Dragon's Wrath 2017

Hi

My family and I did the Tugela Gorge Hike last week Sunday. On our way back we heard a helicopter landing further down the river and were told by a member of the rescue team that a German tourist had fallen and knocked her head. It is an unpleasant feeling knowing that someone that you had just passed a while back had an accident!
I hope it was nothing too serious and that she is on her way to a speedy recovery. Thumbs up to the rescue team...

Edit : I can't say exactly where the lady fell, but we met the member of the rescue team at the gorge as he was setting up ropes...

That is brilliant skills, one wheel in-touch hovering.

Well done, and thank you, to all involved.

There is a clip on youtube that went up about 2 hours ago, I'm assuming it is the same rescue. Link below

Well done to the KZN section of Search and Rescue.

This kind of efficiency is what we practise for so hard.

We were a group of 7 doing a two day hike from sentinel car park to Ifidi cave and back. About 200 m from Ifidi cave while we were traversing the steep slope to enter the cave, Magdaleen sprained her ankle and fell. She passed out for a while but soon regained consciousness. Her ankle immediately started swelling and it was far to painful to step on. It was clear that she tore some ligaments and we also could not rule out that something was broken, so we decided to call mountain rescue. One of the members of our group, Dieter, is a doctor, he strapped her foot up and decided that she should not put weight on her foot at all. We then continued to Idifi cave for a the night, Magdaleen mostly crawled there, as it was quite hard to move over the steep terrain. It was quickly getting dark at this time, and since it was not a critical injury MSR decided to pick her up the next day, rather than execute a night extraction. We all had a warm and comfortable night in Ifidi cave, despite the newspapers mentioning of the "sub zero temperatures".

Sunday morning Dieter and Magadaleen moved to that point about 50 m outside of the cave which we thought were the best spot, since we expected an air hoist. At 9 am the helicopter arrived, to our surprise the pilot put the one wheel down right next to them and kept the helicopter there as stable as a rock. They picked Magdaleen up, took their backpacks and were off roughly a minute later. An incredible sight

I would also really like to thank 15 Sqdn and MCSA KZN Mountain Search and Rescue, you are really amazing!!!

Chris

Just saw this posted on facebook:

www.timeslive.co.za/local/2017/05/26/Canadian-hiker-airlifted-off-Drakensberg-after-dramatic-night-rescue1?platform=hootsuite