The Art of Deception

“She was practiced at the art of deception, I could tell by her blood-stained hands” – The Rolling Stones

The Mingha-Deception route, famous for its role as the Coast to Coast’s mountain run course, draws some of the world’s best athletes, though not always the best outdoorspeople, into some of New Zealand’s toughest wilderness with occasionally disastrous results. With the 2013 race just around the corner, Mark Banham looks at the do’s and don’ts of this iconic trail run.

Arthurs Pass' Mingha River

--------

On Friday 13th January, despite the inauspicious date and an ominous weather forecast, two groups of runners training for the Coast to Coast set off up the Southern Alps’ Mingha Valley into what would soon become a life-threatening situation – and an expensive and controversial rescue.

As the runners loped up the rugged 33 kilometre route, gale force westerly winds slammed into the mountains, dropping 65mm of rain, flooding the Mingha River and its tributaries and sending the wind-chill plummeting.

According to police reports, the first call for help came in around mid-day. The icy rivers, gale-force winds and driving rain had pushed one of the runners into hypothermia. To their credit, their companions recognised the seriousness of the situation, stopped at Goat Pass Hut and used the in-situ radio to call for help.

A Garden City rescue helicopter was despatched, battling headwinds all the way from Christchurch to arrive on the scene shortly afterwards. According to NZ Land Search and Rescue’s Duncan Hamilton, however, there was never any guarantee the helicopter would actually be able to reach the runners.

Hamilton, a West Coast local who has run the route more than 100 times and won the mountain run section of the Coast to Coast on several occasions, was one of the NZLSAR members on the scene that day. He says conditions weren’t as extreme as the West Coast can get, but it was certainly “a bit touch-and-go” for a helicopter rescue.

“There was heavy rain and strong winds, but fortunately the visibility was okay; it never got below about five kilometres and the cloud base always remained two hundred metres up.”

According to Hamilton, that’s a pretty close to the limit for helicopter rescues. He said if the cloud base had dropped by another hundred metres – which would take a mere a percent or two change in humidity – then search and rescue teams would have been forced to use much slower ground  based tactics.

“The next plan would have been for the helicopter to fly up as far as possible and drop us off, which may or may not have been alright,” he said, euphemistically.

In the end, the helicopter managed to sneak through the meagre weather window to collect the runners and transport them safely back to Arthurs Pass where one of the group was treated for mild hypothermia.

It was an embarrassing incident with a happy ending for the runners. For the rescue teams, the day was just beginning.

Before the rotor blades even stopped spinning a report of an emergency locator beacon signal coming from the same valley arrived – the second group of runners were in trouble.

Hamilton says one of the big risks on the Mingha-Deception route in rainy conditions is becoming trapped between rising rivers. “People who aren’t moving so quickly can get across the river at the bottom, but not the narrower crossings further up… and then by the time they get back to the first river crossing, it’s too high to cross as well.”

It sounds fairly benign, but it’s actually an extremely dicey situation. Statistically speaking, if you’re going to get killed below the tree-line around Arthurs Pass, a river is likely to be involved. Of the 93* non-aviation fatalities in the region since 1926, 28 have been due to drowning in rivers.

Sure enough, as the rivers rose the group found themselves trapped between two tributaries. As the precipitation increased their options evaporated until they were left with a choice: spend a night out in appalling conditions with no shelter and minimal food and clothing… or calling for a rescue – they opted for the latter.

So what went wrong?
Many observers simply blew the incidents off, describing them as just more examples of tax dollars being used to interfere with natural selection. But was it really that simple?

They certainly made some bad decisions, most notably going out with a heavy rain warning on the forecast, but simply saying they were idiots and leaving it at that seems a little too easy. In effect, it’s just a way of saying: “It couldn’t happen to me- I’m far too smart,” which is a dangerous train of thought indeed.

To try and make sense of it all we had a chat with Daryl Carpenter, CEO of New Zealand’s Mountain Safety Council. Carpenter’s job is to try and minimise these sorts of face-palm incidents. He says with any near-misses there are always lessons to be learned.

