James Osborne & Fred Fredrickson Follow-up Story

[DougPaul]

3. Carry a cell phone

This one could be seen as a personal choice, that often would not help at all.

No single "solution" works all the time. (For instance, Osborne talked about not having fire starting equipment, but I doubt that they would have been able to start and maintain a fire under those conditions.) You have to choose a practical subset of the possible solutions to try to cover as wide a range of problems as possible.

FWIW, a cell phone can sometimes be tracked even if you do not make any calls. (It has to be turned on.) Once someone is searching for you, this tracking may make it easier for searchers to find you.

Don't forget that the most important piece of safety equipment also doubles as a hat rack. It doesn't always work very well either...

Doug

 

[WinterWarlock]

No single "solution" works all the time. (For instance, Osborne talked about not having fire starting equipment, but I doubt that they would have been able to start and maintain a fire under those conditions.)

Doug

That's true enough...in my winter pack I carry an MSR PocketRocket stove and canister. So while a fire may help warm you up, so could a hot beverage/soup/etc

 

[BIGEarl]

Here's a video interview on WMUR...
http://www.wmur.com/news/17482245/detail.html

and just a reminder about the 'wall' of weather that they talk about hitting, here are the conditions that day...
http://public.fotki.com/MWO/saved/2008/conditions/conditions-022008/20080211045318conditions.html

I have a couple observations concerning the WMUR material.

It seems to me the self-serving claim made by WMUR in their opening statement is false.

I believe the audio would have been more helpful without the frequent voice-overs from the uninformed reporter. Why couldn’t they simply allow James Osborne to tell the story? In my view the WMUR reporter added nothing.

Their corporate “Battle Cry” is “Nobody knows New Hampshire like WMUR-TV”. If it were true, I would expect them to know the difference between Franconia Notch and Franconia Ridge. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

 

[Craig]

What struck me as particularly significant.

"The wind by itself, we probably would have been able to make it back. We weren't particularly cold at that point," Osborne said.

"Visibility is really what got us. We had all this blowing snow. We had to talk mouth-to-ear. Fred wanted to try to make it back. I said, with this visibility, I'm not so sure we can make it."

Although not the case here there are other factors, regardless of weather forecast, that can affect your visibility above treeline. Dense, moister laden cloud cover, icing goggles, darkness etc can affect your ability to travel with confidence. If the visibility is so low that you can’t see your feet, or in winter, the ground and air blend together to become one white mass, it becomes difficult to know which way it up or down. You may not be able to see the ground your foot is about to be planted on as you walk.

Low visibility above treeline is very disconcerting. The affect it will have on your ability to move efficiently and accurately should not be underestimated.

 

[Chip]

From the picture of him that day and the description, he was an experienced winter hiker. The picture looks like he was carrying everthing except a sleeping bag.

Playing Monday Morning QB only here with my sympathies to the families: I would have spent more time trying to get below tree line. If they stopped on the ridge and hunkered down at 1:30, they sat still in freezing conditions for probably 15 hours. On the verge of hypothermia, with frozen goggles and spent from looking for their gear would be a nearly impossible way to start the next day.

Question for Doug Paul: How many hours, days and nights, miles etc. on the trail, above tree line or in winter conditions does it take to graduate from "Rookie" status ? Does this have to be recent experience with modern equipment ? Or were you indicating that even experienced hikers can make "Rookie" mistakes ? Thanks. Just curious.

 

[DrewKnight]

What struck me as particularly significant...

...You may not be able to see the ground your foot is about to be planted on as you walk.

There were a lot of us out in the weather when that particular front hit. In my case, it was in the safe environs of a ski area. Even there, it was absolutely stunning how precipitously the visibility dropped. One minute, it was clear. The next minute, I was skiing along the edge of the trail, barely able to see the tips of my skis. Really. The combination of fresh falling snow and snow blowing off the trees enveloped us in white. It was unnerving, especially because I was skiing with my 10-year old. I stopped and we pulled close together and made a "game" of the rest of the run, calling Marco-Polo as we went -- he thought it was fun, mostly, but for me, I wanted to make sure I knew right where he was at all times.

