The first outdoor sport I took up,
inspired by my brother who is now senior lecturer in ecology at
Charles Darwin University, was scuba diving. I was probably about 18
and I had saved up some money to take an open water course. When I
finished the course I joined the local diving club (still around, the
Port Hacking Divers) and my education as a scuba diver really began.
It was only in later years as I got better at scuba diving and other
outdoor sports, that I realised what a favour the guys (all scuba
divers were men in those days) in the club had done me. Like most
novice divers, on my first dives, I sucked my scuba tank dry in rapid
time. That may not seem a big deal, but, it meant that who ever was
unlucky enough to be partnered with me ended up having a very short
dive. The guys in the club taught me to slow my breathing down, to
navigate under water so that no matter where our dive had taken us we
always came back to the anchor, to cave dive, to deep dive, to take
photographs, to stay calm in murky fast moving water and to just
generally be a reliable partner.
Years and many dives later, I moved to
Tasmania and got into bushwalking. Of course, I joined a walking
club, and learnt all about how to navigate and plan trips. Then it
was Canada and mountain sports like climbing and skiing, I joined
another club and learned more skills. Then Nelson and the life of
ski and climbing bum, and I joined yet another club. In those days,
clubs were much more popular than they are now and had a broad range
of membership from the old to the young, the novice to the
experienced. There were clubs with more rigid rules (like the Alpine
Club) and more rebellious clubs, like the Calgary Mountain Club, but,
they all operated along roughly the same lines with more experienced
people linking up with less experienced people.
The Coast Track, RNP, NSW
In Canada, outdoor clubs have gone into
drastic decline even though participation in outdoor sports is
increasing. Clubs are still doing what they do best, gathering
together like minded people, offering courses, libraries, cabins,
social activities and, of course, trips, but, most clubs don't seem
as vibrant as they used to be. Of course, I could be remembering
things differently, but, back in my ACC days in Calgary, there would
be lots of technical trips on the schedule (like the north face of
Mount Stanley or the south ridge of Mount Fable – we got rained
off), and, there were many guys (again they were men) leading trips
who went on to become UIAA certified mountain guides. Now, it seems
not so much. Certainly, during my decade with the KMC, the club went
from having a pretty good schedule including a week long
mountaineering camp, weekly rock climbing nights at the local gym, a
mountain biking schedule, a hiking and scrambling schedule with three
trips every week to a schedule that, while the traditional and very
popular hiking camps remain, has virtually no advanced trips on the
schedule.
Some of the decline is likely due to
the galloping popularity of social media and the ease with which
people can hook up for trips/activities using internet forums,
Facebook and various meet-ups. Social media not only allows people
to find others with similar interests at no cost, but it also avoids
any requirement to meet minimum standards of performance/expertise
for either the trip organiser or the attendees. This latter aspect
is, I suspect, one of the other major reasons for the decline in club
membership and the proliferation of informal meet-ups via social
media. No longer is a potential trip leader subject to scrutiny by a
club committee to ensure they have met basic standards. Similarly,
trip participants don't have to answer pointed questions designed to
assess just how competent they really are and, in some cases, find
themselves told that “this trip is not suitable for you.”
Totally bomber belay set-up
Organized clubs, on the other hand,
invariably have some established method for screening both trip organizers and participants, varying from the stringent (when I was
in the Calgary ACC I had to complete a form each year detailing my
experience, education, and ability for scrutiny by the ski committee
before I was allowed to lead winter trips) to the lax (in the KMC an
email to the summer or winter trip chair sufficed). These various
methods are frequently unpopular, yet arguably improve safety. I can
remember being quite affronted the first time I had to fill out a
form to lead an ACC trip, but, after the initial knee jerk reactivity
subsided, the whole thing seemed quite sensible. After all, I could
have been a complete tosser with no skill or training about to lead a
dozen people off on a multi-day wilderness adventure.
I am not a big fan of hooking up with
people I have never met through social media. In my experience half
the people on social media are lying about how good they are, and the
other 50% are bumbling incompetents with a severe case of the Dunning
Kruger effect. That doesn't leave a whole lot of reliable partners
out there. I've witnessed a few of friends get into disastrous
climbing situations with people they met on social media. True, the
same thing could happen on a club trip, but, the simple act of
seeking out, paying money and joining a club seems to weed out some
of the worrisome wanna-be's that populate social media. In Australia
(and some clubs in the US), many clubs actually have a formal
assessment procedure that trip leaders and participants must pass in
order to attend or lead trips. All Australian sea kayak clubs, for
example, require members to pass certain base level skills. This
seems an awfully good idea and one I would have liked to have seen
when I was leading trips in Canada.
One of the enduring problems with the
social media hook-up paradigm is that bumblies always seem to meet up
with other bumblies, and neither party recognizes the ineptitude of
the other. The end result is a group of people who are well suited
in interests and all too well suited in ability. No-one in the group
really knows what to do, although there is inevitably one overly
loud, supremely confident individual who manages to convince everyone
else that he/she knows best. A series of minor epics,
mini-successes, and major failures follows. People begin to think
that all the incompetent things they do as a matter of course,
whether it is following GPS tracks, taking an hour to set up a
top-rope anchor, relying on dubious snow pickets, and a hundred other
minor in-competencies are normal. And as we all know, the trouble with
normal is it always gets worse.
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