Rescuers race to rescue a skier from Mt Aspiring after a 400m fall

A skier has amazingly survived after falling 400 meters in the high alps of New Zealand onto a glacier.

The man had climbed Mount Aspiring, northwest of Wanaka, with a friend on Thursday and was skiing down its technical west face when the descent went awry.

Despite seeing his partner fall down, the man’s friend was able to compose himself enough to complete his own descent and search for his injured partner on the glacier.

He then activated an emergency beacon that took rescuers Lionel Clay and Gary Dickson flying up the mountain in a helicopter in 45 minutes.

Incredibly, the man appeared to escape the ordeal with only leg injuries and was airlifted to Dunedin Hospital.

It was a very, very lucky result, Clay said.

“The West Face is well known to us, it is the scene of a reasonable number of accidents and they generally don’t have happy outcomes like we do.”

Clay attributed the man’s survival after the fall to the experience of everyone involved, including the rescue team, who mobilized and reached the mountain at lightning speed as they raced against the darkness of night.

The couple skiing at West Face were from Wanaka, one of them a New Zealand resident and the other a New Zealander.

Clay described the west face of Mt Aspiring as “not an extreme ski slope, but a very steep run.”

“He probably skis once or twice a year.”

The couple were very experienced and knew what they were doing, he said.

“But unfortunately one of them fell off and it’s pretty steep, so once you fall there is no recovery,” Clay said.

“It fell about 400 meters and ended up on the glacier below.

“His partner continued to ski, which is a great feat to keep his mind calm after what you just witnessed, and he found it.”

The man’s friend then continued to do everything right.

He lit an emergency beacon, lifted his partner off the surface of the snow, put him in a survival blanket, and built a wall of snow to stop the howling wind.

“Good smart stuff, experienced people who take care of each other,” Clay said.

Meanwhile, Clay had been on his own ski trip to the Remarkables and had just returned to Wanaka when he received the call for a rescue.

Jumping back in his truck, he ran to meet his rescue partner Gary Dickson and aspiring helicopter pilot James Ford.

Typically, the team aims to be airborne 30 minutes after receiving an alert. This time they took off in 20 minutes.

Forty-five minutes after the distress beacon sounded, they were at the scene on the mountain, “which was pretty quick,” Clay said.

With him and Dickson, who received an order of service from the queen in this year’s New Years honors, being among the most experienced alpine rescuers in the country, they knew what gear to pack quickly.

They had also assessed that there was only one hour of daylight left for the helicopter to operate.

“We really understood the need to get going with the remaining daylight and the bad weather to come.”

The injured man was not critical when Clay and Dickson arrived, but there was little time for any expression of relief with only a few minutes of daylight.

As a rescue coordinator, Dickson verified the man unharmed, called an air ambulance, and coordinated with the base.

Clay, as a medic, made a quick assessment of the wounded man.

Since the man appeared to have injured his legs and was not in critical condition, they decided that instead of trying to treat him in hostile conditions, they packed him up and put him in the helicopter.

They also grabbed their friend, but fell at the base of the mountain at the bottom of the valley before running off to meet an air ambulance on an airstrip in the Shotover Valley.

“We could see them go in and land there at the same time,” Clay said.

He made a verbal delivery of the patient to the paramedic, who then took the injured man to Dunedin Hospital.

Clay and the team then returned to the valley where they picked up the man’s friend and his extra gear, before flying home to Wanaka.

He refused to take much credit for the ransom.

“The Alpine Cliff Rescue team in Wanaka is full of professional mountain guides and very experienced mountaineers,” he said.

“We’re very used to being in the city and then in half an hour to be in an environment like that, so it’s just another day in the hills.”

The key to the rescues was really the team and their training, from the incident managers at headquarters to the pilots.

“It’s not two heroes sneaking into the sunset and rescuing people, there’s so much more to it than that,” Clay said.

“It is very much a team effort.”