1 – You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
The Mountain Safety Council have spent years developing and refining a set of guidelines for the outdoors - the Outdoor Safety Code; a five step process to make sure you don’t end up going home in a helicopter – or worse.

[In case you’ve forgotten, they are: Plan your trip, tell someone, be aware of the weather, know your limits and take sufficient supplies].

Each year the organisation goes to a massive amount of effort and expense to drum the idea into Kiwi outdoorspeople’s heads. So no doubt it’s a more than a little frustrating when people ignore them based on the spurious logic: “I’m running and the code is clearly designed for walkers.”

Carpenter says “If you’re trail runner you’re simply moving at a greater speed. If you’re a mountain biker you’re moving at an even greater speed. The rules apply equally whatever discipline, whatever terrain.”

2 -Timing is everything
One of the most common traps Mingha-Deception runners fall into, Carpenter says, is just not allowing themselves enough time.

“If it’s your first time through, double your expected time. If you’d normally run that sort of thing in four hours, then first time through, you might want to think about eight hours – because you’ll get lost in the rock garden.”

“If you’re with a group of four, generally you end up travelling at the speed of the slowest person. If they’ve niggled their knee, you might be able to do it in four hours but they do eight – guess what you do.”

Rumour has it that the Friday the 13th runners had been told the bad weather would arrive around lunchtime, giving them just enough time to sneak over the pass before the door closed behind them.

As it transpired, they were slower than expected and the weather arrived sooner than expected – closing the door in front of them.

3 - Bring enough stuff.
Carpenter says “As a trail runner you don’t want to prance around with too much gear, but there are some fundamentals.”

For this sort of mountain run people should think about bringing a polypro top and bottom, hat, gloves, a light raincoat and a survival bag - basically the Coast to Coast’s compulsory equipment.

He goes onto underline that’s just a starting point. “That gear will be different from the Kepler run, which’ll be slightly different from the Routeburn run, which will be slightly different from the Port Hills run.”

Plus it’ll change depending on the group. If you’re a fast runner travelling with a group of plodders, you won’t generate the usual amount of metabolic heat, and so you’ll want extra insulation and extra food. If it’s cold you might need still more.

Of course that gear will make you safer, but not invincible. As NZLSAR’s Duncan Hamilton pointed out; “[The Friday 13th runners] had the minimum clothing recommended for doing training there… But that minimum equipment won’t keep you alive if you’re outside indefinitely.”

5 - Know when to quit.
Another trail runners’ trap on the Mingha-Deception comes when, despite the best laid plans and sunniest forecasts, the deluge sets in and the rivers come up.

If you’re training for the Coast to Coast, chances are you’ll be running the route as a final shakedown squeezed into a narrow window of opportunity in January. And chances are you’ll have travelled for hours or days to get the chance to get familiar with the course, so the pressure to just give it a go anyway is tremendous.

Carpenter says if you find yourself in that situation, he has three words of advice: “Pull, the, pin.”
“People bleat and say ‘Aw but... Aw but…’, but hey, that’s life,” he says. “You need to start thinking ‘What’s my backup plan?’”

He says there’s no shortage of options in the area that don’t involve dicing with deadly rivers “You can just run up and over the road to Arthurs pass. Or you can whip over to the West coast and run some of the tracks. If it’s your boulder hopping you’ve got to worry about then jump into the Taramakau and run up and down that for a while.”

Even better, he says, is to have a backup weekend – plan to hike it in December so if the weather’s no good in January (as is often the case) you’ve still had a chance to get to know the route.
He says staying clear of the Mingha-Deception’s river crossings in bad conditions is good outdoor wisdom for anyone but especially for trail runners.

“Most trail runners are pretty lean and trim; you don’t have a lot of body fat to call on, so they’re actually powering through the resources of their body a lot quicker. So as soon as you enter the river, and repeatedly do so, the cold sucks the life out of you.”