I have seen near white-outs before -- this was a perfect white-out, at times visibility was down to a couple of feet. Though the front and the sudden change were well predicted, that doesn't change the result. If you were out in it, especially above treeline with no good visual reference, you had the potential to be in deep doo-doo.

 

[WinterWarlock]

From the picture of him that day and the description, he was an experienced winter hiker. The picture looks like he was carrying everything except a sleeping bag.

I'm curious about this point - it's easy to say now that carrying a sleeping bag might have been helpful and I know many gear lists mention this, but how many people really do? My winter bag is heavy and big, so I don't carry it. I do carry a thermolite bivy but have been thinking about adding the new Thermarest blanket. I figure the two together ought to be enough to hold out a night, without being too bulky.

Scott

 

[JohnL]

How many hours, days and nights, miles etc. on the trail, above tree line or in winter conditions does it take to graduate from "Rookie" status ? Does this have to be recent experience with modern equipment ? Or were you indicating that even experienced hikers can make "Rookie" mistakes ? Thanks. Just curious.

I’m not so sure you can use milestones such as miles, years, days, nights to make a judgment on when you pass that invisible line from rookie to veteran. Professional guides pass a series of tests and some serve apprenticeships in order to become qualified and age or years of experience don’t really enter into the equation. More experience does not necessarily move you from rookie to expert. If you read enough books and magazines on climbing, you’ll be amazed at how many ‘experts’ have died from making rookie mistakes. On the other hand, there are as many stories of rookies who have made miraculous recoveries and have escaped death by the slimmest of margins, sometimes saving the veterans in the process.

I would say that you need to look at a person’s ‘body of work’, just as you would evaluate a candidate for a job. Twenty years of experience does not necessarily make you a better candidate than a person with ten years of experience. Chances are you’ll learn more from a day of winter hiking in a fierce storm than you would in an entire season of hiking on sunny days. It is not teh amount of experience that is important; it is the quality of the experience.

Then you have the intangibles; heart, willpower and luck. Why do some people die when the person next to him lives? It is difficult or impossible to quantify these sort of qualities that end up saving one life and taking another.

I think someone alluded to it earlier in this thread. There are so many variables and there is so much changing in a situation such as happened to Mssrs Osborne and Fredrickson. You have to be prepared, think ahead, evaluate alternatives, react appropriately. Plan, Do, Check, Act. Repeat.

JohnL

 

[WinterWarlock]

You have to be prepared, think ahead, evaluate alternatives, react appropriately. Plan, Do, Check, Act. Repeat.

JohnL

John - I think the last word on your list is likely the one most overlooked...great reminder.

 

[jniehof]

But, there's a difference between a transitory pocket and a permanent shift.

That snap happened at a rest stop in an exposed location, both being situations where I expect to cool off and grab an extra layer. I'm not sure I would have been able to identify it as a genuine change in the weather--more likely I would have sworn at myself for getting too sweaty and not eating enough to properly regulate my temperature.

It's hard to decipher the sequence, but it sounds like the wind and the whiteout hit at the same time. Were there any time between them, the wind might have been the one completely unambiguous signal that the front was blowing in.

 

[WinterWarlock]

Looking at the weather history w7xman posted really brought home to me the reality of the sudden change...that's a pretty amazing shift in a short time.

 

[DougPaul]

From the picture of him that day and the description, he was an experienced winter hiker. The picture looks like he was carrying everthing except a sleeping bag.

From the newspaper reference, Fredrickson is described as being experienced at winter hiking, but Osborne "had only hiked in winter a few times".

