A young man, formerly of Otematata, who died while hunting on Mt Peel, had been a keen hunter most of his life.

Ryan Kelvin Jopson (18) died after apparently slipping on snow and tumbling down a 200m slope.

He was found at 5.30pm on Monday near an area known as the Blue Slips, near Mt Peel, Senior Constable Mike Stephens, of Geraldine, said.

Mr Jopson spent most of his life at Otematata, where his parents live, before studying at Telford.

After graduating, he worked in the Telford area before joining Mt Peel Station as a single shepherd in January.

Mt Peel Station owner John Acland said yesterday Mr Jopson was a very keen hunter, and had hunted at the station since he arrived.

He also played in the forwards for the Geraldine Rugby Club.

Last weekend, Mr Jopson stayed at the station to hunt tahr when most other staff had left for the holiday weekend.

Mr Jopson was a quiet student at Telford Rural Polytechnic, was a hard worker and loved the outdoors, Telford finance and administration manager Stewart Macdonnell said yesterday.

Mr Jopson had attended Telford from July 2007 to May last year and gained his Telford certificate in agriculture and other papers which were available in the one-year course.

"He was a good student who loved what he did," Mr Macdonnell said.

It is the second death of former or current Telford students in recent months.

Equine student Miemie Cloete (18) was killed in a car crash near the polytechnic in March.

Sen Const Stephens said a co-worker noticed Mr Jopson had not returned from his hunting trip.

Mr Jopson's motorbike was found at the base of a hill and the search for him involved two helicopters.

Sen Const Stephens said it was "not horrendous" country and Mr Jopson had hunted in the area before and knew the terrain well.

The death has been referred to the coroner.

Tahr Hunter Falls

Tahr Hunter Falls

Two Who Survived

Injured British hiker survives a week in New Zealand mountains
A British hiker lay seriously injured for more than a week in rugged mountain terrain in New Zealand before using his tent poles as crutches to hobble down a glacier to find help.

By Paul Chapman in Wellington and Paul Stokes
Published: 6:06PM BST 01 Apr 2009

Mathew Briggs spent several days camped out, hoping to be rescued Photo: OTAGO DAILY TIMES
Matthew Briggs, 33, became stranded with his border collie-cross named Little Dog after plunging 15 feet down a cliff on the remote Douglas Glacier in South Island.

He broke an ankle, a wrist and several ribs as well as badly gashing his thigh in the fall, while out hiking in the Southern Alps.
He spent several days camped out, hoping to be rescued, but after his rations ran out, he finally decided to make the agonising two-day trek down the glacier to a hut used by mountain walkers and hunters in a desperate bid to seek help. Once there, two hunters had to undertake another long distance trek to summon medical aid.

Incredibly, when paramedics eventually arrived Mr Briggs said that all he wanted was a cup of tea.

The accident happened after Mr Briggs lost his footing after momentarily looking up at the sun, landing on rocks below and losing the emergency locator beacon he had been carrying.

Speaking from his bed in Greymouth Hospital, he said: "My main concern was that there was a huge trail of blood leading from me down into the creek below. The rocks were stained red by this point and the creek was turning red."

Mr Briggs staunched the bleeding by tying a T-shirt around his leg to compress the wound before managing to pitch his small tent and decided to wait in the hope of being found.

Throughout his eight days stranded there, he put salt on his wounds to prevent gangrene and kept himself and Little Dog on strict rations which ran out on Saturday.

After thinking "If I don't get out of here, I'm going to die here", he set out on an agonising two day trek almost two miles down a glacier before reaching a hut used by mountain walkers and hunters.

Mr Briggs, known to his friends as "Mad Pom", said: "I could see the hut down there in the valley all this time, the sun shining off its roof.

"I was just coming into the hut and saw the most beautiful sight I could ever have seen, a hunter walking out carrying a water bucket. I thought 'Yes, I am going to get out of here. It's all good'."

Two hunters then made a 13-hour hike to summon help for him. Barry Sharplin, one of the men at the hut, said: "I couldn't even imagine what he went through. He handled himself pretty well."

He added that when he opened a tin of spaghetti for the ravenous dog, it devoured it in about five seconds.

Medical staff who flew to the hut by helicopter to airlift Mr Briggs to safety were amazed at his fortitude.

Stu Drake, one of the paramedics, said: "He's really tough. Based on the information we received we were expecting to find someone in a pretty bad state.

