Two die on mountain's deadly slope

By MARTIN JOHNSTON and ANNE BESTON

Two New Zealand climbers plunged to their deaths and a third man lay unconscious for eight hours yesterday at the base of a notorious ice slope on Mt Aspiring.

Police have not named the two dead men but said the injured climber, also thought to be a New Zealander, had fractures to arms, a leg and his pelvis and was lucky to be alive.

The accident happened at 8am as the men, roped together, were climbing "the Ramp", a steep and often icy slope leading from the Bonar Glacier up the Northwest Ridge, the easiest route up and down the 3027m mountain.

Sergeant Aaron Nicholson of Wanaka police said it appeared the lead climber had slipped and all three had plunged down the Ramp.

The injured man lay unconscious until around 4pm when a Wanaka-based mountain guide, at the Colin Todd Hut at the base of the Bonar Glacier, saw him stumbling back over the glacier towards the hut.

He radioed Search and Rescue staff, who immediately dispatched members of the Wanaka Alpine Cliff Rescue Team.

The injured climber was taken to Dunedin Hospital while the bodies of the two dead climbers were taken off the mountain.

They are expected to be publicly named today after their next of kin have been notified.

The Ramp has claimed enough lives to have prompted warning signs at the Department of Conservation's Wanaka visitor centre and at huts.

A department officer in Wanaka, Stu Thorne, said the accident happened on a cloudless, windless day.

He did not know whether the climbers were ascending or descending when the accident happened.

Many of the accidents on the Ramp have involved climbers who may have been tired as they returned from a successful ascent.

"Normally when people fall on the Ramp, they go over a bluff and down into a bergschrund [a huge crevasse in the Bonar Glacier below]," Mr Thorne said.

"Quite often you get shady conditions and ice forming quickly. The conditions go from maybe hard snow to sheet ice very, very quickly and without warning.

"Those have been the main conditions that have caught people out coming down the Ramp."

Hard ice can be much trickier than snow to traverse because crampon spikes do not penetrate well.

Mr Thorne, who helped organise the warning signs more than 10 years ago, said about eight climbers had died on Mt Aspiring in the late 1980s to early 1990s, mostly on the Ramp.

Since the signs went up, no one had died on the Ramp until yesterday and few accidents had occurred, although others had died elsewhere on the mountain.

A Wanaka climber, who asked not to be named, said the Ramp had a big reputation among mountaineers.

"People avoid it because it does ice up quite badly. It can also have a huge avalanche hazard."

Mr Thorne said Mt Aspiring, 30km from Lake Wanaka, had its share of accidents, but fewer than New Zealand's highest mountain, Mt Cook.

Mt Aspiring - often called the Matterhorn of the South because its sharp pyramid shape is similar to the much higher Swiss peak - was first climbed in 1909 by Bernard Head and guides Alec Graham and Jack Clarke.