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Up the only way out for injured hunter after fall breaks ankles

After having broken both his ankles in a serious fall in rugged Murupara bush country, the only way out for Trevor Madden was up – dangling in a harness attached to a 40-metre long-line slung beneath the BayTrust Rescue Helicopter.

Trevor, aged 47, and a bone-room supervisor for Duncan Processors in Rotorua, is an experienced hunter, bushman and former army paratrooper, and is familiar with what’s involved in working with helicopters.

But this was the first time he’d been rescued by one after a bush accident.
In early October, he had gone hunting with his mate, Jason, and the pair had walked into the headwaters of the Mangakino Stream.

They decided to split up, each taking a different watershed valley to ensure hunting safety, and it wasn’t until he had been walking for some time that Trevor realized a creek he was following was running the ‘wrong way’.

“I stopped hunting, unloaded my rifle, and began walking out,” he says.

“It was midday, and the time I was supposed to be meeting up with Jason again. I was lost for a couple of hours, but then worked out where I was and was pretty sure I knew where I needed to go.”

He was walking along an animal track across a steep face when the track crumbled under his feet, and he crashed down the slope more than 25 metres, desperately grabbing on to branches, sticks and anything else to help break his fall.

“It seemed to last for ages,” he says. “When I hit the bottom it must have knocked me out, and I woke up about 4pm. I knew I had to get down to the creek.”

He could see by the angle of one foot that an ankle was broken, so he crawled down to the bottom of the valley, dug himself a hole and prepared to spend the night in it.

“I couldn’t do much else. The pain was too bad. It was real cold, but I had good Swazi clothes on,” he says.

In the meantime, Jason had waited late into the day for Trevor to return, and when he didn’t Jason went back to Rotorua and raised the alarm, sure something had happened to Trevor.

Detective Sergeant John Wilson, long-time Rotorua policeman and highly experienced Search and Rescue chief for the region, set the SAR organisation in motion to begin the search at first light the next day.

He says the area where Trevor was lost was very steep and rugged “and about as gnarly as it gets”.

BayTrust Rescue Helicopter pilot/manager Barry Vincent says the weather was “extremely adverse”, with cloud down on the hills, meaning he had to fly the rescue helicopter through a longer route beginning at the coast.

On the second pass up the catchment one of the SAR volunteers thought he saw smoke – and he was right. Trevor had used toilet paper and dry ponga fronds to light a fire after he heard the helicopter.

“When I heard that helicopter I knew Jason had pushed alarm bells,” he says.

Helicopter pilot Barry dropped off a rescue team as close as he could – 3km away. He then flew out to pick up the longline, and advised St John Ambulance personnel that he was bringing out an injured person.

Two crew members on the helicopter were longlined down to where Trevor had been found, and he was put into a special harness and lifted out.

“The only way out was up,” says Trevor, who was taken back to a landing site, loaded into the helicopter and flown out to a waiting ambulance at Murupara. He was then taken by road to Rotorua Hospital.

It was there he discovered his other ankle was broken, and he spent the next eight days in hospital, and a further two weeks at home.

“I’ve been involved in search and rescue before,” he says. “This was really well done. It was well organised, with good communication – I can’t speak more highly of the operation.”