Pete Hamill, Kerry Lammas and the rescue of Mr. Young

On the evening of May 16 2019 the sky was clear. It had been a beautiful Marlborough day but as the light faded on the horizon, the air temperature dropped to 0 degrees and somewhere in the Richmond Ranges, 65 year old Mr. Young wished he was wearing more than three thermal tops, a pair of shorts, a cap, and a pair of tramping boots.

Just hours earlier Mr. Young had set out on an afternoon walk with a group of friends on a track that he’d never walked before. The day was warm and sunny, no rain was forecast and the group had planned to be back at the car park within a few hours. 

Following the Wakamarina Track - a well-graded track once used by gold miners - in Richmond Forest Park, the group walked beneath the canopy of red and silver beech trees, rimu and kamahi for a couple of hours until they reached Devil’s Creek Hut.

After stopping for lunch the group split into two; one group was going to walk on to Stone Cottages where there are remains of historic stone huts, and the other group, which included Mr. Young, decided to follow the track they’d already walked, back to the car park.

“I wanted to have a hard walk on that day so I went ahead of them… and I arranged to meet them somewhere on the track or back in the car park.”

Setting off with a bit more pace, Mr. Young had no reason to believe he wouldn’t easily find his way back to the car park. “I thought there was one track in and one track out. But there was a fork in the track.”

Pausing for a moment at the fork, Mr. Young decided to follow what he thought was the main track because the vegetation looked similar and he felt confident that he recognised certain things.

An experienced and fit tramper, Mr. Young had in fact followed the wrong track. A mistake that could be made by anyone, and one that is made by many.

“I could see the ridge line above me. I thought that if I could get up there, there may be another track that leads down to the car park.”

Mr. Young headed to the ridge line. But when he approached where he thought there might have been a track, he was met with heavy bush, only something of a track, and eventually a sign that pointed to another car park. Deciding to take a chance on this route, he set off in the hope that a car park would mean cars, and then possibly houses further down the road, too. 

After about an hour and a half, Mr. Young could see that the track wasn’t heading downhill in the direction he’d hoped - it was just continuing along in a new direction.

Without a watch, water, a cellphone, (there was no hope of cellphone reception anyway), and with darkness consuming the sky, he was faced with the task of finding somewhere to bed down and try to keep warm.

As Mr. Young lay shivering between a few leaves, dinner was being prepared in the Hamill household just kilometres away. 

“It was my night to cook, and there’s kind of a standing joke now that when it’s my turn, there’s something that interrupts me, and it’s generally a call-out.”

Peter Hamill, Environmental Scientist for Marlborough District Council and volunteer team leader for LandSAR Marlborough, got the call just after 6pm on May 16th to help Nelson, Marlborough and West Coast Police by joining the search to find Mr. Young, whose walking friends had called 111 when they returned to the car park to find he wasn’t there.

Peter, who’s been a LandSAR volunteer for eight years and who, like all LandSAR volunteers, has a grab bag full of gear and equipment ready to go, did what he and all other LandSAR volunteers do when they receive a call to respond: he dropped everything that he was doing, left his family at home and joined the team for a briefing at Blenheim Police Station. He was deployed from there, to a paddock just north of Canvastown to meet the helicopter, which then whisked the first response teams up to Devil’s Creek Hut to find Mr. Young.

The first teams are what are known as Hasty Search Teams - an Initial response aimed at searching high probability areas, trails, and likely spots. The process of preparing for a search and receiving a brief for any operation is a carefully managed process, and by the time Peter and fellow LandSAR Marlborough field team member and trained Operational Tracker Kerry Lammas were taking their first steps on the Wakamarina track, night had well and truly fallen.

Meanwhile, Mr. Young had had to move on from his makeshift bed of Punga leaves. 

“I was up at 1000 metres. The wind was bitter… icy. I decided it wasn’t going to work to stay here. So I got up in the dark and I stumbled … falling over things… back to Foster’s Clearing.”

Mr. Young was quite a way away from where Peter and Kerry were starting their searches, using skills that they have gained through extensive training.

“It’s not just a walk in the bush at night time trying to spot things that might be unexpected in the landscape, it’s about tracking … using techniques such as looking for an identified footprint or bush that’s been disturbed where you’d expect it to be as-is. All of these things take much longer when you’re doing it by torchlight,” says Kerry.

While the Search and Rescue teams searched their assigned areas, Mr. Young had found a new spot to try and shelter himself with for the night. 