But that still leaves one mystery…
The troubling question surrounding the Friday the 13th rescues is: why did two groups of experienced runners head out onto one of New Zealand’s hardest running routes with a weather forecast that clearly told them it was a bad idea?

Could they have not looked at the forecast? That seems unlikely. Perhaps it was group-think, with people shifting risk management responsibility onto a leaderless group? Perhaps it was the hubris that comes from being lucky in the outdoors for too long? We’ll never know for sure as the people concerned have understandably slipped back behind the veil of anonymity.

However one factor that may have had an influence is the ease with which both parties called for a rescue. There is a theory that emergency locator beacons and mountain radios can sing a siren’s song to outdoorspeople, telling them to push their luck because rescue is only a gadget away.

Carpenter says although their story had a happy ending with everyone being whisked to safety just in the nick of time, pushing your luck then pushing the button for a rescue isn’t a strategy that works in the long term.

“A really good rescue service is the wrong end of the spectrum to look at,” he says. “A really good prevention strategy means you’ll be fronting up at the start line.”





*Statistics from Arthurs Pass Mountaineering (softrock.co.nz). The most lethal accident category is falls with 48 fatalities; however this included a large number of climbing and mountaineering incidents. Below the tree-line the threat from rivers is likely to be higher than indicated. 

An ‘unlucky’ winter

[Reproduced from the May 2010 issue of Wilderness Magazine]

The winter of 2009 saw the Southern Alps’ backcountry cloaked in some of the best snow seen this millennium. But the siren song of all that untracked powder belied what was often a very well hidden trap – and for too many people, a lethal one.

The season had begun spectacularly in May with over a metre of snow falling and surprisingly staying . Skiers across the country were understandably elated. Many simply couldn’t wait and resorted to hiking up the as-yet unopened ski resorts for some of the best skiing of the season; light, dry shin-deep powder under bluebird skies – before winter had technically even begun.

However, according to Mountain Safety Council spokesperson Hamish McCrostie, it was that six week stretch of bluebird days that followed that were to haunt backcountry users.

“That sustained cold weather makes the snow weak; it turns it sugary. Then once you get a bit of snowfall or wind-deposited snow on top, that weak cohesionless snow just acts like ball bearings,” he said. “When you get enough weight on it, the snow on top will release and the whole lot will run down hill.”

The question is how much is ‘enough weight’? Depending on a host of terrain variables like steepness, curvature, rockiness, elevation and angle to the wind, any particular slope could accumulate differing amounts of snow that would stress the buried weak layer by different amounts.

Over the course of the winter, some slopes would avalanche spontaneously under the weight of new snow; others would bond together with the warming influence of the sun. But a lot of slopes would lay waiting for some external force to set them in motion. On July 24, a party of four heliskiers enjoying feather-light fresh powder in the Ragged Range would provide precisely that force.

Llynden Riethmuller, John Castran and his son Gus were on their last run of a day heli-skiing, when as Castran puts it, the snow “just opened up around me”. They’d overloaded the weak layer.

As they rode the disintegrating slab of snow downhill, two more slide paths released nearby, culminating in a triple slip that overtook the skiers. Riethmuller was buried under half a metre of snow and Castran almost two metres deep.

The two men, who were both wearing avalanche transceivers, were quickly located by their guides. Castran survived and was skiing again the next day. Riethmuller died at the scene, possibly due to a pre-existing medical condition.Earlier in the day he had reportedly exclaimed: “You don't get much closer to heaven than this.”

Less than 24 hours later snowboarder Sam Deavoll set off from the Remarkables ski area, past an avalanche advisory sign showing the danger as ‘High’, to ride a backcountry chute above Lake Alta, ominously named ‘the terminator’.

As he dropped into the chute, his weight overloaded the same buried weak layer, releasing a massive avalanche. But, in what was aptly described by the Otago Daily Times as ‘the ride of his life’, he somehow managed to stay ahead of the debris as it ran the full length of the slope and out onto the lake’s frozen surface.

