The bodies of two climbers have been recovered from the north buttress of Sabre Peak in Fiordland National Park after a distress beacon was activated on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
One of the dead climbers was an Australian citizen, while the second person resided in Australia but was a dual citizen of New Zealand and Canada.<\/p>\n
Police were alerted at about 7.40pm when another climbing party activated a beacon after the missing pair failed to return from their intended 500m route.<\/p>\n
“One of the pair was located deceased, but access was difficult due to the deteriorating weather on Saturday evening,” a police spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
“On Sunday, police and Wakatipu Alpine Cliff Rescue specialists returned to the scene and located the second person, also deceased.”<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, MetService issued an orange heavy rain warning for Fiordland for Sunday, with up to 150mm of rain and thunderstorms forecasted.<\/p>\n
Both bodies were extracted in what was a “difficult and technical rescue”, police said.<\/p>\n
The north buttress of Sabre Peak has historically been a popular route and was described as being “on the bucket list of many climbers” by police.<\/p>\n
Sergeant Alun Griffiths thanked rescuers. \u201cPolice are in contact with the families and are offering the necessary support,” he said. “This is a result nobody wanted, and our thoughts are with their families.”<\/p>\n
A formal identification process is underway, with the deaths referred to the coroner.<\/p>\n
Sabre Peak has been considered one of New Zealand’s best rock-climbing peaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bodies of two climbers have been recovered from the north buttress of Sabre Peak in Fiordland National…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[273,111,43,139,69,15488],"class_list":{"0":"post-184574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-southland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}