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accident on Mt Aspiring 4-Jan-2011 At 11:31:51 AM Dikko

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The following was posted on AussieMountaineers. The source was not stated:

A young Australian climber fell about 800 metres to his death on an expedition to Mt Aspiring near Wanaka today.

The party of two men, in their early 20s, were climbing the southwest ridge of Mt Aspiring this morning when one of the men fell and slid down the west face into a crevasse.

Members of the Wanaka Search and Rescue Alpine Cliff Rescue team have recovered the body of Eng Wu Ong, 21, of Melbourne.

Land SAR alpine cliff rescue team leader Gary Dickson, who helped run the nine-hour operation, said the Department of Conservation received an emergency call.

Wanaka police launched a search and rescue operation, including a 10-strong alpine rescue team.

Dickson said the SAR team flew by helicopter to a staging post before a fly-by reconnaissance of the southwest ridge.

The climber was found in a four-metre deep crevasse at the base, he said.

SAR volunteers used a long-line swung from the helicopter to retrieve the climber's body in a flexible stretcher before flying back to a staging post at Bevan Col.

The man's climbing partner met another expedition and joined the group before the SAR team met them at Colin Todd hut.

Dickson said the pair were climbing un-roped, which was not unusual, but it accentuated the risk.

It was possible the man fell from the "top gully'', a two-metre wide ice pass, he said.

"There are some bits of fragile ice, his tools might have popped out.

"We don't really know what happened.''

He said the pair were doing well to climb so high by early morning and the weather was perfect.

"There's nothing in my mind they did wrong ... that's just one of the sad parts of life, there's some risk when it's an adventure,'' he said.

It would be a difficult Christmas for the young man who lost his climbing partner, he said.

The rescue operation started about 9am and continued to about 4pm.

The 3,033 metre peak (9928ft) is a popular mountaineering spot and the only New Zealand peak over 3,000m outside Mount Cook National Park.

The MetService forecast for Mt Aspiring was light northeast winds, southwest 20kmh winds at 2000 metres dying out in the afternoon, followed by northerly 20kmh winds in the evening.