Alpine rescue crews at Aoraki/Mt Cook have been recognised for a night-time mission in dangerous terrain near the Copland Pass, 2060m up, to rescue two trapped climbers in January 2020.

Crew members were recognised at the New Zealand Search and Rescue Awards in Wellington on Tuesday night.

Department of Conservation Aoraki/Mount Cook Alpine Rescue Team member Jim Young said the rescue was “particularly interesting and quite challenging”.

The rescue had tight time pressure. The climbers had come off-route and were stuck on a rocky knoll on the side of the mountain as darkness fell.

Young said the two climbers were “in very tricky, steep, rocky, snowy terrain that you would never normally travel through”.

“They couldn’t go up, they couldn’t go down, they couldn’t go anywhere.”

Making the situation more urgent was the weather. The climbers had travelled in nice weather during the day, but the forecast was that a storm would hit the next morning.

Young said the climbers had some alpine clothes, but weren’t prepared to spend two nights in a raging storm parked on a cliff”.

“They simply would not have survived.”

The climbers activated their emergency beacon and the rescue team was alerted at 11pm.

The rescue had to be done in the dark, with the Otago Rescue Helicopter locating the pair using night vision goggles at 1am.

Young said ordinarily the hope is when the helicopter finds the subjects they might be able to winch them off the terrain as an efficient and reasonably safe method of rescue, but the wind was picking up and made it too unstable for the helicopter.

The decision was made back at Aoraki/Mt Cook Village to try a ground-based rescue, dropping a team onto a small snow ledge a few hundred metres from the climbers.

Young said a key consideration was whether the weather would stop the helicopter returning to extract them. If they got stranded, plan B was to traverse to Copland Shelter a few hundred metres down the mountain and wait out the storm there.

“But first and foremost we wanted to retrieve these people and get picked up before the storm set in, because we would have been stuck in a hut for a couple of days with people that probably needed a higher level of care,” he said.

The team spent about five hours getting across the terrain to the climbers and bringing them back to the helicopter site, making it out with only a few hours to spare before the storm hit.

“You don’t want to run it a whole lot closer than that,” Young said.

As they made their way across the slope towards the climbers, the rescue team had to bridge crevasses and be aware of rock fall and the risk of slipping and falling onto the steepening drop below.

Young said the team’s extensive training meant they were “calm and collected and very task focused”.

“There’s no room for emotions and feelings of panic. We train extremely hard. We constantly put ourselves in positions of discomfort and duress as part of that training. We’re very used to operating as a team in those kind of environments where at face value it may appear terrifying.”

The team reached the climbers, who were “in a cold condition and obviously quite frightened but otherwise in reasonably good shape physically”.

The two were put in rescue harnesses and lowered off the knoll by team member Mark Evans to Young waiting below, where they were connected and guided on a series of fixed ropes leading back to the helicopter site.

The climbers were assessed by the St John intensive care flight paramedic and one was taken to hospital for further medical treatment and later made a full recovery.

At the awards Minister of Transport Michael Wood jointly awarded a Certificate of Achievement to Maritime NZ’s Rescue Co-ordination Centre NZ, the Department of Conservation Aoraki/Mount Cook Alpine Rescue Team and Incident Management Team, and the Otago Rescue Helicopter for their efforts in the rescue.

Young said the award “is a great honour and a great recognition” of the work rescue teams do.

He emphasised the rescue was a team effort and they “couldn’t have achieved this outcome without the huge amount of skill and professionalism” everyone involved in all parts of the rescue showed.

SUPPLIED