Elite NSW Police Alpine squad keeping us safe on the snow fields
They are the crack squad battling subzero temperatures keeping skiers safe on our snow fields. So physically demanding is the role, only the fittest of the fit pass the test. The Sunday Telegraph spent a day with the squad. MULTIMEDIA SPECIAL
NSW
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It was approaching 5am in the middle of a blizzard when the urgent call came through.
A back country camper’s tent was being inundated with snow, wind chill was minus 14 degrees Celsius, the man’s asthma was playing up and panic was setting in.
But this nightmare scenario is all in a day — or night’s — work for the NSW Police Alpine Operations Unit.
This eight-officer team is tasked with leading rescue operations in one of Australia’s most stunning but unforgiving environments.
They find you when you’re lost or injured in the wilderness. They sleep in snow caves carved out of the side of a hill, drop out of helicopters, skidoo, cross country ski and trek through remote terrain with 20kg bags and self-heating food packs for days as part of their regular training.
In the past 10 days alone, following huge dumps of snow across the NSW snow fields, they have found a father and daughter lost outside of Thredbo, co-ordinated the search for a snowboarder buried after an avalanche and rescued a camper stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Less than 24 hours before the call on August 9, Senior Constable Dave Tickell had been sitting at Jindabyne Police Station as grey clouds hung low over the mountains.
“I am expecting something in the next couple of days,” he said with a map of the region in front of him.
“The back country travel is getting more popular. People are leaving the resort and going for a walk to ski areas where no one else has skied.”
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The next morning Snr Const Tickell and his colleague, Senior Constable Daniel Draper, were trekking through metre-deep snow with wind gusts of up to 100km/h on a treacherous search and rescue operation.
Since the team was established in 1993, it has been involved in hundreds of operations, from the search for four snowboarders missing after a snow cave collapse to the Thredbo landslide disaster.
But in between the high-profile jobs are dozens of operations that go unreported.
When The Sunday Telegraph spent 24 hours with the unit, as a polar blast swept across NSW this month, Snr Const Tickell and Snr Const Draper had just returned from camping in the snow in a remote spot deep in the Snowy Mountains.
On past training trips, they’d been handed a shovel and instructed to carve their room for the night out of the side of a snow-covered slope.
“It was probably one of the better nights sleep I have had because I was knackered from the digging,” Snr Const Tickell joked.
The camping trips aren’t just about survivability but familiarising officers, who are on call 24/7 for alpine operations, with a landscape that changes with the weather.
They pinpoint trails, creeks and landmarks that will act as navigation tools in future operations, many of which are carried out at night.
In freezing temperatures, a map can be the officers’ best tool because it doesn’t have batteries that freeze.
“Technology isn’t always real good out here,” Snr Const Draper said.
When they are not on strenuous alpine operations, the officers are based in Jindabyne, Cooma and Nimmitabel, juggling standard police work — petty crime, domestic violence, licensing and traffic operations.
It was meant to be Snr Const Draper’s day off when the job came through about the camper stuck in back country at Mount Sitwell.
Jindabyne Sgt Brad Hughes was expecting to hit the slopes on his day off too but instead co-ordinated the search from the police station.
The weather conditions were as bad as it gets — freezing winds, heavy snow and visibility of less than one metre.
It would turn into an all-day retrieval with Snr Const Draper and Snr Const Tickell finding the camper and walking him out to Charlotte Pass where paramedics were waiting at the top of a chairlift to treat him.
He’d been camping in the mountains for three weeks and had a lot of gear with him, which he expected his rescuers to carry.
“It was the toughest job I have done,” Snr Const Draper said.
The next day, an elderly skier was killed after he hit a low lying branch on Thredbo’s Super Trail.
Two days later, the alpine operators were out again, looking for a father and daughter who were lost outside the Thredbo resort boundaries.
They had left their skis behind and the girl was on her dad’s back as he tried to find the other skiers they’d separated from.
It was getting dark by the time Snr Const Draper found them, about one kilometre from the road.
Both Snr Const Draper and Tickell fell in love with the region after signing up for a winter secondment to Jindabyne in 2016.
Snr Const Draper had been working at Gosford and Snr Const Tickell at a one-man station in a country town of a few hundred people.
They moved to Jindabyne in 2017 with no navigational experience — “it was real fish out of water stuff” — but were put through their paces during the selective eight-month alpine course.
Sgt Hughes moved from Sydney two years earlier after a long stint in the Manly detectives office.
He’d taken the adult equivalent of a gap year — a career break — with his wife and they stayed in Jindabyne for the winter.
Sgt Hughes took a job at one of the snowfields in ticket sales and skied on his days off. On his own admission he was a “ski bum”.
By the time his long service leave was up, Sgt Hughes wasn’t ready to leave.
He eventually took up the Jindabyne Police Station sergeant position and trained as an alpine operator.
Most of the jobs the team responds to come from Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) activations, overdue hikers or phone calls from people lost in the bush.
Snr Const Tickell said they don’t hear “boo” from the people that go out well prepared.
It is those who venture out without the right supplies or advice that end up needing help.
Take a 19-year-old girl who got lost on a 20km hike around Mt Kosciuszko in April for example.
By 7:30pm, she had stumbled into the Snowy River and was trudging aimlessly through waist-high scrub in the middle of nowhere when she called triple-0.
Sgt Hughes and Snr Const Tickell co-ordinated the rescue from the station while Snr Const Draper set out on foot with a paramedic.
“It would have been eight or nine degrees but it was the wind,” he said.
“The wind chill was freezing.”
It wasn’t until 2am that Snr Const Draper found the girl, cold, wet and hysterical about 5km from she thought she was.
“It was pitch dark and there was nothing around,” he said.
“When we found her we were walking back and she was saying there is the ski tube building there, she was delirious — no idea where she was. The tube building is 20km away.”
By the time they got back to the police station it was 6am.