A few moments later the weight of the avalanche debris broke through the thin layer of ice. If Deavoll had been caught up in the slide he would have almost certainly gone to the bottom of the lake making it two fatalities in two days.

Nine days later on August 2, after another storm cycle dumped 75cm of fresh snow, further stressing the snow pack, brothers Frazer and Ryan Campbell traversed from the Coronet Peak ski area boundary, after also having seen an avalanche advisory sign showing the danger as ‘High’ for a twilight run down Dirty Four Creek. Neither was wearing an avalanche transceiver or carrying shovels or probes. By their actions it could reasonably be assumed neither had attended any sort of avalanche education.

As the pair descended the bowl they triggered a medium sized slide, setting around a thousand cubic metres of snow cascading towards the valley floor. Miraculously Frazer managed to stay clear of the debris, but Ryan who was ahead by three metres was carried down into a tight gully and deeply buried. It took a team of rescuers two hours working under floodlights (at some risk of further avalanches themselves) to find him.

After a post-mortem of Campbell’s body, Otago-Southland coroner David Crerar said his death was a result of “severe respiratory failure due to extensive severe chest and lung injuries caused by the massive weight of snow and ice in the avalanche and had been determined to be not survivable and almost instantly lethal.”

Campbell’s parents said Ryan was a victim of bad luck. He’d been “in the wrong place in the wrong set of circumstances” and was “a thrill-seeker, not a risk-taker”.

By this stage many of the more educated backcountry skiers and boarders were opting not to ‘risk take’, or ‘thrill seek’, or go into the backcountry at all for that matter. Despite that, there were still more incidents to come.

By August 14, the avalanche risk finally dropped a little and was listed by the Mountain Safety Council as ‘Moderate’ in the Ragged Ranges when Johnny Morgan, who had been hailed as a hero for his swift work rescuing the survivors of the July 24 slide, set off for a day’s heli-skiing with four clients.

While investigating a run, Morgan was hit by a small slide and swept down a steep gully. Despite being only partially buried, and receiving immediate medical treatment Morgan would succumb to the injuries incurred in the tumble. This slide, Morgan’s second for the season, would be described by survivors as ‘a freak accident’.

Three days later another group of heli-skiers on the Richardson Mountains would be caught out, with one client buried two metres deep. The skier was immediately dug up and flown to Queenstown Lakes District Hospital suffering from hypothermia but alive. Statistically speaking the likelihood of surviving a burial that deep is about one-in-four.

The tragic deaths of Llynden Riethmuller, Ryan Campbell, and Johnny Morgan and the spectacular near misses were well publicised but they were by no means isolated incidents. The Queenstown region in particular recorded 18 involvements that caught or buried 10 people - and that’s just the ones that were reported.

With the popularity of backcountry pursuits growing each year, there is a strong impetus to figure out what’s going wrong and to prevent a repeat in 2010. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of theories out there.

As this goes to print, last year’s fatalities are still the subject of a coronial inquiry with recommendations expected some time in July. If there’s a repeat of last year’s snow conditions that may be too late for some people.

There’s heated speculation regarding the heli-skiing incidents under the watchful eye of experts. The cynical point of view says some guides are becoming blasé about the risks and some operators are bowing to commercial pressure to take people on steep, deep slopes, when they’d be safer on more mellow terrain – or in the pub.

On the other hand, industry insiders point to the fact that the mountains will always present a certain level of hazard and that statistically even if you eliminate 99% of the risk, the 1% will eventually catch up with you if you spend enough time out there. In the case of some heli-skiing operations that’s several decades.

The situation regarding amateur backcountry users is equally complex. A culture has developed in many parts of the alpine sports community that is prepared to hike for steep untracked snow, just outside of the resort boundary, operating under the misconception that near the resort is nearly as safe as the resort.

However, as Treble Cone Operations manger Rosco Davies puts it, “Once you step outside the boundary, you’re into the Stone Age,” he says, “It might be only forty steps past an arbitrary line, but that makes the difference between controlled and uncontrolled – and that can be the difference between safe and dead.”

