TERRAIN TRAP
Outside, the spring wind was keen but it was inside where I felt a real chill.
Bevan Smith had pinned several stories and coroners’ reports on the walls of Relax Shelter. Some of them made for harrowing reading. A young man and his mother, caught in snow at the head of Speargrass Creek. The mother collapsing from exhaustion and the son forging on to Angelus Hut for help. He arrived in the dark, in deteriorating weather. Any rescue that could be organised for his mother was by then too late.
Young tourists, unprepared for New Zealand mountain conditions, are lured by the broad easy ridge to keep going, not knowing how far there was to go, how much higher the ridge gets, how it gradually gets more rugged. Nor may they know how energy gets sapped while fighting that nagging voice that urges you to just keep going. Hypothermia, exhaustion, disorientation and – sometimes – tragedy.
You can’t read these stories without a familiar and discordant note striking: ‘That could have been me.’
In the wrong circumstances, it could have been any of us.
Smith works for
