[pct-l] Prepared for weather

[Eric Lee]

TrailHacker wrote:
>
There seem to be two schools of thought on gear:

1. Boy Scout Be Prepared/Ten Essentials - Whatever can go wrong will go
wrong and all of it will happen on the same trip so you are going to need
every possible piece of gear and possibly a backup for each as well.

2. Ultra-Lite - Everything will go right and be perfect and if it isn't you
will be able to McIver something together with dental floss and your sawed
off toothbrush.
>

Thanks for your note, TrailHacker.  I agree with Radar that it's useful to
think about how and why things go wrong and draw lessons from the stories.
Not to preach to the people involved, but to benefit the community.  The
climbing community does this, as does several other communities that deal
with potentially risky situations.

I've always said that every hiker ought to have the skills plus equipment to
deal with any reasonably-foreseeable circumstance.  To do any less is
foolhardy and is completely unfair to the people who inevitably have to
rescue you when things go pear-shaped.  (Not aiming that at you,
Trailhacker, just in general.)

The trick, I guess, is to figure out what "reasonably foreseeable" means.
It clearly doesn't mean "any conceivable" circumstance.  If it did, we'd be
staggering along under 100-pound loads.  There's always the possibility of a
truly freak accident or something else that no one could have predicted.
That's the risk we accept when we go into the mountains; though as we've
discussed many times before on other threads, the objective risk is still
probably lower than other things, like freeway driving, that we take for
granted.  But there are other things, like snowstorms, that ought to be
considered reasonably foreseeable and everyone should have good, solid plans
for dealing with them.

I know I'm making a few adjustments to my "reasonably foreseeable" list as a
result of this year's stories.

Eric