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Mt Cook Accidents 17-Feb-2004 At 9:44:45 AM vwills

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Just got back from NZ. The rescues seemed to keep coming. Apparently people had to be rescued off Mt Avalanche when they got benighted around the 9th or 10th Feb. That was a fairly cold night with snow but the conditions were not dreadful. It sounds to me like a lot of people are heading out without proper experience or gear for when things don't go quite according to plan.
There was lots of rain late Jan/ early Feb but I finally got 4 days of sunshine in Mt Cook village, the winds were just gusting>100kph instead! Good reconnaisance for next season though.
I also heard about the Indonesians who were doing crazy things like roping up to head down from Mueller Hut. It brings to mind an incident recently revisited in Climber where the NZ primeminister at the time (Piggy Muldoon) intervened to "rescue" a team of mute ?Japanese climbers out of the Mt Cook region before they could attempt the climb. It raised a lot of interesting issues about autonomy and rights in the mountains.