“All I could do was dig a little bit of a hole… a trench. I hunkered down for the night. It was really, really cold. I stayed awake, because I didn’t want to go to sleep… in case hypothermia kicked in… In hindsight it was a mistake. I’d dressed very lightly. No food. A bit of water.” Mr. Young mentally prepared himself for a long night ahead.

2am rolled around quickly for Peter and Kerry who, with layers of warm clothing, waterproof jackets, alpine sleeping bags to climb into, and food to give them energy, were thinking about how Mr. Young might be coping.

Peter and his team got up at dawn and continued working through their assigned search area. Other groups were doing the same in nearby locations, but as they found out later, none of them were even close to where Mr. Young had spent the night. 

“At dawn there was snow around me. I had to take stock of things. I figured I was a long, long way from where I’d intended to be. So far away that I didn’t think they’d be looking for me where I was, yet.” Mr. Young was right. In his attempt to find another way out, he’d all but lost his bearings and the teams who were searching for him were now being advised of the chances and statistical probability of survival by the Incident Management Team (IMT); based in the Police station, approximately 60 kilometres away in Blenheim.

“Tracking involves working with signs and indicators that can be identified as the missing party’s and then working methodically to gather as much evidence as possible,” Peter explains.

“But it wasn’t easy to establish a clear sign of Mr. Young’s movements and we had not expected him to climb more 900 metres’ elevation above where he was last seen.”

Kerry’s tracking skills were being put to the test, “we hadn’t had an ID on the boot tread from the IMT, and there were lots of footprints around. It’s a busy track.”

Meanwhile Mr. Young was facing some difficulty with identifying tracks himself.

“There were lots of tracks around me and it was confusing. The walking track, hunters’ tracks and animal tracks. I found what I thought was the walking track and I retraced my steps.”

On the afternoon of the after he got lost, Mr. Young tried his best to make his way back to familiar territory - where he thought people would be looking for him - Peter and Kerry were stood down on their search attempt and sent home to rest.

“It’s not easy having to call time on a search when you haven’t found what or who you’re looking for. But the adrenaline can’t sustain you forever. We’d both been working our jobs the day before and had then been up most of the night. It’s important to rest and let another team come in with new energy,” states Peter.

As Peter and his team walked back out to the main car park at the end of the Wakamarina track to get home, Mr. Young was still walking, and feeling concerned that he hadn’t yet made it back to where he hoped to be. 

“I got to mid-afternoon and I thought, ‘this isn’t working out’. I could see the river below so I thought I would try and get down to it because it’s open country.”

“On that day I heard helicopters. But the bush was so dense I knew they wouldn’t be able to see me.”

As the light of Mr. Young’s second day in the bush started to fade, he came across something that instilled a fresh burst of hope. 

“I found what’s known as Fosters Creek, which I knew would lead to the river, but by this time it was late in the day and I knew if I followed the river it would get pitch black and be exposed. So I decided to stay there for the night.”

“I stayed awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep.”

Mr. Young found a rotten tree trunk, which he put his feet into, to help shelter his feet, which were wet, cold and showing first signs of frostbite, and again he prepared himself to get through another night. “My feet were a bit cold… my boots were wet from sweat. I stayed awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep. It was a long night watching the moon go across the sky. It drizzled but nothing too bad.”

Weather reports from that day in May show that Nelson Airport reached an overnight low of 3 degrees Celsius. But at 1000 metres above sea level, where snow had fallen that morning, the wind chill factor would have made Mr. Young’s second night in the open much more uncomfortable.

“As soon as dawn came, I got to the river. It was OK. Stepping stones and things. But it soon became a bit of a canyon. Sheer rock walls… eventually the water got strong and fast and I couldn’t do the stepping stone thing so I got in the river. I was half wading, half swimming… slipping and sliding on rocks. I knocked myself around. There were a couple of big drops in the river… waterfalls. I tried to get around them as best I could. I was really, really cold by this stage. But I kept going and going and going.”

Suffering from extreme exhaustion, dehydration and having sustained a few painful scrapes, Mr. Young thought to himself ‘I’ve got to get out today because I won’t last another night,’ and he willed himself to keep going.

But when Mr. Young reached a big waterfall, his heart sank. 

“It was big. I looked over the edge and just didn’t think it would be a good idea to jump. So I scaled the rock wall at the side and went back into the bush… just going and going and going… I was wet through. Eventually I could see that the river was coming to an end. Then I stopped to get my bearings. I thought the river was making some weird noises. Like talking. I thought I was hearing things. But it was… I could hear some voices across the river.”