Numerous avalanche involvements in this resort-adjacent backcountry are leading to resorts considering a North American approach to boundary management, where ski resort boundaries are policed. This would be quite a big change for New Zealand which has long tradition of free and unrestrained access to the backcountry.

McCrostie says, “Resorts are unlikely to restrict access to the back country.” However he cautions, “Some may choose to limit access options by erecting fences with gates and providing much more ‘in your face’ information at those access points”.

In fact, Wanaka’s Treble Cone ski field already has its backcountry gated and it closes that gate on days with high or extreme avalanche danger. Last season no avalanche involvement occurred at the field.

Treble Cone is fortunate in having only one main access point to the backcountry; other ski fields have dozens.

Davies says another way to improve things might be to look at New Zealand’s five-step avalanche warning system. He says experts, like American Bruce Tremper are suggesting a two-part scale that gives one rating for the likelihood of releasing a slide, and another for the consequences if you do.

“While the likelihood of setting off an avalanche last winter was reasonably low, if you did set off one it was very large, and probably not survivable,” he says. “Other years we can have a higher hazard where you’re pretty likely to release an avalanche, but if you do they’re only five or ten centimetres deep - something that might take you for a scary ride but you’ve got a good chance of surviving uninjured.”

A system that covered both factors would give people a clearer understanding of what they’re letting themselves in for, but it does assume that people will actually look at the warnings - unlike in the cases of Deavoll and Campbell.

A salient point in avalanche incidents is the misattribution of ‘luck’ in media coverage. People who avoid avalanches are ‘lucky’. People caught have had ‘their luck run out’, or were ‘at the wrong place in the wrong set of circumstances’, or were involved in a ‘freak accident’.
All of which runs against the seemingly obvious reality that luck is not what keeps you alive in avalanche terrain; making the right decisions is. As McCrostie puts it, “If you make good decisions, you make your own luck.”

Mother Nature’s gambling den

How to ski steep and deep... while stacking the odds in your favour.

To the average flatlander, skiers’ obsession with powder snow must seem a bit ridiculous. Why on earth would go to so much effort, so much expense and generally risk your neck for a bit of frozen rain?

The simplest answer I can give is this: riding steep untracked powder is an experience that leaves any other non-medicinal recreation for dead.

Why? Well, the nature of powder snow is such that you don’t so much travel across it as fly through it, piloting your skis or board in three dimensions. Plus the surface itself is incredibly forgiving, more so even than water, allowing you to drop cliffs and have wipe-outs that’d send you to the emergency room on any other surface.

Then there’s the whole kinaesthetic side of it. The rhythmic motion of linked turns in deep snow is a little like dancing to a steady, thumping baseline – the sort of rhythmic movement that awakens the primal hunter-gatherer part of your brain; the beast within - Grrr!

When you combine these things it’s like being a superhero for the day – flying faster than a speeding bullet, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, surviving blows that would kill any mortal man. It’s an endorphin rush, an adrenalin rush and a head rush all at once. Better than any drug… and way more addictive.

You see, there are no guarantees with snow – especially in a maritime climate like New Zealand – you can have champagne powder one day, slush the next, and ice day after that. It’s Mother Nature’s gambling den; you get a random reward with a random frequency. It’s no surprise people get hooked.

The problem is snow’s a tricky substance, when it’s freshly fallen it’s light as eider down, but given the right conditions it can form into dense layers (often hidden deep in the snow pack) that can peel off a mountainside when triggered by the weight of a skier.

To make matters worse, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be hard to tell just how securely things are stuck together– in effect, you won't know whether you’re playing a 20c poker machine or betting everything at the high rollers table.

So what’s a hapless powder-addict to do? One word my alpine amigos: learn.

If you're reading and this thinking "hey, that sounds like me" and you happen to be in Queenstown*, then a great way to get started is taking place on Thursday the 27th of August at the World Bar (yes… before you ask… you are allowed to drink beer at the same time), with the screening of the mould-breaking avalanche movie The Fine Line.

