KEY POINTS:
An Australian climber who watched his brother fall to his death on New Zealand's highest mountain thought he would also perish on the treacherous peak.
Miles Vinar, 42, will be reunited with his family in Perth today, but his brother's body is unlikely to be recovered.
Mr Vinar
said his brush with death came when he was stranded on Mt Cook after he and his doctor brother, Mark, got into trouble trying to descend from a ridge high on the mountain on Thursday morning.
The men had flown to Plateau Hut in Mt Cook National Park last Saturday with plans to climb the mountain via the difficult Zurbriggens route early on Wednesday morning.
Mr Vinar said that as soon as he saw his brother tumble hundreds of metres down a steep hill while trying to cross some ice, he knew there was no chance he would survive the fall.
"I won't go into gory details, but there is just no way. As I was continuing down the snow slope I sort of saw evidence. So there was no chance.
"He would have been unconscious. He would have been as close to death as you could possibly get, I would imagine, and there was just absolutely no chance of any sort of rescue."
The Perth man told of his fear during two icy nights spent in a snow cave on Mt Cook.
"On Thursday night, actually, I was expecting to die that night.
It was just a continual flow of snow coming down your face ... It was a continual battle just to keep clearing it all the time."
Mr Vinar sustained just a few light cuts around his face from his jacket, and a little sunburn on his nose.
Once the weather cleared, he signalled a group of other climbers by flashing his headlamp about 4.30am on Saturday.
But he was sure of rescue only when a helicopter approached.
"When I saw that helicopter coming up towards me, I almost wept then. I was so happy. It is just an amazing feeling, absolutely amazing."
Mr Vinar, who works as a systems engineer, said he would now give up mountain climbing.
His wife, Sally, said: "He's relatively unhurt, but when he talks about what he went through, I'm just lucky to have him coming home."
But the Vinar family was naturally distraught, she said.
Chief ranger at the Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park, Richard McNamara, said it was difficult to know whether Mark Vinar's body would ever be recovered.
"It's very much a bit of a lottery really. If later in the summer the snow melts and he is on the surface, and we can safely recover it, we will."
He said there was no gear the two brothers could have had with them that would have averted disaster and they did everything right.
"They did the right thing and turned back when the weather was no good, but in that country you don't get a second chance."
Nine people have died on Zurbriggens Ridge, where Mark Vinar is thought to have perished, and 70 people have died on Aoraki/Mt Cook since 1907.
- AAP