A mother and daughter got lost on a day hike in New Zealand. Pretty spiky terrain by the sounds of it. They got lost, pressed on into rough country, got injured and wet and hypothermic, and no-one knew they were missing. Fortunately, SAR got to them in time.

Seems like a classic cascade of small errors building into a dangerous situation. The story includes lots of details, some of which may induce a facepalm or three. Still, they beat the odds.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/...rrifying-ordeal

The most challenging situation facing SAR is "They have been missing for some time - not sure where." The more defined the search area, the better, especially if a speedy, positive outcome is desired. They were very fortunate and placing a signal worked once again!

Despite bad luck and many avoidable errors they still survived! I guess that's good luck. Survival is graded pass/fail so I guess that's a win.

Thanks to years on ETS, I will never even walk down my block so unprepared.

Kudos to the helicopter pilot.



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They seemed to have made a lot of poor decisions (following the stream and spelling out "help" was not bad though). I look at this and I shake my head, "what a pair of unprepared and ignorant folks". But there was a time when I might have been so ignorant myself. It's good that they survived. Nobody deserves to die for their ignorance and poor decisions, they just need to be educated.

I am working on a theory that outside of mountain climbers, day hikers are those most often in need of rescue.

Your theory is not quite correct. While hikers are indeed one of the leading causes of SAR incidents, climbers are quite far down the list. Some of the best hard data I'm aware of comes out of Oregon. See: statistical Data for Oregon on the Oregon OEM site.

If you open Accumulated SAR Data 1997 to 2013, you will find an interesting graph on page 34. There you will see that the largest number of incidents are for "Hiking", followed closely by "Motor Vehicle", "Wandering", and "Hunting game". You have to go down to number 7 to find "Climbing", with "Mushroom picker" close behind.

The reason climbing is often perceived as a major source of SAR incidents is that climbing incidents tend to make better, more exciting, and more photogenic media stories. A story about helicopters plucking a climber off of a tiny ledge tends to get way more media coverage than a story about searchers slogging through the brush in the rain looking for a hunter who couldn't find his way back to camp. But the truth is that while climbing rescues can be spectacular stories, they actually make up a surprisingly small percentage of SAR activity.

My experience accords with AKSAR's data and references, although you need to define "climber" with some precision. I can count on one hand the number of "climber involved in SAR operations - against over at least two hundred involving hikers or picnickers, etc.

All too often a hiker wanders into technical terrain, but lacks the equipment and training to cope with the situation. Example: A graduate student had just aced his PhD oral exam (the last significant hurdle between him and the degree). He went for a hike that afternoon, following an increasingly vague trail until he was in highly exposed terrain, whereupon he slipped and fell 300 feet to his death. Very nasty recovery operation....

One of our most dependable groups, in terms of generating rescue operations, were picnickers who over imbibed, all too often then wandering off steep cliffs.

The most technical peak in our area generated exactly one rescue operation in the twenty-nine years I was in Southern Arizona. if SAR were to depend upon climbers for action, our group would have disbanded out of sheer boredom.

Ditto on AKSAR's and hikermor's observations regarding climbers. Climbing SAR assets have noted that accidents reported by the media as involving "climbers" are often actually dayhikers or scramblers who have wandered into terrain that is too technical for them. But they're often not truly 5th class or alpine climbers.

Good points and thanks for the info. ( in hindsight, mountain climbers are often better equipped and can self rescue)