"When we arrived in the hut he was standing up. We offered him some morphine for his pain but all he wanted was a cup of tea."

Mr Briggs underwent surgery for his injuries yesterday and is expected to return within the next few days to the small South Island settlement of Middlemarch, where he keeps the village shop.

He was brought up in Penistone, South Yorkshire, before graduating in communications engineering at Swansea University and emigrated to New Zealand seven years ago.

Mr Briggs, who lives alone and is a lover of the big outdoors, also works for the island's Department of Conservation.

His parents David and Ann Briggs, both university professors, who live near Richmond, North Yorkshire, are emigrating to New Zealand after their retirements this year.

Prof Ann Briggs, 61, said: "We are just relieved that he had the survival skills. It wasn't an area of danger, it was the brightness of the sun that caused him to fall off the track after slipping on a piece of shale."

Police suggested that he had not filed enough information about where he was going or when he was due out of the mountains.

But Mrs Briggs said that as well as carrying a beacon he had left his itinerary taped to his kitchen table at the store.


Tough Guy
Mental toughness, a good mate and a short length of rope helped a Waihola tahr hunter survive an ordeal in the Southern Alps during Queen's Birthday weekend.
John Van Turnhout (44) is now resting in Dunedin Hospital waiting for an operation to repair the leg and ankle bones he broke in a fall on the Horace Walker Glacier between Mt Cook and the West Coast settlement of Karangarua.

Mr Van Turnhout and his twin cousins, Syd and Marty Van Turnhout, flew in to the Horace Walker hut (altitude 960m) last Friday and on Monday he and Marty, wearing crampons, walked up the glacier.

Mr Van Turnhout said the glacier was generally easy walking.

"It's steep but it's just one big sheet of ice."

The trip had become an "annual pilgrimage" and was timed to coincide with the "rut" of the bull tahr.

They shot three tahr and as they were walking back to the hut in the afternoon, Mr Van Turnhout slipped and slid about 5m down an ice chute, breaking his right leg - his "good leg" - in the process.

Sitting on the ice, in a shaded valley, with radios that were out of range, the pair decided their best option was to walk the 4km or so back to the hut.

"It's not the sort of place you want to camp out because you will die out there."

The first obstacle was the 50m drop from the side of the glacier to the "rock garden" running alongside the glacier.

The pair linked themselves together with the rope, and Marty lowered Mr Van Turnhout, who was on his back, down the icewall two painful metres at a time.

"It was bloody painful, all right, pain like I've never felt before."

Then, with Marty carrying packs and rifles, the pair set out for the bottom of the glacier, moving through 2km of boulders - some as big as houses.

"I walked on my arms and my legs and with my ice axe, using any means possible to get down. Marty couldn't carry me. It was too steep for that."

Marty Van Turnhout said the walk had involved four and a-half hours of "teeth-grinding pain" for Mr Van Turnhout.

"The poor bugger, he crawled out, literally crawled, limped and hopped his way down through the rocks."

After the rock garden, they had a kilometre or two of flat land to cross before arriving at a big slip before the hut.

They were able to use their radios to contact Syd, who helped carry Mr Van Turnhout (70kg) the final 500m or so to the hut where, the following morning, they used a mountain radio to call a helicopter.

Initially, the hunters had tried to devise a splint from their ice axes but that had failed and the axes became makeshift crutches.

Mr Van Turnhout described Marty as "bloody marvellous".

He expects his leg to take at least four months to heal but the ultra-keen hunters plan to return to the Horace Walker glacier to hunt tahr again next Queen's Birthday.

• The Horace Walker hut was the refuge sought by Middlemarch man Mathew Briggs and his dog, "Little Dog", after he had spent eight days in the bush in March with a suspected broken ankle, broken wrist and deep lacerations. r Briggs fell down a 5m bluff on to rocks and spent two days walking to the hut using crutches made from tent poles.

Must Have Hurt

Reading those brings back all to familiar memories...
I almost took a LONG nap while tahr hunting.. 5 days in the mtns waiting for the heli to return after my fall, Lifeflight chopper ride to Christchurch, then 9 LONG days in the hospital.
Those Alps are the most unforgiving mountains Ive ever been in. And I plan on returning ASAP.

RIP

If you head into those mountains, at some stage you will make a mistake that has the potential to hurt you. I think most of us can think of moments when we were extremely lucky.
With the weather this season, i'm surprised there havn't been more.

Very sad. At least they died doing something they loved.

Mountain hunting is dangerous on the best of days.