A member of the search party who was one of the first to reach the casualty commented: “I’m certain that if we hadn’t found him when we did we would have been recovering his body the next morning. Those of us at the front of the group had passed within 100 metres of him and were on our way to search further up the mountain. It was pure fluke that the wind subsided when it did. He was in a difficult to reach location and with conditions due to get worse a detailed search of that area would have been impossible. He is very lucky to be alive.”