Bulldozer back from the brink
Rumours of a bulldozer stranded in rugged hill country near Whanganui had been circulating for years when Finn Wallis set out to find it.
‘‘Everybody said there was a bulldozer somewhere in the Ahu Ahu Valley but in 15 years of talking about it, nobody had ever seen it,’’ Wallis said.
Now living in Canterbury, Wallis was working as a contractor in Taihape when he decided to go in search of the mythical piece of heavy machinery.
‘‘Friends of mine owned the land it was supposed to be on.’’
Wallis summed the unconventional search and rescue mission up simply – ‘‘I found it, dug it out and took it home’’ – but the reality was more complicated.
The bulldozer was on the edge of a 250-metre bluff about a kilometre off the existing track. How it came to be there isn’t clear.
‘‘The guy I got the digger from said he’d transported plenty of diggers in there and not got them back out so that gives you an idea of how tough the country is.’’
Recovering it involved a 20-tonne digger, a week of bushwhacking and a nerveracking attempt to pull it back from the edge of the bluff.
With a track to its remote resting place cleared, Wallis returned with his father, best mate and a retired diesel mechanic.
The Komatsu D85 machine weighed 10 tonnes more than the digger, so tying the two together wasn’t an option.
Instead, Wallis used the digger’s bucket to turn and nudge the bulldozer back on to level ground. ‘‘I didn’t want to use a chain because if the bulldozer went, it would have taken me and the digger with it,’’ he said.
Although posted online in 2016, footage of the nail-biting rescue has recently gone viral, clocking up more than 900,000 YouTube views.
That footage showed that while getting the bulldozer on stable ground was a victory in itself, the real test was yet to come.
‘‘We checked over everything we could before trying to start it.’’
Miraculously, it spluttered back to life and Wallis was able to drive it out of the bush. After a service that involved nearly 450 litres of fresh oil, the bulldozer was fully restored. It was bought by a farmer, Wallis said. ‘‘As far as I know, it’s still operating today.’’