This Site is dedicated to all those families of the people that have tragically disappeared on flights in and around New Zealand. I only hope that from all the effort in building this site and from all the effort of those taking part in this venture, that it will bear fruit in bringing ‘closure’ to their memories!
Gavin Grimmer
The worry of how long it would take to get back to the vehicle meant that we had
to allow a few hours in case we ran out of daylight, so after an hour or so of searching
the area, it was time to head back..
We were unable to search all of the area as we were so tired and the going was so
tough, but I did get the impression that it was possible that the forestry workers,
who planted the forest back in the early 90’s, may well have seen wreckage and maybe
even removed it not realising the importance of it.
In the image below, you can see our GPS tracks of where we walked, apart from the
track up from the road
In the process of getting to the site, we eventually came across the firebreak shown
on GE, and when we walked out, we just followed this firebreak all the way back
until we found the road (or should I say track, as that was all it was) that we had
intended to come in on, if we had been able to find it when we first drove in.
Where the track intersected the road that we drove in on, we then had to walk from
there all the way back up a steep hill to almost the point shown at the top of this
image to get back to the van.
After a long difficult slog, we came out on top of a ridge where we could see open
farmland through the trees, and before we got there, we came across another road
leading in the right direction. After a much more pleasant tramp, we eventually made
it to the general area, but by this stage we were rather exhausted.
Being so close to the cliff face made it very difficult to get an accurate bearing
with the GPS as one minute it would say that we were too far south by about 600 ft
and then after walking north counting down to about 300 ft, it would suddenly say
we were 600 ft, or so, too far north...very frustrating to say the least!
We were able to see the cliff faces through the trees from time to time, so we were
able to take bearings from them but we didn’t come across anything of interest.This
area was once again very difficult to proceed through due to all the tree prunings.