German backpacker rescued by residents
Alpine experts say a young German backpacker is lucky to be alive after straying off the Ben Lomond Track, falling, and being forced to spend the night out in the trees above Fernhill early last week.
Thankfully, Fernhill resident Dennis Bell and his neighbour, Anthony Warren, went searching for the woman early last Tuesday (24 June) after Bell’s wife Dawn heard her screams for help around 8am that day.
“She came in off our deck and said she’d heard someone up there crying out, ‘Help!’ very loudly and they sounded very distressed,” Bell says. He went outside and heard it too. “I could see the red of her sweatshirt in the scrub below the trees.”
Bell went down his Watts Road driveway for a better view where Warren, who’d also heard the screams, joined him.
“We got in my ute and tried to find the best place to get to her, climbing some steps behind a house in Dart Place.” Warren, who rang the Police, ran up into the bushes where he says the woman was “precariously perched on a ledge above a bank”.
“She said she’d fallen and had a sore leg.” She was distraught, a bit incoherent and disoriented, very tired and dehydrated and couldn’t move from the spot where she was, he says.
The woman told them she’d become lost coming down the Ben Lomond track after setting off on the trek the previous morning around 8am. She’d veered off the track and become lost, falling and landing on the ledge at the edge of the bank, losing her phone in the darkness during the fall.
She was clothed only in fitness tights, a sweatshirt and track shoes. Her knee was bleeding and her clothing was damp.
“She didn’t have much on. She was bloody lucky as she’d been up there since the morning before,” Warren says. He assisted her down to Bell and they both helped her down the steps where they gave the very thirsty woman some water just as the Police arrived. There didn’t appear to be anyone home in some of the nearby houses.
The pair say they couldn’t believe that she’d been stuck there that long only about 20m, from the nearest houses in Dart Place and hadn’t managed to get help.
“We were absolutely amazed. She was so close to houses and yet nobody had heard her cries for help,” Bell says. “It would’ve been dark, so she probably didn’t realise houses were right there.”
Bell says she told them she’d only just arrived in New Zealand and was staying at a local backpackers’ hostel. “It must’ve been pretty scary for her, new in a foreign country and getting lost,” he says.
Wakatipu Alpine Cliff Rescue and SAR experts have made repeated calls for those heading into the backcountry to be well prepared, with plenty of warm and waterproof clothing, water, food, a head torch with spare batteries and several means of communication, preferably a personal locator beacon.
This warning was reiterated just last week by rescuers and the Mountain Safety Council amid avalanche danger concerns in the region as well.
Alpine Cliff Rescue Team co-ordinator Russ Tilsley says people are tending to “push further and harder” and they really need to be getting their local information from official sources, like the DOC Visitor Centre in town or outdoor adventure shops.
“Please don’t rely on social media for your track information,” he says. “There are plenty of avenues for people to get the right safety information from before they set off, but if you’re walking anything in winter around here now you can expect snow and very cold temperatures."
While it was a coolish night, it had been milder than the rest of the week. “She’s very lucky that it wasn’t two days later during the snowstorm or she would probably not have survived.”
It was hard to be sure without being able to interview the woman, but it sounds like she’d followed the ridge route to the west of the main track down which leads to the back of Fernhill,” Tilsely says. “She must’ve come off the ridgeline the wrong way and gone off the marked track.”
