Tramper winched from national park
A tramper with a fractured ankle was winched out of a remote, snowy valley after setting off a personal locator beacon.
Nelson Marlborough Rescue Helicopter (NMRH) pilot Brendan Hiatt said the crew responded to a personal locator beacon activation on Saturday.
The alert led them to a party of five trampers in the Speargrass Valley, about 5 kilometres from Speargrass Hut in the remote Nelson Lakes National Park.
The helicopter couldn’t land in the valley, so an NMRH medic attended the injured tramper, before the tramper was winched to safety and flown to Nelson Hospital, Hiatt said.
Later on Saturday, the NMRH crew picked up a man from a rural Ngatimoti property. The man had sustained injuries after his quad bike rolled over.
The crew also picked up a man in Motueka, who had suffered a medical event during a martial arts class, Hiatt said.
Meanwhile, animal-related reports kept police busy across Nelson-Tasman over the weekend.
On Friday evening, police were alerted to a car versus cow incident on Tākaka Hill Rd, on the Golden Bay side, about 7.50pm. The car’s wing mirror had clipped the cow, a police spokesperson said.
The driver was uninjured, but there was no word on the cow, they said.
Around the same time on Friday, police received reports of a seal on State Highway 6, near the NPD fuelling station at Hira, the spokesperson said.
On Saturday morning, at 6.47am, police were alerted to an adult seal, and a dead baby seal on Wakapuaka Rd.
The baby seal was collected by a road worker and the adult seal was not seen again, the spokesperson said.