Smaller search for tramper

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33857, 31 May 1975, Page 16

Smaller search for tramper

The search for the young Christchurch tramper who has been missing for five days in the Kelly Range, north of Otira, is to be scaled down.

Today six men and a constable will search the lower Taipo River area, but all other searchers, police dogs, and the R.N.Z.A.F. Iroquois helicopter will be withdrawn. The man. Mark Grenville Whitehead, aged 17, of 62 Cleveland Street, St Albans, was due out from the bush on Sunday after crossing the Kelly Ran;je by Kelly Saddle and down Seven Mile Creek and out the Taipo. The 35 men who searched vesterdav included a face rescue team of eight who searched waterfalls in the Seven Mile Creek area. The man’s pack was found in Seven Mile Creek, about 1000 yards upstream from the Taipo River, on Thursday. Food and utensils had spilled out of the pack and ; had been washed downstream. Sergeant D. A. Thomson, who is in charge of the search, said in Greymouth last night that the searchers had covered “all the areas of possibility and probability

The bush to the right of the Taipo River, and on both sides of Seven Mile Creek, had been searched up to 1000 ft. The Taipp riverbed had been searched, and a jet boat had been used on the Taipo River as far up as it (could go.