too bad but bad decisions in the mountains often lead to bad results just like this.
The reality is that most of our hiking and outdoor adventuring, even in the Whites, pales in comparison to the risks of high altitude mountaineering, but I always keep in mind a quote from noted mountaineer Ed Viesturs, who turned around 300 feet from Everest's summit on his first attempt, "Getting to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory." A short read on the decision making subject for those interested http://www.slate.com/content/slate/b..._mistakes.html
"That's the thing about possum innards - they's just as good the second day." - Jed Clampett
Very interesting, and the principles are applicable to many of the dicey situations a less adventurous hiker might encounter: crossing a rushing creek, hurrying over an exposed mountaintop as thunderclouds approach, navigating a narrow path beside a steep slope.Originally Posted by 4eyedbuzzard
double post
A good read, everyone should read this.
I was on a trip last May where a group of us were doing the Lowest to Highest ending with the summit of Whitney. At the top of the chute there is one final climb. The other three hikers were able to get up and over the summit but as I looked at the risk I pulled the plug and returned via a very long glissade back down the chute. I have second guessed that decision ever since. But falling on the icy, scree cover slope would have resulted in a thousand foot fall. logic tells me I made the right call but that little voice keeps questioning it. The other three made it, certainly I would have as well.
We have a saying in the hang gliding community... "there are old pilots and there are bold pilots...but there aint no old bold pilots".
Whitney isn't going anywhere and you didn't end up the topic of discussion on a Whiteblaze thread about the dead guy that should have turned back. It wasn't a bad call.
I had a tough winter backpacking trip in January 2011 which can be found here---
http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=335847
On the trip I took out Ed Viesturs's book No Short Cuts To The Top, and while sitting thru blizzards I wrote out some neat Ed quotes:
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"What's another ten pounds when you're in great shape?" Ed Viesturs(as a Ranier mountain guide with RMI).
MORE QUOTES OF THE DAY
"It doesn't matter how good you are --- in the mountains just when you think you're in control you aren't." VIESTURS
"Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean the mountains love you." Lou Whittaker.
ANOTHER GOOD QUOTE
"Another firm which I had a long-standing informal relationship was Seattle-based Outdoor Research, a maker of technical gloves, mittens, gaiters, and overboots. The products were superbly made --- which is one of the reasons I still have all of my fingers and toes." ED VIESTURS.
AM I THE ED VIESTURS OF SOUTHEAST BACKPACKING?
He is known for his safe climbs and knowing when to stop and pull back when things get hairy. If you look at my last two trips you'll see some of the same behaviors. Knowing when to stop and retreat is his trademark and he has controlled his summit fevers. So too a winter backpacker in the Citico/Slickrock needs to know when to sit out a storm or when to leave the high ground. These decisions don't mean the trip is finished and you go home, and on long three week(or three month)trips you can't rightly bite off more than you can chew and then bail to the car and go home.
Weekend snippet backpackers can park on a Friday in their Range Rovers or four wheel Jeeps at Carvers Gap near Roan Mt or at Massie Gap in Grayson Highlands and pull a tremendous snowshoed winter trip and be out by Sunday with just a couple nights of "hell". When you're dropped off for an 18 day trip and get dumped on by a series of winter storms, it's okay to get into a Viesturs mindset of "safety first" and know how to hunker down for eight days in a nonstop blizzard.
A younger guy with a lighter pack on a shorter trip could posthole for three days and not think twice although his 15 mile days will have to be reduced. So, this gets me thinking about backpackers on the AT this week and how they are faring. Poorly, I bet.
Sadly ironic that Kate Matrosova read and reviewed this book on Goodreads in 2013:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/678093039
Wow, that's a little macabre.
While we are awaiting more information about this tragic accident, there is already one lesson that can be learned from this story: people who think that a helicopter will arrive half an hour after activating distress call from their PLB should rid themselves of this delusion, and the sooner the better.
Even if a helicopter arrives it is not certain that they will be able to pick up the caller - I highly recommend this winter rescue story on Rosalie Peak in Colorado: http://www.summitpost.org/rescue-on-...19-2011/701157
I do most of my hiking alone and I often go off trail, so I started thinking about getting a PLB about two years ago as I was descending on Boott Spur trail quite late in the day, it started raining, rocks became pretty slippery and I arrived at the ladder. I looked down and thought to myself that if I fell from the top and became disabled my family wouldn't even know where to look for me. Eventually I decided to get a Spot last summer ahead of a week-long backpacking trip in Kings Canyon National Park in California. My choice was driven primarily by tracking mode as 1) I wanted my family to know approximately where I was, 2) I wanted to transmit my location in case I got badly hurt and wouldn't be able to to activate a distress signal, and 3) it would give me an opportunity to test the device accuracy in a variety of conditions myself without relying on manufacturer's marketing hype.
So how accurate is my Spot? It surely matters given the reports that Kate's location transmitted by her PLB were all over the map (which is what I mean by reported "1 mile radius" in this terrain.) Maybe the rescuers could reach her on Sunday if they were certain where she was? Well, after using my Spot for over half a year, I think it is mostly fine i.e. within 50 feet of traces recorded with my Garmin eTrex 30, but there were times where it was so far off that it became a subject of jokes among my family like one time I "hiked" 6.3 miles in 10 minutes or there was a sudden 0.6 mile "side-jump" from the trail. See example below: first is the original screen shot from Spot web site and then comparison to my Garmin traces (in red):
Spot failing to get a fix.jpg
Spot in yellow Garmin in red.jpg
I tried to get Spot support to investigate these problems with fixes but it wasn't going too well and I pretty much gave up after exchanging a couple of e-mails with them without much progress. I also think there are other issues such as the fact that the transmissions sometimes don't go through for quite some time and the unit will automatically shut off 1 hour after it stops detecting motion, so if you get disabled your last location may never make it through. Despite all of its limitations I think I will renew my subscription when the time comes as I don't see other viable alternatives for me.