The voices across the river were those of a small group of Canyon Search and Rescue (CanyonSAR), a sub-group of LandSAR that specialises in navigating the treacherous terrain of rivers, canyons and gorges gouged out by raging rivers.

“It was a lucky find. We’d only just started on our search. The resource of having heaps of people out there was probably what saved him.”

Mark Caldwell, a volunteer CanyonSAR member, was part of a team tasked with searching Devil’s Creek, off the Wakamarina River as a matter of practicality, not because anyone thought that they would find Mr. Young where they did.

“It was pretty emotional. There was huge disbelief… he broke down. He kept repeating that he’d thought it was his last day on earth.”

The CanyonSAR team had come, as all Search And Rescue (SAR) teams are trained to do, equipped with enough supplies to administer basic first aid and provide sustenance for those who’ve been without food and water for any length of time. 

“For about 10 minutes he just sat and didn’t talk. He was in real shock. And then he just drank and drank and drank warm raro. We were blown away by how much he drank.”

There was no rush to get Mr. Young out. The team sat down and let the warm sugary drink bring some colour and relief back to Mr. Young’s bruised, tired body. 

“We gave him lots of positive encouragement. We sent word that we’d got him and everyone couldn’t really believe it cause we all thought we were searching for a body. It was a good feeling. But for Phillip… it was emotional stuff,” recalls Mark.

By the time the helicopter arrived to collect Mr. Young, the rescue team were feeling good about his vital signs.

But the 48-hour ordeal had taken its toll on Mr. Young. “I was hypothermic, dehydrated… They put eight litres of liquid back into me via a drip in Nelson Hospital. My kidneys had started to shut down. I had bruises and cuts. But I was so fortunate that I didn’t break anything… or develop anything like pneumonia. I was really determined to get out.”

Mr. Young says it took three or four weeks after he was out of hospital to feel like he’d regained all of his strength. He knows just how lucky he was to have survived the conditions he faced.

“Luckily I’m not a person who panics easily. During those nights I went into a bit of a meditative state. I was really determined to get out. I felt a bit angry that I had got myself into that situation but I just knew I wanted to get out.”

For the volunteers who were part of the rescue operation, their response to the rescue of Philip Mr. Young is the same as any other Search and Rescue Operation. 

“The guys who are involved are doing what they love doing. Mr. Young was doing what he loved to do. All of us have had moments where we’re lucky and we get reminded that nature is tricky. We all hope that there would be people out there willing to help.” Caldwell says he volunteers because he’s driven to share his skills to help others. 

“It’s for those moments when you find someone, and it changed their life. Doing something for someone else is a great feeling.”

And for Mr. Young, a fit, prepared, practical 65-year old bushwalking enthusiast, he’s been reminded that mother nature is unpredictable… but that the spirit of human nature is strong.

“It’s one thing seeing a rescue on TV or reading about it. You see them… I always thought they were a great group of guys. But I have a new appreciation for sure.”

“I didn’t know they were volunteers and I hadn’t heard of LandSAR. Without them, I wouldn’t be here today.”

As Peter points out, it’s not just the SAR team members who offer their time and energy into going out and searching for the lost, the missing and the injured. 

“It’s a real team effort. As we searched through the night there were team members back at the SAR shed, planning the next area to search. There is the Amateur Radio Emergency Communication (AREC) team manning the radios and being our link back to the planning team.

We have guys who’ll drive us where we need to go and wait for us to come back. Cause, you know, when we come out after hours in the bush we shouldn’t be driving. Or the guys back at base who’ll make us a cuppa without asking. That’s the stuff that people don’t think about. Those are all hours that people are giving to be part of these operations.”

And for all volunteers who give up their time to lend a hand when it’s needed most, there’s a strong common factor that gives them the drive to do so. 

On behalf of Mr. Young, LandSAR wishes to thank the following organisations that assisted in the rescue of Mr. Young:

• LandSAR Marlborough

• Nelson, Marlborough and West Coast Police

• Blenheim Police SAR

• Amateur Radio Emergency Communication (AREC) Marlborough

• Nelson SAR

• CanyonSAR Nelson

• Nelson Marlborough Rescue Helicopter

• Precision Helicopters

Video  -->>  WATCH PETE AND KERRY TALK ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE