SAR
Sharon Brettkelly of RNZ’s The Detail broadcast a nice piece, ‘Our search and rescue heroes’, on 5 February 2024. Google will help you find and listen to it, and you should. I’m always impressed with Sharon’s ability to grasp the fundamentals of difficult subjects extraordinarily quickly, but that is by the by. Of course, the thorny topic of ‘who pays for rescues’ came up. I couldn’t help thinking of Tim Hartford’s (The Undercover Economist) observation that the success society has at making life safer merely encourages us to take bigger risks, which is why we keep having car crashes, stockmarket crashes and other catastrophes.
Perhaps, he suggests, implementing ways to self-inflict personal injury to those who cause problems could minimise the fallout to others? By way of example, he postulates that instead of mandatory seatbelts in cars, the steering wheel should have a spike sticking out of it, ready to pierce the driver’s heart in an accident. Doing so, he contends, would make drivers very cautious, rid us of car accidents and make seatbelts redundant. Perhaps there are a few ways this approach could be adopted in the outdoors?
Windchill
Have you every wondered why the engineers who design air hand-dryers can’t get their machines to start with blowing hot air on your hands instead of cold air that only slowly heats up? A little experiment you may care to try is to put your hands in the airflow while they are dry. I am confident you will find that the initial airflow won’t feel cold. The difference you feel between putting dry and wet hands under the strong, warm airflow is largely due to the latent heat of evaporation as the water evaporates.
Trampers call this windchill, though technically that is not strictly accurate. The good news about skin is that it soon dries out, eventually leaving no water to evaporate and so your hands warm up once the water has gone. Wet clothes, on the other hand, have a reservoir of water to evaporate. Cotton is extremely good at holding water, taking ages to dry out, which is why you don’t want to wear wet cotton on a windy day.
There is also another effect going on with our hand-dryer: transferring heat from the air to a surface (or vice versa) is up to ten times more effective for very fast-moving air than still air. This is why you blow on your hands to warm them up, and you blow on your porridge to cool it down, and why strong winds on cold days are not to be taken lightly, being true windchill.
Bothy Bags
You heard it here first, in an UJCC in a time before my current hard disk had memory: David Samson had described in UJCC how he carried a bothy bag when he was an outdoor instructor in the UK. A bothy bag is a lightweight nylon bag that the whole party can climb into in an emergency, where it forms an effective safety shelter. Being inside the bothy bag reduces the surface area exposed to the wind and so minimises windchill, and the fug that forms inside from everyone’s exhaled breath helps keep everyone warm. I don’t believe they are very comfortable, but if you need one it will be much better than being outside, where it will be rather less comfortable. I note they are now gaining some popularity in New Zealand and your club may like to contemplate purchasing one.
Hammocks
I have some second cousins out of Wānaka who get into Fiordland every Roar. Unlike most trampers, hunters prefer to return regularly to the same place to hunt because they like to know every tree and hollow and, perhaps, get to know every deer in the valley by its first name. Hunters see the landscape quite differently to trampers. Consequently, because they go there each Roar, my cousins know the Florence River better than me by a long shot (and if the bottom reaches are a bit boggy, the upper sections and the route out over Tamatea Peak to Lake Roe Hut are beautiful, so they are onto a good thing – just don’t go there in the Roar!).
Ben tells me that he has given up on sleeping mats that become waterbeds under the right conditions, and for the last few seasons has used a hammock to sleep in. Modern outdoor hammocks are lightweight and have a fly arrangement over the top to keep you dry. Ben says you do need a bit of extra insulation under your back and that they are not comfortable when sleeping on your side. Obviously they won’t work above the bushline, but you may like to investigate them for other places.
Girls Can Do Anything
I had a smart female engineering student working for me over the summer vacation. When we were setting up some test instruments, I noticed that she seemed unfamiliar with tightening some connectors and that she was diffident with the test instruments. Being a bloke, I was, of course, ready to dive in and do it myself, while at the same time magnanimously showing her how to do it.
Being married to a strong feminist instead gave me pause to ask her if the blokes in her university lab groups had always elbowed their way in – probably in the nicest possible way – to show her how to do these things rather than letting her struggle through and learn by doing it herself. I would guess every woman reading this column knows the answer! Her eventual solution had been to work in all-girl lab groups where they all (initially) muddled through together to get to grips with the technology. That’s an okay short-term solution, but given that there are a lot more men than women in engineering, it’s not a sustainable one, and so we discussed other strategies she may think of adopting.
Louise is also a very capable tramper and commented that she found blokes in the Hills were prone to the same behaviour, again with every best intention. So here’s a message to the blokes reading this column: people learn by doing, not watching. Girls can do anything (as the 1980s feminist slogan ran), but just like everyone else, they need to get a chance to do fire-lighting or whatever and keep on doing it until they get good at it. Fire-lighting is not a spectator sport, so don’t hover over the firelighter offering helpful advice – go and get some firewood! I need to add that I asked Louise if I could mention her experience here in this context and she said she hoped it would help the cause.
Another Cool Map
I have had a bit of fun visiting the Ngāi Tahu Cultural Mapping Project website, Kā Huru Manu, which is dedicated to recording and mapping traditional Māori placenames and associated histories in the Ngāi Tahu rohe (tribal area). You can jump straight to the maps at www.kahurumanu.co.nz/atlas, but you would miss a lot of interesting stuff by not looking around the rest of the site. On the whole I find I am becoming increasingly supportive of the often poetic Māori names of our places. A case in point is Piopiotahi for Milford Sound – say both names aloud to hear what I mean, and piopio is quite descriptive in a poetic way. But I struggle with Tititea Mt Aspiring, where I find the Māori name musical and the Pākehā name eponymous, so I’ll stick to a dual place name for there, please!
The maps also show old Māori access routes. My favourite rises up the Blue River near Makarora, crosses Māori Saddle and descends the Okuru River to the West Coast. I inadvertently sandbagged the late Arnold Heine with Māori Saddle by telling him it was straightforward. When he returned to tell me that it wasn’t and indeed was quite steep in places, my memory was jogged and a few genuinely forgotten desperate moments flashed incoherently behind my eyes. I’m impressed that Māori went up there, but I suspect it was a lot faster than going through the Gates of Haast back in the day. Regardless, some of the routes shown on the map should inspire modern-day trampers.
Ka kite,
Robin McNeill
r.mcneill@ieee.org
This article was re-published from the March 2024 issue of FMC’s Backcountry magazine. To subscribe to the print version, please visit www.fmc.org.nz/
