A guttural yelp escaped my lips, the kind that betrays the unexpected and the terrifying. My foot had slipped off the rock-face, and suddenly I was falling. Having placed no protective gear so far, the only possible outcome was a ground-fall.
I slammed into the hard edge of a natural water trench at the base of a cliff in the remote, wild, intimidating Darran Mountains of northern Fiordland. I had only been a few metres off the ground, but the pain was immediate. It took me several moments to untangle from the crumpled heap I’d collapsed into.
It was around then that I realised that I’d left my first aid kit in my backpack at our bivvy site at the top of the valley. We were a long way from there. We had abseiled into the valley, and then danger-walked — including lowering ourselves from handfuls of
