lot fitter, more experience and in all round better health then the average tramper. So it is not surprising that they get into trouble less often. Many trampers only go walking a couple of times per year, while most trail runners are running several times per week, and often on trails and uneven ground.

my experience is trail runners vary greatly in their experience in the mountains, some have way to little gear in case anything goes wrong, they think fitness will cover them, they dont think they will get injured easily or they dont think about it at all... theres only so much experience is going to help if you don't take any gear with you for an emergency

My understanding is, prior to the coast to coast, trail runners are constant, and theres a big spike in 'rescues' then. In my experience of trail running, there is a high proportion going into the races do not have a lot of experience (in the mountains). The marshalling, etc that race organisers usually have, reduces the probability of incidents. IMO Races like the southern crossing require prior experience of the route before entering solo (or used to). How they determined the numbers trail running - versus day tramping, I don't know. I personally think that, like all backcountry activities that are increasing in participation, trail runners have an increasing proportion of people that don't have enough experience to extricate themselves from some places that very quickly get themselves into.

"Out of 770,000 trampers, only 3146 have notifiable injuries... Or 0.4% of all trampers get injured." I'll need to look more properly when not tied to my phone, but to take this to extremes, does the data confirm that this isn't just the same person being assisted 3146 times?

"Interesting also to note a lower injury rate per participant and zero death rate from trail runners." I'm wondering if there might be a data collection issue when trying to compare this stuff. I'm not very convinced by the robustness of MSC's combining of its participation data with its incident data. Edit: There's an explanation from page 178 regarding how the participation data was constructed. Going by all the business rules they've applied to imperfect data from several sources, it doesn't seem to me that it's likely to give a reliable count of participation. It's more of a best guess, but they're trying to combine very different questions about activities from different surveys, and then re-hash the results. And then, it's only counting the total number of discrete people who supposedly participated in the activity at all during the year, without much insight into how much time they spent doing it. I don't know how it'd be possible to do much better when most people in the outdoors are invisible until they have a reported accident, but I'd be wary of trusting any insights from this report which claim to map numbers of incidents back to participation.