Fun and games at the Lake

Last weekend we had a family get-together at Lake Rotoiti. These are some photos I took there. As you can see from this shot, the park has taken a hammering from the recent storms. There are trees broken and uprooted all over the place. A big cheer for DOC who are doing a great job getting the tracks cleaned up. Its going to be a big task.

The lake looked serene

as did the inhabitants.

This was a spectacular rainbow, it was actually a double, but you can't see it in this photo.

And later there was another one draped across the sky

These are some of the eels (or tuna in Maori) living in the lake.

We had a great weekend, staying at a bach which was really a very nice house. Some of the family went up to Rainbow ski-field on Saturday, but I curled up in front of the fire with a most excellent book:
Survive! RemarkableTales From The New Zealand Outdoors by Carl Walrond is a page-turning adventure in itself, detailing successful and not-so-successful survival stories from the NZ wilderness. This book will grab any of you who are interested in having adventures, or like myself, temporarily have to have them vicariously through other people! My all-time favourite adventure book is Into Thin Air by John Krakauer, which documents the disastrous attempt to scale Mt Everest by New Zealanders Rob Hall and Gary Ball, among others, in 1996.

I was hooked on Survive! from the very first chapter which details an adventure that I am well familiar with. It chronicles the story of Nelson trampers Clayton Te Iringa and Nathan Strawbridge who became lost in the rugged bush on Mt Rintoul, above the Lee Valley, south-east of Nelson.

This was in 2003, and my brother and I were inaugural members of the Nelson-Tasman Urban Search and Rescue team (USAR) at the time. Assisting on this search was one of our first real-life missions outside of training. John and me had the relatively unglamourous job of manning a roadblock on the road up to the Lee, checking that all vehicles coming in knew of the search in progress, and that those coming out didn't happen to have picked the missing trampers up somewhere. It was a good day though, sitting on the roadside with our thermoses and sammies, watching and waiting for any news.

You get quite caught up in the intensity of these sorts of things, and for some time it was very uncertain as to whether the searchers were looking for live people or dead bodies. I remember the moment of great excitement when news reached us that searchers had found the labrador that the men had with them. Any news is something when people have seemingly stepped into a void.

One of our USAR members, Hamish Pirie was in the party which located Te Iringa, and this was something to savour for the whole USAR team. Though for Hamish, he has gone on to be part of many successful rescues in his role as winchman for the Nelson Summit Rescue Helicopter.

Check out the website for the Nelson USAR Team (NZRT2) at http://www.nzrt2.co.nz/

For more information on USAR nationally and internationally, check out their website at http://www.usar.govt.nz/

And check out Carl Waldron's blog for more of his adventure stories.

Typical USAR training exercise, being lowered out of tall partially collapsed old buildings, especially if you're a smaller team member! I got lots of practice in the stretcher! Builds trust...or stupidity...not sure which!

(p.s. that's not me in the photo, I just snaffled it off the nzrt2 website to illustrate)