The death of 15-year-old Nick Delaney in the Blue Mountains is a reminder that in the bush, even with experience and preparation, things can go tragically wrong. But even official safety advice needs cross-checking.
Until fixed yesterday, descriptions of some bushwalks on the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW) website were wrong, downgrading their degree of difficulty. As regular bushwalker Richard Chirgwin told Crikey, that’s a potential safety risk.
Wentworth Pass, for example. The 2006 website of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) described it as a “difficult” walk of five hours. DECCW had it listed as a “medium difficulty” walk of four hours.
A real howler, said Chirgwin, was the walk from Perry’s Lookdown to Blue Gum Forest. A “difficult” walk of five hours, DECWW had it as “medium difficulty” and just three hours.
The three-hour target is not just unrealistic, but downright dangerous for anyone but the most hardened bushwalker, Chirgwin said.
“To get from Perry’s Lookdown to the Blue Gum Forest is a climb, on steps but very steep ones — other walks describe the same kind of steps as ‘ladders’ — of more than 600 metres, about twice the Giant Stairway, after which you descend quite a bit further into the actual forest itself.
“I’ve seen 20-somethings looking very ill because they tried to take it too fast … Real heart-attack material … If someone reading the description set out at, say, 4pm expecting to be home before dark … the mind boggles,” he said.
The descriptions of these bushwalks are among 24 that DECCW has outsourced to Wildwalks, an online bushwalking guidebook run by “people who are passionate about the outdoors”.
A DECCW spokesperson told Crikey that high quality, accurate information on bushwalks can help introduce a wider audience to walking in parks.
While Wildwalks is aimed at the beginner — their 2008 pitch notes that “If we genuinely want people to go walking we need to make it easy for them, maybe as easy as finding the local fast food shop” — there was no attempt to make the walks look easier. Nor was it hardened bushwalkers forgetting that not everyone is as fit.
It was a cock-up.
As the DECCW spokesperson put it, “There was a migration error that led to some ‘difficult’ walks, such as Wentworth Pass, appearing as ‘medium’ on the NPWS website. This has now been rectified.
“Wildwalks uses the Australian Standard AS 2156.1-2001 Walking Tracks Classification and Signage standard to rate the walk difficulties. This creates a consistent method of classification,” they said.
“It was a definite oops,” Wildwalk’s Matt McClelland told Crikey. “Walks are checked regularly and, where necessary, re-rated by trained staff and volunteers.
“The description on the [NPWS] website is just a brief summary of the walk. It’s not really intended for people to walk off,” said McClelland.
“If people click on the link and come through to Wildwalks, then the information [on those walks] has always been the grade four, the grade ‘hard’. There’s a link just below it which says ‘go and get a map here’.”
Wildwalks welcomes feedback to refine their website, and in this case the problem was fixed promptly.
“An advantage of their online system is that revisions can be quickly made with none of the turnaround issues faced by printed walk guides,” DECCW said.
“We also strongly advise walkers to put safety first, and if they are attempting a walk for the first time that they talk to someone who has been on the walk before, or contact the local NPWS office.”
NPWS and Wildwalks recommend carrying topographic maps for the area, and a compass or GPS, and know how to use them. They also recommend carrying a personal locator beacon (PLB), available for hire from bushwalking and outdoor shops, or borrowed from police stations and National Parks offices in the Blue Mountains and Kosciusko areas.
Oh man, is this nanny state stuff? A walk on a track. Use your map, and a compass. Take water. Tell someone. Make enough time. Don’t go alone. Matches. Did I mention lighter! Looks like Xbox might be replacing boyhood camping trips.
The mystery is half the fun (though getting lost on Kokoda was a worry, but even that was fun).
……………………
As for the 15 year old’s death, damn, that’s real bad luck. Rock collapse? Damn. Easy to wonder about rainfall in hindsight. Condolences.
Seriously such awful coincidence can happen in the urban jungle too. It’s a harsh reality that death is a part of life, though this is not really the time granted …
Even if you cross-checked with another track description, how would you know which was correct if you hadn’t walked it before? And there’s not much an accurate track description can do to prevent a rockfall killing you.
There’s no way a GPS would get a signal in Wollongambe gorge and many spots a PLB wouldn’t get a signal out either. Very hard to do compass navigation in a gorge since line-of-sight is limited and you need a good distance to get an accurate bearing. Unless the gorge makes several big turns >15 degrees all a topo map would tell you is what you already know: you are at the bottom of a very steep-sided gorge.
Go with someone who knows the route, and do what they tell you to.
Hmmm… Perry’s Lookdown TO Blue Gum Forest would be nowhere near 4 hours even for Joe Hockey carrying a pregnant cow. I assume this figure incorporates the return?
Yeah, I’d say 2hrs max for fit young people.
Correction: Walk descriptions are not re-rated by Wildwalks’ “trained staff and volunteers”. Wildwalks does not use volunteers at all, and doesn’t intend to. Input is welcome from any walker, but the actual rating is done by Wildwalks staff who receive training in how to apply the relevant Australian Standard.
@Tom McLoughlin: I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call this “nanny state” stuff. It’s pretty easy for a city slicker to get themselves in trouble real fast. But I get where you’re coming from.
As a kid our local scoutmaster dumped a bunch of us 14-year-olds on a random dirt track in the Barossa Valley at night with a map but no compass, telling us that he’d be waiting at the pub in Lyndoch until midnight and after that we were on our own. We’d been taught to navigate by the stars, we knew how to gather food and water, and we were fine. But I daresay anyone trying that today would be in deep shit.