‘This is not one of Earth’s kind places’: The extraordinary search for Hector Artigau

Sunday, 13 April 2025

This excellent piece is from the Sunday Star-Times. It was originally published on April 13.

Hector Artigau disappeared on a popular mountain track near Wānaka on Waitangi Day. Despite an extensive and often dangerous search, he has not been found. Mike White tells the story of the extraordinary effort to find Hector.

Hector Artigau wasn’t the first person to walk this way.

Slim tracks through the tussock, worn by inquisitive visitors, pointed to that.

Unofficial paths beyond the lookout where the Rob Roy Track in Mt Aspiring National Park ends.

Each year, thousands of tourists arrive at the viewpoint, and gaze across at the glacier’s tumbling ice. They lunch, they lounge, they smooth their hair and smile for selfies.

And then they turn back the way they’ve come.

But, like a few others, 21-year-old Artigau from Argentina, and two friends, decided to carry on a little further, through the scattered rocks and matagouri, down towards the stream flowing from the glacier.

Here, a few hundred metres away, was something those who paused at the glacier viewpoint couldn’t see.

It was a chasm, a narrow slot carved through schist by the stream, grain by infinitesimal grain, till it was 60m deep at times.

The glacier’s water surged and charged through it, down a series of waterfalls and churning pools, with just a metre between the gorge’s polished walls in narrow sections.

Artigau turned to his friends and said go back. It’s slippery. You don’t have the right shoes.

That was the last time anyone saw Hector.

Thursday February 6

Roy Bailey had just opened the books he was meant to be studying for his skipper’s ticket.

The Wānaka builder had only recently got home from overseas, and he had lots to catch up on.

But shortly before 5pm on Waitangi Day, he got a call from a Wānaka Search and Rescue (SAR) member saying someone was missing, 50km towards the mountains.

As coordinator of Wānaka SAR’s swift-water/canyon rescue team, Bailey immediately flicked to the group’s WhatsApp channel.

4.51pm: “Job on. Who’s available for a river job up the Matukituki now?”

Three minutes later, team member Dave Cassaidy replied: “I can.”

Almost instantly, Alex Petherick also responded: “I am.”

As he jumped in his truck to head to the team’s base, Bailey typed out: “If you can come in guys, cheers.”

Petherick texted he was in Lake Hāwea, and would be 25 minutes.

At 5.01pm, Bailey updated the others: “River/canyon.”

The alarm had been raised by Artigau’s friends, Blas Antonelli and Santiago Ponce, who he’d met at the Leaning Rock Cherries orchard near Alexandra, where he worked.

After warning them not to go further towards the stream, Antonelli and Ponce walked downstream to wait near the canyon’s exit at around 4.30pm.

Then they saw Artigau’s cap in the stream.

Screaming, they raced back to the viewpoint and down the track, eventually finding someone with an emergency locator beacon, which they activated.

Bailey, Cassaidy, and Petherick had arrived at their base within 30 minutes, kitted up, and been picked up by Aspiring Helicopters pilot James Ford to fly to the scene.

On the way, Bailey imagined Artigau had become trapped in the stream’s lower reaches, and there was a chance they could rescue him.

But when they touched down, Antonelli and Ponce pointed to where their friend was last seen.

“They said, ‘It’s up there,’” remembers Bailey. “And I thought, ‘Oooh, OK, that changes the picture a little bit.’”

Nearing the chasm’s edge, Bailey noticed loose ground sloping away at 30 degrees into the gorge.

“My initial impression was, ‘Wow, that’s a really dangerous spot.’ And you’re starting to think, ‘Shit, how are we going to do this?’”

But Bailey also began thinking something else: “I thought we’d be looking for a body.”

The trio did an aerial search of the area and tried looking into the 100m-long canyon where possible.

Wearing drysuits, Petherick and Cassaidy were lowered into the upper section on a strop dangling beneath the helicopter, but their search was hampered by water levels having risen in the afternoon due to ice and snow melt.

At the canyon’s top end, four boot prints were found. (It was later shown these weren’t from Artigau.)

In a pool near the bottom, muesli bars were spotted circling in an eddy.

Just before 9pm, with light fading, the team pulled out.

Friday February 7

The next morning, they were back with more SAR members, and more gear.

They examined the canyon’s top sections, searching the stream’s bed with avalanche probes because it was impossible to see more than 10cm in the milky glacial water.

In an pool halfway down, they found a deodorant can.

But their progress beyond this was stalled at a large rock wedged across the stream, with water rushing under and around it.

This “sieve”, a dangerous feature that can easily trap people, led to a 4m waterfall. And as Bailey and Petherick peered over it, “neither of us were really that keen to try and attack it,” says Bailey.

“So we called James to come and strop us out, and we were standing on the rock, and as he came over I was like, ‘Yep, stop.’

“And then there was this moment’s silence when nothing’s said, and I’m on the radio saying, ‘That’s it - we’re in that little slot.’

“And there was a bit more silence, and James goes, ‘In that black hole? All I can see is a black hole.’

“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

“It’s not often James is short for words.”

Saturday February 8 - Monday February 10

Searchers flew back to the canyon the following day.

Bailey had spent time thinking about the most likely place Artigau might be trapped, and figured it might be upstream of where the light and buoyant deodorant bottle was found.

But on reaching the canyon, water levels were higher than expected.

“We weren’t prepared to take the risk - it felt a bit more dodgy.”

So they headed back to Wānaka, spending the next two days planning their return.

Tuesday February 11

Dan Clearwater had been canyoning on the West Coast when Artigau went missing.

Clearwater, who is the New Zealand Canyoning Association’s president, and wrote the definitive guide to the sport here, was in a hut when the phone of another Wānaka SAR member, Patrick Timm, pinged with Bailey’s first message.

“Oh look, the boys are going in and doing a job,” Timm said.

“So we came back on Sunday night,” says Clearwater, “and I just assumed the job would be all good and dusted. But then I got a call from Roy, saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you come along on Tuesday and search this spot.’”

By 8am, Bailey and Clearwater had been lowered into the canyon.

Using a 3m inflatable sled to stand on, they made their way to the rock sieve where Bailey had pulled out three days earlier.

“Holy moly, the water’s low today,” Bailey said. “This is great.”

Standing on the rock, they could see how the water fell and smashed into the left-hand wall, and then curved back under itself into the cave behind the falls.

“It’s a really ugly-looking spot,” says Bailey. “It’s just boiling.”

When they attempted to lower the sled down the 4m drop, it immediately got caught and buried under the falls.

A downstream rope attached to it had snagged under a rock, and the upstream ropes Bailey was holding were jammed tight.

Clearwater, who was suspended from a 90mm stainless steel bolt screwed into the canyon’s right-hand wall, was unable to offer much help.

“But I could see Dan’s reaction as he’s hanging on the side,” says Bailey, “and I can see he’s going, ‘Whoa, what the f…?’”

From his vantage point, Clearwater also noticed the rising water level, as temperatures rose and melted ice upstream, making the stream even more turbulent.

After 45 minutes, two other team members finally managed to release the downstream rope and pull the sled free to sit beside the waterfall.

Bailey rappelled down on to it, and shone his spotlight behind the falls.

About 3m away, he saw an object floating just above the surface.

“And I yelled to Dan, ‘I think we’ve got him.’”

It was too dangerous to get behind the falls, so Bailey strapped a torch and camera to a pole, pushed it through the water, and took footage of the object.

Clearwater, a former Air Force helicopter pilot, followed Bailey over the waterfall, but as he reached the sled, it began to tip and sink under the water.

“We were trying to brace off the wall and looking at each other, going, ‘What do we do?’ and trying to right it,” says Clearwater.

“And after about 30 seconds, I said to Roy, ‘This isn’t working, I need to bail out of here.’”

The only option was to leap into the water and go with the thundering flow downstream.

“So I grabbed the rope on the stern line and basically pulled myself past the boil line downstream, to swim to where Ben [Yates, another SAR member] was standing on a rock, and he told me where to go and where to exit, because there were sieves on both sides.”

That night, a decision was made to bring in a police diver to reach the object Bailey had spotted.

Because body recovery is the police’s job, notes Bailey. And because, “it’s not a safe place to be”.

Thursday February 13

When police diver Senior Sergeant Bevan Cranstoun pulled himself behind the powerful falls and into the pool behind them two days later, he confirmed the object was Hector’s backpack, but there was no body.

Bailey’s immediate response summed up everyone’s feeling.

“Bugger.”

“Every day, we went in thinking, ‘This is the day we’re going to find him,’” says Wānaka SAR chairperson Raewyn Calhaem, who took two weeks off work to oversee what became one of the team’s largest and most intensive operations ever.

“We had to keep thinking of innovations and different ways of doing things - you weren’t just on the job when you were on the job.”

“The days you’re not in the canyon, I was trying to come up with a better clamp for a torch, or looking for a better hook - that sort of thing,” says Bailey.

“It’s not like you’re back home thinking, ‘I need to get that firewood’.”

Sergeant Darren Cranfield of Wānaka police, who was in charge of the search, says every day there was unwavering focus from everyone involved to “give it their all” and bring Hector home.

At each morning’s 6am briefing there were no late arrivals, no idle chatter - just respect, determination and urgency, he says.

“I often find myself asking, how a small community like ours can produce so many highly-skilled individuals, each willing to sacrifice their time, comfort, and energy, day after day, working in extreme environments that test the limit of human endurance?”

Bailey and Clearwater are among the country’s most experienced canyon experts, but Bailey says the search was “the most technical operation I’ve ever done”.

“You wouldn’t go there for fun,” adds Clearwater.

“It was like a dangerous canyon in a small flood. So you’re going into an already difficult place, with elevated water levels. It’s like, ‘This is full on.’”

The water was just a couple of degrees, the sun rarely shafted through the canyon’s roof, and the stream’s noise was so loud Bailey and Clearwater had to use the radios in their helmets to communicate, even when standing beside each other.

On top of that was the constant prospect of finding someone who’d died.

“Nobody wants to do that,” says Bailey. “But it’s something you’ve got to do.”

The canyon had never been traversed before, and both Bailey and Clearwater are frank about the search’s challenges.

“Your heart rate gets up, for sure,” says Bailey. “There’s points when you’re nervous.

“But when you’re actually abseiling or stepping on to the platform, it’s more of a focus.”

“Every move we make is very calculated and deliberate,” says Clearwater.

“We’re not making it up and going for it.”

When problems arose, it was simply a matter of problem-solving, not panicking.

Cranfield remembers Bailey approaching him after the second day’s search.

“I’m not going back in there,” Bailey told him. “It’s not one of Earth’s kind places.”

Cranfield says they respected this decision, and began looking for another strategy.

“But the very next morning, Roy came back and said, ‘I know how we can do this, team.’

“And just like that, we were back at it.”

Afterwards

In total, 40 Wānaka SAR volunteers spent 823 hours on the search for Artigau - more than 20 working weeks, all without pay.

(During this time, they also rescued a climber from Mt Aspiring, and helped recover the body of a tramper on the Te Araroa trail.)

Below the canyon, sub-alpine and dog teams scoured the stream to its confluence with the Matukituki River and found Artigau’s boots, his cap, and a sock.

The day after the last canyon search, Artigau’s mother, Adriana Calomarde, and her uncle, Carlos Calomarde, flew from Argentina, bound for Wānaka.

At Buenos Aires’ airport, they took a photo of themselves draped with the Argentinian flag, to say thank you to those who’d raised $15,000 to help their journey.

A remembrance service was held on Lake Wānaka’s shore, and the family met with searchers, in what Cranfield says was a poignant and emotional moment.

“I remember one team member quietly saying, ‘Hector is part of our family now - and we won’t give up.’”

Bailey describes the feeling of not finding Artigau, despite so much effort, as “disappointing”, but then reconsiders, knowing how the search went far beyond a practical, tactical challenge.

“That’s not the right word - but I’m not sure what it is. Because you’re thinking about the family, and you really want to return him to them, and to not be able to do that is - emotionally disappointing?”

“A small amount of guilt, I suppose,” Clearwater offers, “that with all our collective skills and experience and resources, we couldn’t achieve that.”

There has only ever been one other search where Wānaka SAR hasn’t been able to find someone - in 2011 when German visitor Rene Weisswange fell from a kayak on Lake Hāwea and never surfaced.

So not recovering somebody doesn’t sit easily or well for those involved in Artigau’s search.

“It wasn’t for lack of trying, though,” says Bailey, a 17-year veteran with Wānaka SAR.

The belief is that Artigau slipped and fell, his body becoming trapped somewhere in the canyon where searchers simply couldn’t reach.

But Cranfield says they haven’t given up and as water levels drop over winter, they’ll search again.

“We remain committed.”

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