Accidentology of mountain sports: An insight provided by the systemic modelling of accident and near-miss sequences

Accidents are notoriously frequent in mountain sports, but thorough understanding of the mechanisms of accidentality remains limited by the fragmentation of sources and by mostly heterogeneous methodologies. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of prevention must rely on detailed knowledge of typical circumstances and scenarios. Rooted in the statement that an accident is never induced by a single cause but rather by a dynamic combination of factors, this paper explores the opportunities offered by a systemic analysis of experience feedbacks on accidents and close calls. The study identifies risk factors for several hundred mountaineering accident and near miss reports. In order to enhance the benefit of these descriptions and to show the interaction of a broad variety of contributing factors, it introduces graphic models. This is not an attempt to compress the unique richness of each story, but rather to create a tree structure using the concatenation of multiple testimonials, thus enabling researchers to build general lessons out of individual cases.