Question for Doug Paul: How many hours, days and nights, miles etc. on the trail, above tree line or in winter conditions does it take to graduate from "Rookie" status ? Does this have to be recent experience with modern equipment ? Or were you indicating that even experienced hikers can make "Rookie" mistakes ? Thanks. Just curious.

I think JohnL has answered most of this. The boundaries between the categories are fuzzy and pragmatically, there are no hard and fast dividing lines.

Mountaineering requires a fusion of a number of skills. Intermediates may have mastered some, but not others. And yes, even experienced mountaineers can do things that others will later judge to be rookie mistakes. Accidents also often involve significant amounts of luck--we tend to judge victims and survivors by the outcome. (Someone who took big risks and survived is often viewed as brave or skillful while someone who took small risks and is hurt or killed is often viewed as being foolish or unskilled and gets castigated on the outdoors BBSes... Yet in reality, the only difference might be that a random rock fell on one instead of landing three feet away.)

Perhaps expert and novice are a better set of terms--one can go out many times in perfect conditions and claim to be experienced, but not be expert due to inadequate knowledge of how to handle bad conditions.

In this particular case, thermal management (not sweating into one's insulation) is a basic skill. Recognizing that a sudden drop in temp with an increase in the wind is likely to be a violent cold front is another. These are what I was calling rookie (novice) errors.

Doug

 

[DougPaul]

... to do no matter what the season:
1. Check the forecast
2. When conditions turn for the worse, abandon the plans and turn back
3. Carry a cell phone

I'm curious about this point - it's easy to say now that carrying a sleeping bag might have been helpful and I know many gear lists mention this, but how many people really do? My winter bag is heavy and big, so I don't carry it. I do carry a thermolite bivy but have been thinking about adding the new Thermarest blanket. I figure the two together ought to be enough to hold out a night, without being too bulky.

etc.

There is a tendency to focus on the latest accident and what one could have done to prevent it and thus what one "should" do to prevent it in the future. In reality the next accident is likely to be different. Yes we should learn what we can from this incident*, but we should also examine a wide range of accidents/incidents and combine the lessons from as many as possible.

* Note that we could learn just as much if both had survived. Ideally, we should be able to learn from any close call, accident or not.

Doug

 

[RoySwkr]

How many hours, days and nights, miles etc. on the trail, above tree line or in winter conditions does it take to graduate from "Rookie" status ?

In job hiring, recruiters say there's a difference between 10 years of experience and 1 year of experience 10 times

A man I know got into bad trouble because to paraphrase Gene Daniell, the guy had winter hiking experience and bushwhacking experience but no winter bushwhacking experience. (That man is fortunately alive and still hiking.) What you need is not necessarily more skills but the correct skills (along with luck and good judgement).

The man who died is said to have had ice climbing experience, which many winter hikers don't, but that skill did him absolutely no good in this situation. Perhaps he was lacking in experience following trails in whiteouts, which the group ahead of them apparently had if they successfully completed the hike - unless they were significantly faster hikers and had made it past Lafayette before these 2 even got to Lincoln.

If Fred had insisted on turning back instead of hunkering down like his buddy suggested, perhaps this would have been a non-event but maybe they would have wandered off the ridge - we'll never know. And often people who hole up sit on their snowshoes for more insulation. Perhaps as the victim suggests they might have made it back safely to the trailhead if they hadn't looked for their snowshoes, but trying to find a trail in a couple feet of fresh snow when you're snowblind is no picnic either and perhaps they would have gotten lost someplace where neither would have been found in time.

 

[Dr. Dasypodidae]

My rescue team's boss turned me onto this book, which might be worth a look:

http://www.deepsurvival.com/

 

[DougPaul]

My rescue team's boss turned me onto this book, which might be worth a look:

http://www.deepsurvival.com/

There have been at least 2 prior threads on this book. The most recent one is
http://www.vftt.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25036

Doug

 

[Little Rickie]

This scares me so bad I'll stop complaining how heavy my day pack is.