Pair went two weeks without food
‘Jess and I would wake up and think if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow, and if it’s not tomorrow, it’s the next day.’
The two trampers who went missing in bush northwest of Nelson say they spent nearly two weeks without food and their only saving grace was water they found.
An intensive search and rescue operation had been under way to find Dion Reynolds and Jessica O’Connor, who had been in Kahurangi National Park since May 8.
The pair were in a very rugged and remote part of the park when a search helicopter spotted smoke from a fire they had lit and rescued them on Wednesday, the police officer leading the rescue, Sergeant Malcolm York, said.
York said the 23-year-olds were incredibly lucky to have survived.
“This search was a particularly challenging one due to the remote and rugged location. It’s a long way from anywhere out there and it’s a complete lack of any communication.”
Despite spending the first night in a comfy bed in a long while, Reynolds yesterday said he “couldn’t sleep a wink” because it was hard to process everything that had happened.
Reynolds told Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report they had gone into the bush on May 8, rather than their planned May 9 date.
“We went up the river for two days and made our first campsite, and pretty much the first thing that started going wrong is we ended up burning our socks, I burnt three out of the four socks that I’d had after the river crossing.
“We decided to go up the hill and thought we’d cut across the track and carry on down towards the lake. The next day, once we camped up on that hill, the fog had come in and it really disorientated us.
“We thought we were going to just carry on heading east up the hill in the same direction that we were, but obviously it wasn’t.”
After they had passed through a forest, Reynolds told O’Connor that they needed to stop because he realised they were going around in circles after spotting their own footprints.
They decided to camp there during another couple of days of thick fog but they were running low on water, he said.
“We were on top of a hill, there was no fresh, clean water. Jess had gone to this little rocky puddle that we ended up boiling the water out of, and that was all right for us.
“The next day we kept on going until we found this hilltop and the fog was still there.”
Once the sun came out, they decided to get a sense of where they were to find fresh water, Reynolds said.
“We only had two days worth of food left and we were going down a gully, real steep, it turned from a small rocky stream into a pretty serious waterfall. On our way down, I twisted and sprained my ankle . . . we got to a waterfall that was 15-20m high and we just looked at each other. We’re like, ‘we can’t go down that, we need to stop and go back up the hill’.”
Once again, they made camp and waited it out but O’Connor had injured her back after falling while trying to get water, Reynolds said. “We were very lost at this point.” They spent 13 days without food, but the “saving grace” was a stream that was two minutes away from the gully, he said. “That’s what kept us alive.”
As time passed, the pair relied on each other not to break down and made sure not to lose hope.
“Jess and I would wake up in the morning and think if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow, and if it’s not tomorrow, it’s the next day.”
About a week ago, they spotted a helicopter and lit the fire again to signal their presence.
“It got to about what I assumed would be 5.30 or six o’clock in the evening and we saw a Westpac Rescue helicopter fly up the gully and straight at us . . . and they just didn’t spot us because it was real poor lighting. But it really bolstered our hopes a whole lot.”
Rescuers finally managed to locate them and went down to them.
“I’ve never been so goddamn happy in my life . . . first chopper came over and saw us and Jess went over the quarry and started waving at it,” Reynolds said. “Then the medic came down . . . at that point, I knew we were saved.” — RNZ