Bushwalking: cross-check everything, even official advice
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The death of 15-year-old Nick Delaney in the Blue Mountains is a reminder that in the bush, even with experience and preparation, things can go tragically wrong. But even official safety advice needs cross-checking. Until fixed yesterday, descriptions of some bushwalks on the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW) website were wrong, downgrading their degree of difficulty. As regular bushwalker Richard Chirgwin told Crikey, that’s a potential safety risk. Wentworth Pass, for example. The 2006 website of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) described it as a “difficult” walk of five hours. DECCW had it listed as a “medium difficulty” walk of four hours. A real howler, said Chirgwin, was the walk from Perry’s Lookdown to Blue Gum Forest. A “difficult” walk of five hours, DECWW had it as “medium difficulty” and just three hours. The three-hour target is not just unrealistic, but downright dangerous for anyone but the most hardened bushwalker, Chirgwin said. “To get from Perry’s Lookdown to the Blue Gum Forest is a climb, on steps but very steep ones — other walks describe the same kind of steps as ‘ladders’ — of more than 600 metres, about twice the Giant Stairway, after which you descend quite a bit further into the actual forest itself. “I’ve seen 20-somethings looking very ill because they tried to take it too fast … Real heart-attack material … If someone reading the description set out at, say, 4pm expecting to be home before dark … the mind boggles,” he said. The descriptions of these bushwalks are among 24 that DECCW has outsourced to Wildwalks, an online bushwalking guidebook run by “people who are passionate about the outdoors”. A DECCW spokesperson told Crikey that high quality, accurate information on bushwalks can help introduce a wider audience to walking in parks. While Wildwalks is aimed at the beginner — their 2008 pitch notes that “If we genuinely want people to go walking we need to make it easy for them, maybe as easy as finding the local fast food shop” — there was no attempt to make the walks look easier. Nor was it hardened bushwalkers forgetting that not everyone is as fit. It was a cock-up. As the DECCW spokesperson put it, “There was a migration error that led to some ‘difficult’ walks, such as Wentworth Pass, appearing as ‘medium’ on the NPWS website. This has now been rectified. “Wildwalks uses the Australian Standard AS 2156.1-2001 Walking Tracks Classification and Signage standard to rate the walk difficulties. This creates a consistent method of classification,” they said. “It was a definite oops,” Wildwalk’s Matt McClelland told Crikey. “Walks are checked regularly and, where necessary, re-rated by trained staff and volunteers. “The description on the [NPWS] website is just a brief summary of the walk. It’s not really intended for people to walk off,” said McClelland. “If people click on the link and come through to Wildwalks, then the information [on those walks] has always been the grade four, the grade ‘hard’. There’s a link just below it which says ‘go and get a map here’.” Wildwalks welcomes feedback to refine their website, and in this case the problem was fixed promptly. “An advantage of their online system is that revisions can be quickly made with none of the turnaround issues faced by printed walk guides,” DECCW said. “We also strongly advise walkers to put safety first, and if they are attempting a walk for the first time that they talk to someone who has been on the walk before, or contact the local NPWS office.” NPWS and Wildwalks recommend carrying topographic maps for the area, and a compass or GPS, and know how to use them. They also recommend carrying a personal locator beacon (PLB), available for hire from bushwalking and outdoor shops, or borrowed from police stations and National Parks offices in the Blue Mountains and Kosciusko areas. |
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10 Comments
Oh man, is this nanny state stuff? A walk on a track. Use your map, and a compass. Take water. Tell someone. Make enough time. Don’t go alone. Matches. Did I mention lighter! Looks like Xbox might be replacing boyhood camping trips.
The mystery is half the fun (though getting lost on Kokoda was a worry, but even that was fun).
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As for the 15 year old’s death, damn, that’s real bad luck. Rock collapse? Damn. Easy to wonder about rainfall in hindsight. Condolences.
Seriously such awful coincidence can happen in the urban jungle too. It’s a harsh reality that death is a part of life, though this is not really the time granted …
Even if you cross-checked with another track description, how would you know which was correct if you hadn’t walked it before? And there’s not much an accurate track description can do to prevent a rockfall killing you.
There’s no way a GPS would get a signal in Wollongambe gorge and many spots a PLB wouldn’t get a signal out either. Very hard to do compass navigation in a gorge since line-of-sight is limited and you need a good distance to get an accurate bearing. Unless the gorge makes several big turns >15 degrees all a topo map would tell you is what you already know: you are at the bottom of a very steep-sided gorge.
Go with someone who knows the route, and do what they tell you to.
Hmmm… Perry’s Lookdown TO Blue Gum Forest would be nowhere near 4 hours even for Joe Hockey carrying a pregnant cow. I assume this figure incorporates the return?
Yeah, I’d say 2hrs max for fit young people.
Correction: Walk descriptions are not re-rated by Wildwalks’ “trained staff and volunteers”. Wildwalks does not use volunteers at all, and doesn’t intend to. Input is welcome from any walker, but the actual rating is done by Wildwalks staff who receive training in how to apply the relevant Australian Standard.
@Tom McLoughlin: I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call this “nanny state” stuff. It’s pretty easy for a city slicker to get themselves in trouble real fast. But I get where you’re coming from.
As a kid our local scoutmaster dumped a bunch of us 14-year-olds on a random dirt track in the Barossa Valley at night with a map but no compass, telling us that he’d be waiting at the pub in Lyndoch until midnight and after that we were on our own. We’d been taught to navigate by the stars, we knew how to gather food and water, and we were fine. But I daresay anyone trying that today would be in deep shit.
Grammar fail. We were the kids, not the scoutmaster.
Tom’s point about Xbox (it was that new fangled flickering box in the corner when I war a yung’un) is surely unarguable.
Physical activity= good health, sedentary lifestyle= compoundingly poor health. Esp for children - who gives a rat’s about already lost adults?
Fatties at school in the 50s were rare and I never saw one as obese as now seems to be the norm. Little chance that they are going to be fit enough to work to fund my pension in the future.
Got very mixed feelings about this. If a wrong track description and time is the difference between life and death then Darwin’s been following you for a while.
Had long discussions about this with my rock climbing comrades. General consensus is that in the end, all you can take responsibility for is your own safety. Putting the onus on the track describers/descriptions misses the point.
I have personally found track descriptions to be VERY conservative. I’ve done 4 hour walks in under an hour without breaking a sweat!
@Evan Beaver: I think I actually want those track descriptions to be very conservative. I’d much rather a newcomer to bushwalking feel a sense of achievement from beating the suggested time — or merely taking time to look at the birds and flowers, and therefore be encourage to try it again — rather that being discouraged from failing to meet the times suggested for fit young people.
Not to mention Richard Chirgwin’s point about setting out too close to nightfall…
Stil: Agree city folks aren’t trained up from young age. Worth a reminder - no doubt. Am showing my country upbringing again. Forget what you learned (in boy scouts too).
Interestingly at ANU they had a similar orienteering challenge called Inward Bound - probably gone the way of most insurance risks. Dumped at night, in a radius up to 100km depending on level of hardship. Compass and any maps you can carry. Figure it out. Look for power lines. Roads, compass angles. Rained on my last one in the hardest class. Campfire saved the situation, set in the damp.
Did I say matches! Lighter!
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Again condolences. All this talk is nothing to the business of profound grief for the family, granted, while making time for living.
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I did the Tuross River in remote Deua Wilderness say 20 years back. Camp first night. A rock fell from a cliff into the pool say 20 metres away next to our camp for 2. Goats? It was dry weather. Loud enough to cause real injury would be my guess too. Damn bad luck.