It’s nice to hear good news these days. I’m sure his family is so relieved.
So it seems like he was found by a small group of random hikers instead of the search team?
I saw a map of the area including the trail but they didn’t point to wear he was at/found.
I really wasn’t expecting they’d find him alive given how long it had been - now that’s a nice thing to be wrong about.
As long as you are not cold or injured and have access to clean water, surviving for 2 weeks is not that surprising for a healthy young person i think. Definitely not fun tho.
It’s more that after 2 weeks of concerted searching in the area you expect anyone still mobile or able to actively respond to have been found, and then it becomes more likely that they’ve fallen down between boulders or some other difficult location (in which case finding them within any reasonable time period is unlikely).
I do find it interesting that they found him near Blue Lake. I wonder what the plan was there - getting above the tree line is actually a decent idea if you want to be found in that country but from that description he seems a fair way away from where they would have been walking (maybe aiming for Charlottes Pass?). If they were near Geehi I would have thought it’d be easier to head downhill and aim to follow the river to the Alpine Way.
Ah yeah that makes sense now. He just managed to evade the search effort quite well then somehow.
