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5) "Stick to the major paths/trails - and if possible where a bright top."
... most running injuries happened in Zurich and/or local wanderwegs, and not on mountain trails.
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While that may be so for injuries, and that was my anecdotal evidence, the
SAC statistics for fatalities is even more curious. Some of the interesting things I could glean (but most reports are in german, so I could be wrong in guessing the meanings):
1. Hikers beat mountaineers in absolute number of fatalities (39 hikers vs. 27 mountaineers and 6 rock climbers in 2008). Not so surprising, given that there were probably far more hikers than mountaineers and climbers put together, but the numbers are interesting nevertheless.
2. One would think the 'the Rega will pick us up if we get ourselves in a mess' generation refers to the younger lot, this is conventional wisdom and i would have thought so too. However the statistics are quite intriguing. If we assume forty as the median age of hikers, the under-forty fatalities is 40 compared to the over-forty fatalities of 61. People over 70 beat the people under 20 by a 3:1 ratio in the last four years.
If we keep the under-30s as the "
Rega will pick us up" generation, the under-30 fatalities is a mere 21 compared to 80 people who were over 30 years. Now this can be interpreted in many ways, maybe it proves that the under 30s tend to whistle the chopper more readily whereas the older ones tend to go down honorably, thus supporting the conventional wisdom. It could also mean that it is not necessarily true that the older hikers are safer.
3. Personally, this one is of greatest interest to me. In the distribution of the terrain, 3 people died on wanderwegs (the yellow paths), 21 people died on bergwegs (the red and white mountain trails), and 2 people died on alpine routes (the blue and white, off-trail or free to chart your own trails that I was referring to).
This supports my hypothesis that it is not the hardness of the route per se that is dangerous, it is the mismatch between a person's abilities and the route he has chosen. My feeling is, a person on an alpine route will never let down his guard, and so is less prone to falls than a person on a marked route. But open to other interpretations as well.