Rescuers were just in time
A couple who were rescued from Mt Taranaki had fallen hundreds of metres and only a safety fence had stopped the man from falling over a bluff, it has been revealed.
The pair had been climbing past the top of the Manganui skifield on Tuesday afternoon when they fell down the side of the icy mountain, with the woman suffering a gash on her head.
With thick cloud rolling in as darkness fell and temperatures plummeting, a massive community effort was launched to save their lives.
With just minutes to spare before the weather made a helicopter rescue impossible, the 50-yearold male and a 53-year-old female, understood to be German nationals, were flown off the mountain by the Taranaki Community Rescue helicopter.
The pair had been climbing past the top of the Manganui skifield earlier that afternoon when they fell.
Stratford Mountain Club spokesman Rob Needs said the couple had talked to a crew from the club doing maintenance on the ski field’s top tow and were warned about the rapidly changing conditions on the mountain.
Needs said it appeared the experienced and well-prepared couple had planned on climbing as high as they could before skiing or snowboarding back down the mountain side.
But that never happened and some time later the pair lost their footing and tumbled more than 400 metres down the mountain.
‘‘That’s vertical metres, so the slope was more likely to be 700 to 800 metres depending on how steep it was,’’ Needs said.
Having witnessed the fall, the club members called 111 and set of a chain of events to rescue the couple.
While the club members administered first aid and secured the climbers, Taranaki’s emerg- ency services quickly jumped into action.
Taranaki Rescue Helicopter crew member and general manager Andy Cronin said they were alerted by the ambulance communication centre that someone had fallen on the mountain on the ski field.
They immediately began contacting the Alpine Cliff Rescue Team and St John paramedics while Police Search and Rescue began co-ordinating the rescue.
Cronin said they then flew towards the mountain with a St John paramedic and a member of the alpine team on board.
‘‘When we got to the ski field the wind was thundering down hill,’’ Cronin said.
Unable to winch the couple off the mountain, they dropped the alpine expert and some of the gear off at the mountain’s plateau car park, to lighten the load before trying a second time to winch the pair aboard.
When that didn’t work the helicopter crew made the decision to land at the bottom of the ski field to pick up the injured pair, who had been brought down by the Mountain Club members in ‘‘banana boat’’ stretchers.
The patients were then flown back to Taranaki Base Hospital in a stable condition, just before the cloud closed in which would have meant they would have had to be stretchered off the mountain.
‘‘We couldn’t have stayed on the mountain five minutes longer,’’ Cronin said.
New Plymouth Police Senior Sergeant Thomas McIntyre said the couple were ‘‘very lucky to be alive given the fall they experienced’’.
Cronin said the whole operation had been a community effort that went as planned and he praised the efforts of the Mountain Club members.
Taranaki District Health Board spokeswoman Greer Lean said the couple were in a stable condition on Tuesday night and had since been discharged.