I was oblivious to this piece of news, but I am sure most of you were aware that recently 3 people had to be rescued off of Mount Hood in Oregon. Fine, they got stuck in bad weather, fell off of a ledge, and were incapable of self-rescue.
But do we really need laws governing mountaineering? I am not objecting to carrying these so-called 'Mountain Locator Units', electronic homing devices that relay your position to anyone listening for it, besides rescuers, I suppose. (The name of the device is misleading; it is not for locating mountains, but rather for locating people who will presumably be on mountains.)
My problem is that people endorsing this bill are probably the same people pushing to have cell phone towers put up in the Adirondacks and Yosemite. There is no need for cell phone towers in state and federal parks. In fact, many people want to go to places like those because there are no cell phone towers.
People need to learn self-sufficiency and self-rescue, not rely on others to come rescue them. Sure, there will be incidents where it is necessary to have outsiders rescue you or your group. But this should be the exception, not the norm.
MLUs and cell phones aren't going to save everyone. I bet more people end up having accidents because they think, "Someone can always come get me." I just have horrible nightmares about families driving cross-country and going to Yellowstone (or Mount Hood in the summer) and bitching to park rangers, "What if something happened to us? Why don't you have cell phone towers everywhere so that we can call 911?" Um, because it's the wilderness?
Why don't we just require everyone who leaves a major metropolitan area to own a $3000 Iridium satellite phone and have a $300/month satellite phone plan? They are the size of regular cell phones, yet you can use them even at the North or South Pole. Let's also require that everyone also carry a GPS and MLU, for redundancy's sake. (Hey, their batteries might run out.) That way everyone will be safe because teams of rescuers will be able to come to their aid at any moment should they stub their toes or slip on ice and bruise their hips.
You do know that about as many people are lost/injured/killed by hiking every year as by climbing, right? Do these legislators know that? No. Climbing is an "extreme sport" so it must account for almost all of the wilderness injuries/deaths. (There is a journal titled "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" which anyone who goes into the woods should be familiar with. Many of the incidents posted are actually hiking incidents, and not what most would consider "mountaineering". If I get the chance I'll run the numbers.)
Certain people should just not be allowed in the wilderness, at all, ever. (This is no reflection of those on Mount Hood, but rather on the families driving through Yellowstone.)
Besides, we have enough laws governing everything anyway. Do we need more? Why not work to make our legislature/judicial system/whatever more efficient? Get rid of laws that are no longer meaningful or unnecessarily burden police/officials/whoever and citizens. Why is efficiency not a priority? Because legislators need job security?
End of rant.
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7 comments:
Check out the Canadian accidents online here. It is interesting reading, and can teach you what not to do. You can sort by activity, year, etc.
I did a quick summary of some of the numbers and found that in Canada, there have been 182 reported mountaineering deaths since 1896, most occurring in the latter half of the 1900's. But, there have been 97 reported hiking deaths since 1967, most in the past 10 years.
The number of injuries for hiking is far far greater than for mountaineering, due to the nature of the activity, i.e. mountaineering accidents are more often fatal.
So who needs more protection from themselves? The mountaineers or the hikers?
If I recall right, the % of people died/injured from climbing Mount Hood, in the past century, is something waaaay less than an nth of a percent. It's something like 6 or 10 have died in the past century, but thousands climb it every year. With that sort of stat, why do anything at all? That seems like everything going hunky dory, to me. No?
But I think your sat-phone idea is good. The burden should be on the risk-takers, not everyone else. You should formulate that into a very to-the-point, polite letter, and snail-mail it to a few senators or congressmen.
haha. dan, if i were to write letters to politicians then i might as well register to vote and take part in democracy. ;)
you should vote! do not take your rights for granted. think of all the poor bastards who have no say in their government. then ignore the fact your vote probably is meaningless and vote anyway.
I am no political scientist, but I often claim that we don't live in a democracy. Rigged election conspiracy theories aside, I would classify our government as a republic, or a democratic republic if you absolutely insist. However, we are certainly not a true democracy by any means.
Also, as far as your rant about why we need to make more laws, et cetera. Here is my recent view: It is because people who are in positions of power within the state and federal governments believe they are entitled (or it is their duty) to have asymptotically increasing oversight over anything and everything in the state/nation because they are vested with the power to do so. Since they have the power, they might as well exercise it right? And in such a way as to allow them to claim responsibility for something like "my program saves lives everyday" to use as ammunition in their next election, or put on their resume, or tell to all their rich and famous friends. It is slightly more complicated that that, but you get the general idea.
I'll jump on your bandwagon Josh...I prefer to think of these kinds of laws as Nanny politics.
Just as bad is the recent NYC discussion on a law allowing for ticketing of NYC pedestrians who wear headphones while crossing the street. Why are we mandating safety requirements to protect stupid people?
I didn't look at the link and I'm not making my comment to disagree with the points you made. But, as to the number of injuries for hiking being far greater than for mountaineering...
I would expect this result based on my assumption that way more people hike than mountaineer. I don't think a statistic showing numbers of injuries provides enough information to determine which activity is more dangerous unless we also know how many people are involved in each activity.
In any event, from the point of view of "dangerous to the most people," yeah, I'm sure hiking is way worse. Stupidly, (in my opinion) however, I think the law makers will focus on the % risk too much and not on what actually presents a danger to the most people (hmmm, perhaps that is what you are saying).
Also, I bet part of the motivation for the proposed law is for the protection of the rescuers, not the mountaineers. If rescuers know where to look, they can spend less time searching. That reduces the danger to themselves. However, your point, about encouraging more people to go on when they shouldn't might counter any effect of shorter rescue times.
I agree. I like having no connection. It made my hike in MASS last year way more relaxing. If the office needed me, I had no way of knowing :)
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