When the beaten track is off

DOC cannot be expected to turn the Gertrude Saddle into an outdoorsy version of a Monopoly board, where every footfall lands on a square that is clearly named, colour-coded, suitably developed . . . and the path ahead is one from which the traveller is able to deviate only upon receiving written instructions to do so.

This is surely understood. It’s a wilderness, and pretty challenging even by those standards.

However there is a beaten track and – tragically, it turns out – there’s been a place where it takes the tramper to the very point of an intended, safe, crossing of a stream but then conspicuously deviates to a far more perilous crossing area, near a waterfall, where the underfoot terrain is wetter, steeper and more dangerous.

Why? Because enough people have been misled by the errant footsteps of others.

So the point of deviation was one sorely in need of a corrective polemounted marker – a need made tragically clear, and accepted, following the death of Israeli tourist Udy Brill in March 2016.

But DOC didn’t act swiftly and in January 2017 another tramper, AnnaMarie Scaglione-Genet, also died after taking the same wrong turn.

Little wonder Coroner Marcus Elliott was critical. And yes, the department should feel chastened.

But chastened, not excoriated. Here we have one of those cases where health and safety requirements are applied to an area that is, itself, far from inherently safe and cannot be made so. The department, though acknowledging it could have acted more quickly after Brill’s death, says markers were not able to be installed immediately because winter conditions prevented staff from heading safely into the area.

The fact remains there was a window of opportunity, albeit not the full 10 months but a short period before Christmas, that wasn’t used.

Although many a commentator on this issue has hammered the point that neither DOC nor anyone else render such a massive, spectacular and rugged area benign, that doesn’t mean that problems quite this localised, quite this specific, and quite this clearly demonstrated, should languish unaddressed any longer than is absolutely necessary.

There is a wider issue. It doesn’t get DOC off the hook in these two cases, but not every tramper who heads into this terrain does so having first consulted DOC and its warnings.

Oftentimes they have set their expectations on the information from Facebook and Instagram, or third party websites, in which those who post information may have been unknowingly riding their luck harder than they realised, or times when the conditions were more benign. Those who follow such posts can be poorly prepared for the rigours that lie ahead.

There’s only so much that the department can do about that, though its antennae should always be up for any fresh ideas for getting its more cautionary messages spread as far and wide as possible. And it cannot escape attention that the number of deaths in the Gertrude of recent years far exceeds this problem spot; at least half a dozen people in the past 15 years.

In fact, since markers were installed, another death was recorded in April this year when a German man slipped and fell.