Bottom line is that I think I am still very much on my own when hiking solo and my chances of survival are maybe only slightly higher if I found myself in a life-threatening situation.
Globe has an interesting article today:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...j7K/story.html
So, at the end of day, it comes down to hubris. A modern Greek tragedy.
This article certainly tells us a lot. There is going to be a lot more debate going around as to the safety aspects of these SPOT/locator/GPS devices and the technology involved.
It looks to me like this has turned out to be a case of not turning back soon enough after underestimating her ability (assuming she know of the conditions).
RIP and thanks to all SAR
This post raises a lot of excellent points. Carrying any type of personal locater is not a panacea - the crisis is not over with a press of the SOS button. Its also important to know your equipment capabilities and limitations - especially with safety gear.
I also do a lot of solo hikes and picked up a SPOT Gen 3 at the beginning of last season. I'm experienced with GPS technology - I use handheld and survey-grade GPS units recreationally and professionally and find the occasional wildly erroneous points show up in $100 Garmin to the $10K Trimbles (admittedly much less with the higher end units). There is a lot that goes into getting an accurate GPS point - some you can control and a some that you simply can't. Things you can control include starting with a decent GPS receiver, orienting the antenna properly, and minding the sky cover. Other things out out one's control included topography blocking line of sight to satellites and GPS satellite constellation status (geometry of the array at a particular time, number of working satellites overhead).
Looking at your images, it looks like your SPOT is actually doing pretty well. I do think your second image could easily be misinterpreted, though. What's important in that image is where the SPOT points fall on the Garmin track, not the SPOT track itself. Ignore the yellow line and look at the actual points. A comparison of the tracks to each other is not meaningful due to the difference in resolution - the SPOT tracking interval was 10 minutes and the Garmin was much less. It looks like there are about 15 points in the SPOT track and maybe two or three are way off. That's about an 87% or better agreement, so its not all that bad. It's similar to what I've been seeing in hilly terrain over the last year when comparing my SPOT Gen 3 to my Garmin GPSmap 60csx. The goal is to have good data when you need to press the SOS button.
I try to do this in a couple of ways. First, I pay attention to how the SPOT is attached to my pack since I've found that the SPOT antenna to be more directional than my handheld Garmin. I usually clip the SPOT to the carry handle and tuck the SPOT in the top pocket of the pack, taking care to orient the antenna surface up and not to put anything between the SPOT and the pack material. When I've just clipped it to my pack, I found it winds up upside down or hanging off to the side and the data quality is pretty bad. The second thing I did was to buy the enhanced tracking for $50/year and set my tracking to 2.5 or 5 minute intervals to get a higher resolution track log. I also set up the SPOT shared web page to display my track. I make the page private and give the login info to my emergency contact at home. That provides a track to augment the single point that gets transmitted with an SOS in the event of an emergency. I also like having a higher resolution when I download the points from the SPOT website.
Getting out of the SPOT-specific weeds here, the takeaway is the importance of understanding i) the use, capabilities, and limitations of one's gear; and ii) that no gear can replace common sense.
Last edited by Offshore; 02-22-2015 at 09:48.
IMHO - I don't think it wise to ever depend on someone else to rescue you.
My question is: what did she have in her pack?
My dad drilled into my head starting at age 7, "Bring water, food and some type of provisions to spend the night out - in case your day hike turns into an overnighter". I remember wondering if he was being too safe, but then again he spent literally months in the field in cold weather at the bottom of Mt Fuji and other locales around the world. So, I never questioned his rationale and to this day I have provisions to spend the night if I need to, God Forbid.
Even if it's just an emergency blanket and rain gear during a summer hike. We've all seen warm sunny weather deteriorate to cold soaking rain in the mts in a matter of minutes.
What I don't get about her plan; if everything went perfectly she would arrive back at 6pm and that is a LATE hour. Things can always go South and at 6pm the sun is setting and temps drop even more - so she didn't have any means to dig in? No provisions? I can't wrap my brain around that.
According to the Globe article, her GPS tracker shows her going up Madison, then Adams, then trying to retrace her tracks back. If she had known the mountain better and the wind was still coming out of the NE, she would have been better off heading towards Thunderstorm Junction and down the Spur trail, which gets you out of the wind fairly quickly and towards some cabins, one of which has a wood stove and help.
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If everything had gone perfectly, she still would have been lucky to make it back down by midnight. The distance isn't far, about 12 miles, but the going is very, very slow. Apparently she did have a snow shovel with her, but didn't have the right place or opportunity to use it.
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Thunderstorm Junction is on the saddle area between Mt. Sam Adams and Mt. Adams. One would expect a wind velocity from the NE to be amplified there (Venturi effect) given the orientation. It would appear that her route back was better shielded from the NE wind at first.
The Globe article certainly adds to the picture. I am amazed that after summiting Madison she went on summit Adams. She certainly knew what the conditions were by the time she summited Madison. It also sounds like she took time for a selfie at Madison Hut too. Perhaps she still hadn't realized the danger she was in, but clearly she was mistakenly bold to push on to Adams. Perhaps hypothermia was already clouding her decision making.
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