Adventurous skier died fulfilling dream
David Dec and his companion woke up early. They had slept at the Colin Todd hut, high on Mt Aspiring, and were preparing to reach the summit before skiing down.
They climbed from 5am on September 22, hitting the top at 9.30am. They had not gone far down before it went wrong.
‘‘They were skiing back down and I guess [David] hit a very steep icy patch and slipped and tumbled through a rocky area and came to rest on a glacier,’’ his brother, Jaymes Dec, said from the United States.
‘‘The climber with him was a paramedic and got to him and immediately started performing CPR. I know he tried for about 30 minutes.’’
The climber, from the Czech Republic, set off a locator beacon, alerting the Wanaka Search and Rescue team, which arrived by a helicopter soon after.
They found Dec on the Bonar Glacier. His 600-metre fall over steep and icy terrain was ‘‘nonsurvivable’’, they later said.
Two of the team had skied the same route two weeks earlier and described Dec’s attempt as ‘‘gutsy’’.
‘‘It’s clear that everybody did everything they could,’’ his brother said.
Speaking publicly on behalf of the family for the first time, Jaymes Dec said that if there was any consolation for the family, photos from his brother’s fellow climber and descriptions of the days that preceded his climb showed he was happy at the time.
‘‘We saw where they were and we can see that he was really fulfilling a dream and doing what he loved.’’
He said Dec, 35, was the youngest of five children. He had grown up skiing and was extremely competent.
‘‘He was a big outdoors man. He loved climbing and hiking and skiing.’’
He grew up in the New York region but his love of the mountains meant he lived and worked in Olympia, Washington. He took on various jobs, including in a bakery, working in carnivals and busking while playing a kazoo.
He foraged for mushrooms and kept animals and a garden at his ‘‘farmette’’. He was also a volunteer, teaching children to garden and creating gardens for underprivileged people.
Jaymes Dec said his brother was ‘‘a creative tinkerer, especially musically, mixing digital and analog formats to explore sound and music’’. ‘‘He played mandolin on a west coast tour. He also played guitar, bass, drums, melodica, and was a proficient saxophonist.’’
Jaymes said his brother had studied during the past year to be a dental hygienist, to the surprise of his family.
‘‘He just graduated from this dental hygienist programme and was top of his class and decided that before he started working he would go on this adventure of a lifetime.
‘‘He didn’t really tell any of us. I got this email from him when he got to New Zealand . . . he had rented a camper and was going to spend a month driving around and visiting mountains.’’