Event Director, Sophie Kennedy from AdventureSkope, who was one of the first on the scene at the recent avalanche that killed Ryan Campbell, says what she saw that afternoon inspired her to organise the screening.

“Although we weren't able to save Ryan, I hope that by screening this movie and increasing avalanche awareness in Queenstown, we might be able to prevent situations like this happening in the future.”

“If you have any interest in avalanches, snow sports, backcountry access or simply exquisite cinematography you should see this film. You just never know, someone's life might depend on it some day," she said.

The film’s cutting-edge cinematography which includes wire-cam, time-lapse, animation – and even a claymation cameo – has seen it win a swag of international awards including "Best at Festival" at the 2009 Fernie Mountain Film Festival, “Best Director” as the X-Dance film festival and "Absolute Winner - King of Films" at the 2009 Livigno Film Festival in Italy. Check this out to whet your appetite (or click here):



Doors open at the World Bar, Queenstown at 6.30pm with the film starting at 7.00pm. Tickets are $10 with all proceeds going to Search & Rescue. House drinks are $4 and entry to the spot prize draw is included.

If you’re a skier or boarder, and you’ve ever found yourself gazing wistfully at the untracked powder beyond the ski area boundaries, then $10 for a ticket – available at the door - could well be the best money you’ve ever spent.

*If you're not in the neighbourhood, then get on a plane... but seriously, if you visit Rocky Mountain Sherpas you can buy the DVD, or maybe track down a screening near you.

Lost and found

Rediscovering the art of tracking.

After several years’ procrastination I’ve finally taken the plunge and become involved with New Zealand Land Search and Rescue, the first step of which is getting educated in the ways of SAR with introduction to tracking course.

I have to say my understanding of the subject was until recently, limited to B-grade TV shows where the ‘Indian’ tracker would point down at muddy footprints and say, “Two men went this way, Kimosabe”. Needless to say in real life it’s a bit subtler than that.

In fact, tracking in the SAR context is really about tuning in to the environment, getting intimate – down and dirty - with the land, then looking for something out of place; a turned leaf, a broken twig, a straight line that looks man-made.

It sounds like a ‘needle in a haystack’ exercise – and often it is. If it takes twelve hours to find out someone’s missing, and they’re walking at two kilometres per hour, then you have about 5500 square kilometres to search.

But it’s not all bad. The good news is that as you wander through the bush, especially thick bush, you leave about three thousand footprints per kilometre, from which a trained tracker should be able to extract about five or six ‘signs’ each.

Then there’s above the floor evidence like broken branches, and disturbed dewdrops, ‘top sign’ as it’s known, plus information gleaned from huts, toilets, cars, witnesses, and the person’s family and friends.

When you add in the statistical information known about the behaviour of different groups of people when lost (that’s another course in itself) plus some high-tech gadgetry like helicopters with thermal imaging capability - then you really start to stack the odds back in favour of finding them.

There’s no guarantees they’ll be able to thank you when you get to them – but at the very least you’ll be giving the person’s friends and family a bit of closure, rather than leaving them with a question mark.

NZLSAR’s Trail and Clue Awareness course is a two-day crash course in a subject people devote their lives to, so it’s pretty safe to say I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Even so it’s surprising how quickly you get the knack of it. On Friday night I couldn’t track down someone unless they’d walked through wet concrete, by Sunday afternoon I could do it - not well - but I could slowly but surely follow a person through the bush by the signs they inadvertently left behind. And that’s an amazing thing for a slow learner like me!

Which led me to thinking; it’s only in the last thousand years or so that we’ve been ‘civilised’ to the extent that we haven’t had to do this for a living. For a few million years or so prior to that the ability to track is what kept us alive.

Perhaps like just walking, talking and having sex, this is something that, through evolution and natural selection, has been hard-wired into our brains. Perhaps doing a course like this isn’t so much about learning, as remembering what we instinctively know.

I suppose that might also explain my tendency to stray from human tracks onto deer tracks over the weekend - it must have been my inner caveman saying, “never mind the lost bloke, what about lunch!”