Bushwalker’s crawl for life
An Australian bushwalker said he crawled for two days with ‘‘the whole bottom half’’ of his leg ‘‘loose’’ so he would have a chance of being spotted from the air.
Neil Parker, 54, was walking in Cabbage Tree Creek on Mount Nebo, north-west of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, on Sunday, when he slipped and fell 6m down a waterfall. The fall broke his leg and wrist. From a hospital bed yesterday, Parker said: ‘‘My left foot below my ankle snapped in half ... the whole bottom of my leg came loose’’.
The experienced bushwalker used hiking sticks to fashion a splint, a process so painful that it caused him to hallucinate, and then crawled 3km in two days to an area where he hoped helicopter crews might see him. Surviving on an energy bar, sweets and basic painkillers he had in his pack, he was finally spotted by a rescue helicopter.
The Queensland Government Air service was alerted at Archerfield Airbase and headed to Parker’s last known location. About an hour into the flight, rescue crew officer David Turnbull spotted Parker, despite the heavy tree canopy.
Parker later said he had to ‘‘carry his leg’’ for the two-day crawl. ‘‘Legs are very heavy when they’re not connected to anything,’’ he said, adding that he had heard a helicopter fly overhead on Sunday night but was in a poor position to be spotted at the time, which is when he resolved to crawl nearly 3km to a better location.
‘‘I was right down on the creek bed so I had access to water, but if they came back ... I knew I had to crawl again. I could only get a metre or a metre-and-a-half each time before I had to stop. It was only three kilometres, but two days to cover three kilometres, I thought I was never going to get there.’’
Parker said he had been particularly anxious because he had not told anyone exactly where he would be bushwalking, and had accidentally dropped his mobile phone in the creek after the fall.
‘‘It was the worst possible scenario ... it was getting very emotional thinking, it’s not a nice way to die, just laying here waiting, waiting,’’ he said.
He gave a message to other hikers: ‘‘Simply don’t go alone.’’
– Telegraph Group
‘‘It was the worst possible scenario was getting very emotional thinking, it’s not a nice way to die, just laying here waiting, waiting.’’ Neil Parker
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