Re: Do people die in the wilderness (from getting lost or stuck in terrain) in pom land?

Well, the Scottish Highlands

That's hardly "Pom Land" though, is it? You'd never call a Scottish person
a Pom, would you?


was what I had in mind when discussing it.
I'd imagine the far north of Scotland to be pretty isolated and harsh in
winter.

I was up in Durness @ New Year. The area up there is bleak as ***, and
very very remote. It's been ages since I've been down to the South Island
to compare, but it was the most remote-feeling I have ever felt. Checking
online, Sutherland has a population density of around 2/sqkm; cf Westland's
1.3. Not so much different.

I was out hiking each day, and other than when around Durness itself, we
did not see any other people, nor evidence of any other people. We saw a
few deer. Driving to and from where we were hiking, we'd probably see one
car every 15min on average.

One could easily find one's self 10km away from the nearest road, in
low-mountainous area (up to like 2000m), with snow and northerlies coming
off the North Atlantic. Slip on some ice and break your leg? You could
well be fucked.


At the other extreme, last Easter I went up "Mt" Snowdon (still not in Pom
Land), which had more foot traffic on the trail than Queen Street at lunch
time on Friday (this is as much an indictment of the latter as it is the
former), and one could still get blown off the trail there by a gust, and
fall to one's doom (the very thing had happened a month or so earlier).
Obviously one's not going to be able to lost one one of the main trails,
but it's a big slab of rather remote land, so if one was slowed down by
injury and could not call for help, I could see a person ending up stuck
out there at night and freezing to death. I was up there during the day in
March, and the water in my drink bottle was well on the way to being frozen
solid by the time I got to the top.

--
Adam
.

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