Bill Ryan
5th November 2022, 17:11
This is a tragic incident with an important moral to the story. There's a lot I could add to this, but I'll keep it as short and concise as possible. It's about how over-reliance on a single iPhone ended up killing 7 people.
Here's one of the many web articles, quite a good one:
Alpine ski-mountaineering accident claims seven victims
https://swissinfo.ch/eng/bad-weather_four-people-dead-in-swiss-alps-despite-rescue-operation/44086098
There's also a 20-minute video here, but it's not very good:
The Haute Route Disaster
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v9EFzryLxnY
I can summarize it all very briefly.
In April 2018, a group of ski-mountaineers hired a guide to traverse the week-long, 100-mile Haute Route ("High Level Route"), between Chamonix in France and Zermatt in Switzerland. They encountered a serious blizzard, and to effect the critically important navigation to safety the guide only had his iPhone, with a GPS app and a digital map.
But the iPhone froze and the battery died. He had no spare batteries, and no standalone GPS device. He made other serious errors too, and mistakes were also made by the other members of the party who deferred all the decision-making to the 'expert'. (Where have we heard this before?)
Totally lost, the group had to dig into the snow as best they could to endure a freezing night. They had no shelter with them (and astonishing to me) they all split up to fend for themselves rather than forming a 14-person dogpile, which would have been pretty uncomfortable but warm enough for them all to survive the night. A helicopter reached them in the morning, but by the time it was all over 7 of the 14 had died.
All this was because the guide was depending on his iPhone, which failed in the cold. He didn't even have a paper map and compass. OMG.
~~~
I'll add a couple of personal experiences to this, which some readers might find interesting. They do enhance the moral of the story.
Many years ago, I did this very same French Haute Route myself, with a friend. No guide. :) Moreover, neither of us had ever been ski-mountaineering before. We just bought new mountaineering skis and boots and flew to Chamonix. We could downhill ski (though not very well!), but we were good mountaineers. That's the part that's important.
This was long before the days of iPhones and GPS. We had a compass each, and plastic-laminated paper maps. While we learned to ski with backpacks on (by Day 3 we'd got a lot better!), we knew exactly where we were every inch of the way.
On the final day we too were hit by a fierce blizzard. At one point, my friend sat down in the snow, exhausted, closed his eyes and told me he was just so tired he wanted to go to sleep.
I shook him to his feet and told him strongly that we had to keep moving at all costs. (Which we did. :thumbsup: ) At one point, we encountered a group of 6 Germans (this was hilarious, like something out of Monty Python) who were trying to ski in the blizzard, all tied closely together on a single rope.
Every 20 seconds one of them would fall, and then the rest would all go down like dominoes, swearing at each other (Himmel! Schweinhund!! etc. :ROFL: ). We quietly skied past them, amazed.
A few years after that, I skied the Italian High Level Route, solo, in February. I didn't know it at the time, but I was the first person ever to do that, solo in winter. No guide, no iPhone, no GPS.
That was a 4-day trip, but it was much higher, more remote and more serious than the French Haute Route. Again, on the last day I was hit by a ferocious blizzard. I took my skis off and picked my way down with utmost care through a crevasse-field in the whiteout. It took me hours, but I knew what I was doing and was entirely safe. Again, I had my compass and map and I always knew exactly where I was.
There are parallels here with ocean sailing. If your GPS and auto-navigation fails, you'd better have a sextant and know how to use it. (My guess: only 1 in 500 sailors these days would even know how to hold a sextant, let alone use it.)
And there are comedic incidents too. Maybe someone else can find this, but once I saw a YouTube video of a car whose driver (with his unfortunate trusting wife) had followed his faulty GPS navigator without question, and drove right off the road into the ocean. :)
And there's the apocryphal story (is it true??) of the guy who'd bought a new Winnebago RV, set it to cruise control on the highway, and with no-one at the wheel went into the back to make himself a cup of coffee. He'd thought the cruise control would also steer the thing for him. (He crashed, of course, but like the couple above who drove into the ocean I believe he survived.)
