David Iredale

In December last year 17-year old David Iredale decided to hike across Mount Solitary in the Blue Mountains, two hours west of Sydney.  These mountains, which get scatters of snow through the winter but never enough for skiing, are deceptively pretty, their rocky faces smoothed by the eucalypts which give them their name.  

David and two school friends had thought the treck across Mount Solitary might contribute to their Duke of Edinburgh award.  When they told this to the teacher at their school who administered the award program, he was about as interested as any teacher is when a pupil tells him what they’re doing over the weekend.  This didn’t surprise them.  This was the teacher, after all, who had been promising for weeks to bring them a GPS but kept forgetting to put it in his bag.

Mount Solitary is a three-day hike along a well-marked track.  It’s heavy going, especially the second day when a walker needs to climb 810 metres to the top of the mountain.  It might not sound much, but remember December is mid-summer in Australia and it gets bloody hot that far from the coast.  Walking anywhere can be tough.

My mate Kurt, who’s quite the outdoor-expert, told me recently than when you are walking in the mountains you should carry three litres of water a day per person.  Plus a litre or two for cooking at night, plus extra if you want to wash.  David Iredale was carrying two litres for the entire trip and, unsuprisingly, ran out on the first afternoon of his hike.  Undeterred, he and his friends pushed on to the next day’s climb.  The maps they’d brought with them showed fine blue lines trailing down each side of Mount Solitary and they assumed these were creeks where they could fill up their bottles.  Big mistake.  

Blue on an Australian map is mostly a suggestion of what might occur.  Open an atlas and you’d be forgiven for thinking lakes dot the centre and south of this country.  But one of those lakes, Lake Eyre, has water in it now and tour companies are selling “once in a lifetime flights” to view it.  

Creeks in the Blue Mountains are not quite so rare and most winters can guarantee a trickle somewhere close to the fine blue line on the map.  But you should never rely on them, especially not in mid-Summer.

At the top of the mountain David left a hand-written note which read “Got to the top!  Haven’t had H2O for a whole day but river coming up! Enjoy the view”.  Needless to say, no river came up.

At some point in the following hours David “cracked the shits” with his two mates and walked ahead down the path.  What happened next is on the one hand unclear, but on the other recorded in painful detail.  

The unclear part is why or how David left the path and ended up 200 metres to the north on a rocky incline.  If he was looking for water why did he leave the path which appeared to be heading towards it?  Dehydration probably, delirium perhaps.

The all-too-clear part of those dry and desparate hours was played to a packed court-house at an inquiry last week.  Five calls to the Emergency Services in 16 minutes.  Five different operators refusing to help David because, although he said he was on the Mount Solitary walking track, he was unable to name a cross-street.  His calls were audio-recorded but not entered onto the computer system as the operators didn’t think they were worth it.  The last person he spoke to said “OK, so you’ve just wandered into the middle of nowhere.  Is that what you’re saying?”.

David’s body was found nine days later.  That delay shows more than anything how easily you can get lost in the thick undergrowth of the mountains.  But no one in Australia is blaming the mountains just now.  They are just wondering why until this week, five months after David died, the emergency services had still not reveiwed their operating procedures.