Southern Traverse
Early Morning Rescue in Lower Paparoas
Susan McKenzie / 18.11.2004
Team Lundhag Adventures’ hopes for a top three finish came to a cold, crushing end in the early hours of Friday morning. As Kathmandu and Go-Lite/Timberland waited out the dark zone on the Arahaura River, the Swedes were hours behind, struggling off the Lower Paparoas between CP25 and CP26.“We were going so well, felt really good, then everything started to go really wrong,� Mikael Nordstrom says as he sits wrapped in a red sleeping bag inside a cabin at TA7. Team captain Mikael Andersson lies on the bed, trying to warm up his cold, shivering body.
“We couldn’t find the trail, and we went so far off it,� Nordstrom continues. “Then Mikael started to get very, very cold and then we ended up down this ridge near a creek so then I got out the radio and we stopped.�
Several teams behind the Swedes, including Outward Bound and Sierra International, were dispatched from CP25 with hot drinks. But the terrain is tricky and treacherous, and when the Kiwis finally made visual contact with the Swedes, they were in fact several hundred metres below the stranded racers and out of reach.
“They were about 300 metres down a green rock cliff,� says race operations Wayne Allen, who was among them who went in to rescue the
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