Irish man stranded on icy peak builds igloo to survive

An Irish mountaineer who was trapped for a day and a half on a snow-capped peak survived by constructing an igloo to keep him and his fellow climber warm.

Danny Murphy, a carpenter from Kerry, was trapped on an icy ledge 5,500 feet above ground. He and his French colleague, Thierry Thouvard, spent 36 hours on the side of Mt Crosscut in the Darran Mountains of New Zealand as they waited for help.

At one stage, they felt that all was lost when a rescue helicopter left the scene after mistakenly thinking the two men were safe. They could not move up or down and were only rescued when they spotted a van in an alcove in the distance and waved their red emergency shelter.

The climbers were eventually hauled into a scoop net dangling 50m beneath a rescue helicopter dispatched from Te Anau, a town on the South Island of New Zealand.

Sgt Todd Hollobon of Te Anau police said another climber raised the alarm. “We had a call from one of the climbers staying at the huts up there, reporting two climbers stuck halfway up Mt Crosscut there. [He said he’d] just gone to have a look, they’re certainly in a pretty precarious position there.”

Speaking after the rescue, Mr Murphy said he and Mr Thouvard were completing the climb when they “just got up into an area where the conditions with the snow and the ice made it a wee bit marginal”.

They decided to turn around but that proved difficult. “Then we were kind of stuck — nowhere to go up and nowhere to go down,” he told New Zealand’s TV3 news.

Mr Murphy, who has been living in Queenstown, a two-hour drive away, for the past few years, is an experienced climber. The two men had each been climbing for about five years, but mountaineers encountered different types of mountains and terrain, he said.

“That’s just the nature of it. It’s not good though, it was a learning curve,” he said.

Safe back on the ground, he said he wasn’t used to the icy snow on the mountain, which is difficult to anchor on to.

“The two of us haven’t done a huge amount of it, so we kind of got in a bit over our heads,” he said.