On the 11-2-14 RAL received a call from a lost hiker who had left the Whakapapa car park that morning and was now lost in the fog. His route up turned out to be the skyline marked trail and he kept on climbing from there to reach the crater plateau. He thought he had made it to the crater lake and took a photo of it. See below.
From there it gets patchy. Several raro teams were deployed (see the attached google earth image)to initiate quick sound sweeps and checks of high probability areas. A translator was engaged to communicate via cell phone with the missing party as they only really spoke Swiss German. He had an altimeter and compass on his watch and could see some buildings. After fruitless sound sweeps on the Whakapapa side it was suspected that he was actually on the Tukino side of the mountain and in the end that was where he was located by military police from waiouru. Below is a rough layout of how it all unfolded in a static image. Contact Andy for a .kmz (google earth) file that you can interact with.