Do we have any more stories like this? :flower:
Here's one of the many web articles, quite a good one:
Alpine ski-mountaineering accident claims seven victims
https://swissinfo.ch/eng/bad-weather_four-people-dead-in-swiss-alps-despite-rescue-operation/44086098
There's also a 20-minute video here, but it's not very good:
The Haute Route Disaster
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v9EFzryLxnY
I can summarize it all very briefly.
In April 2018, a group of ski-mountaineers hired a guide to traverse the week-long, 100-mile Haute Route ("High Level Route"), between Chamonix in France and Zermatt in Switzerland. They encountered a serious blizzard, and to effect the critically important navigation to safety the guide only had his iPhone, with a GPS app and a digital map.
But the iPhone froze and the battery died. He had no spare batteries, and no standalone GPS device. He made other serious errors too, and mistakes were also made by the other members of the party who deferred all the decision-making to the 'expert'. (Where have we heard this before?)
Totally lost, the group had to dig into the snow as best they could to endure a freezing night. They had no shelter with them (and astonishing to me) they all split up to fend for themselves rather than forming a 14-person dogpile, which would have been pretty uncomfortable but warm enough for them all to survive the night. A helicopter reached them in the morning, but by the time it was all over 7 of the 14 had died.
All this was because the guide was depending on his iPhone, which failed in the cold. He didn't even have a paper map and compass. OMG.
~~~
I'll add a couple of personal experiences to this, which some readers might find interesting. They do enhance the moral of the story.
Many years ago, I did this very same French Haute Route myself, with a friend. No guide. :) Moreover, neither of us had ever been ski-mountaineering before. We just bought new mountaineering skis and boots and flew to Chamonix. We could downhill ski (though not very well!), but we were good mountaineers. That's the part that's important.
This was long before the days of iPhones and GPS. We had a compass each, and plastic-laminated paper maps. While we learned to ski with backpacks on (by Day 3 we'd got a lot better!), we knew exactly where we were every inch of the way.
On the final day we too were hit by a fierce blizzard. At one point, my friend sat down in the snow, exhausted, closed his eyes and told me he was just so tired he wanted to go to sleep.
I shook him to his feet and told him strongly that we had to keep moving at all costs. (Which we did. :thumbsup: ) At one point, we encountered a group of 6 Germans (this was hilarious, like something out of Monty Python) who were trying to ski in the blizzard, all tied closely together on a single rope.
Every 20 seconds one of them would fall, and then the rest would all go down like dominoes, swearing at each other (Himmel! Schweinhund!! etc. :ROFL: ). We quietly skied past them, amazed.
A few years after that, I skied the Italian High Level Route, solo, in February. I didn't know it at the time, but I was the first person ever to do that, solo in winter. No guide, no iPhone, no GPS.
That was a 4-day trip, but it was much higher, more remote and more serious than the French Haute Route. Again, on the last day I was hit by a ferocious blizzard. I took my skis off and picked my way down with utmost care through a crevasse-field in the whiteout. It took me hours, but I knew what I was doing and was entirely safe. Again, I had my compass and map and I always knew exactly where I was.
There are parallels here with ocean sailing. If your GPS and auto-navigation fails, you'd better have a sextant and know how to use it. (My guess: only 1 in 500 sailors these days would even know how to hold a sextant, let alone use it.)
And there are comedic incidents too. Maybe someone else can find this, but once I saw a YouTube video of a car whose driver (with his unfortunate trusting wife) had followed his faulty GPS navigator without question, and drove right off the road into the ocean. :)
And there's the apocryphal story (is it true??) of the guy who'd bought a new Winnebago RV, set it to cruise control on the highway, and with no-one at the wheel went into the back to make himself a cup of coffee. He'd thought the cruise control would also steer the thing for him. (He crashed, of course, but like the couple above who drove into the ocean I believe he survived.)
Do we have any more stories like this? :flower: