Thank you for your thoughts and excellent resources, Moulton. We continue to mourn Kim and Mark and also can learn from the devastating loss.

For the past 11 years, I’ve run the National Center for Cold Water Safety, an all-volunteer organization. Our mission is to prevent exactly this sort of tragedy. As founder and director, I read hundreds of reports about close calls and fatalities each year. Each tragic death leaves a shadow of sadness behind in the hearts of friends and family.

When two very experienced people die like this, it should be a reminder to everyone in the wilderness community that complacency is a trap to which we are all vulnerable. This was a brutally-cold, 48F lake with a bad reputation for unpredictable weather, and neither victim was wearing a properly-secured PDF – or a drysuit.

As countless accident reports demonstrate, it’s easy for very experienced people to let their guard down and skip fundamental safety protocols. We discuss this in detail on our website – including the fact that survival timetables are notoriously misleading when it comes to assessing risk because they don’t take either cold shock or swimming failure into consideration.: http://www.coldwatersafety.org