COroners report on death on Mt Taranaki climb

I agree with all of the above regarding the need to learn correct techniques, learn what your limits are and stick within them. My gripe was with the much overused 'you (ie everyone) shouldnt be there in winter / poor weather / etc'. I'd say at least half of my winter/spring trips are carried out with either a poor forcast, or heading into unknown snow/ice/river conditions. But that doesn't mean I should stay at home and watch the idiot box instead as the world keeps telling us to do. It means I need to take the right gear, know my limits, have a plan b,c and d and go out with a mindset of assessing the conditions and only proceeding if I'm comfortable with what I find. Thinking through last winter's snow & ice trips only two of the five I can recal achieved their objective. But the others turned into pleasent easy valley weekends, or scrambles up to the snowline or excuses to sit in a hut and drink tea. So instead of lambasting people who 'shouldn't be there' as the media love to do (coz it's the easy story) lets take the harder but more rewarding approach and teach the mindset that the posters above have mentioned.

The north side is often mellow, but then thats often, not always. That mountain can be incredibly variable. I took a youngster on the north side more or less around that date, and it was pretty firm. At other times various places on the hill ive seen it literally blue in places. My standard advice used to be that a snow craft course is not optional, but what to do now that MSC have stopped running their great courses? This http://www.mountainsafety.org.nz/resources/community/courses/#ALPINE doenst look too inspiring, theres no north island courses listed and the half doz named providers all look commercial. The clubs do run courses, of course, eg https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=snow+craft+course+nz, but usually for members only eg: http://www.aucklandclimber.org.nz/instruction/ In the end Ueli Steck reminds us that life and death are entwined.

The Alpine Club runs courses, including beginner snowcraft, but I'd always assumed they're more tageted at people with a greater interest in full-on alpine climbing. I dunno what the Alpine Club thinks. https://alpineclub.org.nz/alpine-climbing/courses/ Some of the former MSC instructors ended up with Outdoor Training NZ, which is meant to have a similar model as what the MSC used to be. It's still fairly new and looking at the list of courses, they seem to have presently consolidated around general bushcraft, river safety and navigation courses. https://www.outdoortraining.nz/courses/courses.php I guess those are the types of courses where it's easiest to find an ongoing demand for, especially with the interest in DoE. If there were lots of interest expressed for basic snowcraft types of courses, though, and (obviously) the training skills available for running those courses, it might be the type of thing that OTNZ would consider hosting in future.

You mean easiest to avoid the potentially nasty tangle of red tape?

I can talk to you about alpine courses, as I've trying to do one for a year :) The Alpine Club is running courses, yes, but they are bloody expensive in Auckland! $800 for the course + $110 for the membership + ~$100 gear hire = $1000+ and not sure if this includes transport to Ruapehu. It might be awesome and stuff, but then the Wellington AC course is $275 and gear rental is $20. And it provides basically the same thing… I don't see why there is such a difference in cost. I've been told it's because they have to pay a professional guide. If that's the case, they're not a club to me, just another commercial operator. And you don't look for the same things in a club as in a commercial trip. But either way I don't think this makes a difference for short-term visitors, as those courses only run once a year. And when I checked last time I couldn't find an operator that would take me on Taranaki in winter…

Red tape? Could be but I'm not so sure. My tramping club runs snowcraft courses. The main criteria, besides signing up in time, is to be a member of the club. This criteria was added for consistency with the H&S Employment Regulations (2011). They give an effective exemption for sports & recreation clubs as long as it's for members, or for other clubs, or if it's hoped participants would join. http://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2011/0367/latest/whole.html?#DLM3961534 OTNZ is an amateur thing that's supported and operated by volunteers. If it wanted to fall into this category I'd have thought it'd be fairly easy to set up a club structure, call itself a recreation club, and require or encourage participants to join. I'd expect the trickier issue is around the overheads of actually having and training qualified instructors, and running the events, because having a goal of training people OTNZ wants to make a point of actually having instructors with qualifications. I've not quizzed anyone in OTNZ on this, though. Maybe I'm wrong.

i did an alpine club snow course decades ago, they took allcomers and in three weekends you could specialise in glacier travel technique or go vertical. I climbed the ruapehu pinnacles as part of my course, which was the first time I'd done anything beyond a steep walk on a mountain, but we did do a vertical rope skills course in wellington to prepare us. someone did die on one of their courses a couple of years ago falling off the pinnacles... we werent roped up the whole time. a couple of us took falls while on ropes and at least one of the instructors was laughing about it. my instructor was pretty impatient with me being a novice to vertical climbing.. the instructor wanted me to assure him i wasnt going to panic while i was climbing just when we were at the base of the pinnacles, I assured him i wouldnt but felt pressured to tell him that to avoid getting kicked off the days activities, being a teenager, i was more into towing the line of what elders said back then. later on he criticised me for putting a snow anchor in at all and told me it was more important to move fast than put an anchor in,,, this when it was my first time hanging off the side of a vertical slope. no one briefed me to put a sling on my snow stake before going up... no one really checked the extent of my gear. the instructors were extremely experienced though, but their people skills werent always very good. you really needed to have some basic background in putting in anchors and having the right gear and in snow travel in themountain in general before attempting to go vertical as I said this was decades ago. I have no knowledge of what the course instruction is like now...

The problem with getting more experience and skilled at climbing is you then try harder things and so to some extent the risk stays about the same no matter your experience and skill level. People with low levels of skill/experience fall of places like Taranaki in winter or Mt Aspiring in summer, people like Ueli Steck fall off more difficult mountains.

@Ian_H, do you think part of that maybe ties in with the claim that alpine climbers tend to fall into a category of people who have different benchmarks when assessing risk versus reward? (Dr Erik Monasterio at Otago has done a bunch of work on this type of thing.) I'd do a course but ultimately I don't think I fall into that category, so I suspect I'm less likely to choose to take the same sorts of risks that some people more likely to be natural alpinists might take, regardless of if I've had the same training.

The reason ive always encouraged people to do a snowcraft course, is that based on my observations of people I see on the slopes, neither ice axe or crampons are intuitive to use. Without training a beginner lacks the foundation skills to tackle even entry level trips. But then the MSC courses were only a couple of hundred dollars, basically food and accommodation, you didnt need to be a member of anything, and the waiting list was not overly onerous. The instructors taught on an exchange for training basis. Izogi, sure, exposure to those with training may very well occur on club trips. And maybe this is reason enough to aim for a revival of the clubs.