Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Search and rescue volunteers at work

Israeli Liat Okin was last seen alive on the Routeburn Track on 26 March 2008. The track has since been the scene of an an intensive and prolonged search. After the official police search was called off on 23 April, a private search, led by her brother and search and rescue volunteers, has scoured likely areas where she may have wandered.

A rugged area, it is in the locality of one of New Zealand’s great survival stories. Prospector Alphonse Barrington and his mates survived for months in these mountains in the autumn and winter of 1864. Yet, after nearly six weeks missing, there is little hope that Okin is alive.

Possibly the longest anyone has survived in the New Zealand bush in contemporary times is solo tramper Peter Le Fleming. He went missing on the Heaphy Track on 20 January 1980. Searchers in a helicopter, conducting a last-ditch sweep, spotted his orange groundsheet in the upper Burgoo Stream and then saw him draped over a rock. He was within a few kilometres of Fenella Hut, in the upper Cobb Valley, and had last been seen 29 days earlier.

The case of Liat Okin (assuming that she has come to grief on the track) illustrates a worrying recent trend in tramping fatalities – tourists are increasingly represented. People get into trouble all the time in the bush. But if you go alone without a distress beacon and get into trouble there is no way to signal where you are and that you need help. Going solo is a gamble.