Man ties legs together, crawls for help

[Andrew F]

Learning from other accidents is a great way to keep yourself out of trouble. I read Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year when it comes out. That being said, I don't find Eric's re-posts of articles about accidents very useful because news outlets do a bad job of reporting any of the technical details that you could actually learn something from.

Also, two other points about your statistics Eric:
(a) Climbing is inherently a much more dangerous activity – you don't die if you forget to double back your backpack's waistbelt – that it deserves much more focus on safety. Also, climbing accidents can easily be caused by a small technical mistake, whereas to get rescued in a dayhike or backpacking scenario generally requires a bigger screw-up. So you shouldn't expect the same levels of scrutiny of accidents in the hiking community as there is with climbers.
(b) Of course there are more rescues involving day hiking and backpacking – there are many more people who go hiking than rock climbing. And in climbing you have to learn the basics of belaying, etc. before you can do it so a minimum level of instruction is required, whereas anybody can go for a hike. The meaningful statistic would be number of rescues per time spent hiking/climbing, which undoubtedly is higher for technical climbing than hiking.

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