John Van Turnhout (44) is now resting in Dunedin Hospital waiting for an operation to repair the leg and ankle bones he broke in a fall on the Horace Walker Glacier between Mt Cook and the West Coast settlement of Karangarua.
Mr Van Turnhout and his twin cousins, Syd and Marty Van Turnhout, flew in to the Horace Walker hut (altitude 960m) last Friday and on Monday he and Marty, wearing crampons, walked up the glacier.
Mr Van Turnhout said the glacier was generally easy walking.
"It's steep but it's just one big sheet of ice."
The trip had become an "annual pilgrimage" and was timed to coincide with the "rut" of the bull tahr.
They shot three tahr and as they were walking back to the hut in the afternoon, Mr Van Turnhout slipped and slid about 5m down an ice chute, breaking his right leg - his "good leg" - in the process.
Sitting on the ice, in a shaded valley, with radios that were out of range, the pair decided their best option was to walk the 4km or so back to the hut.
"It's not the sort of place you want to camp out because you will die out there."
The first obstacle was the 50m drop from the side of the glacier to the "rock garden" running alongside the glacier.
The pair linked themselves together with the rope, and Marty lowered Mr Van Turnhout, who was on his back, down the icewall two painful metres at a time.
"It was bloody painful, all right, pain like I've never felt before."
Then, with Marty carrying packs and rifles, the pair set out for the bottom of the glacier, moving through 2km of boulders - some as big as houses.
"I walked on my arms and my legs and with my ice axe, using any means possible to get down. Marty couldn't carry me. It was too steep for that."
Marty Van Turnhout said the walk had involved four and a-half hours of "teeth-grinding pain" for Mr Van Turnhout.
"The poor bugger, he crawled out, literally crawled, limped and hopped his way down through the rocks."
After the rock garden, they had a kilometre or two of flat land to cross before arriving at a big slip before the hut.
They were able to use their radios to contact Syd, who helped carry Mr Van Turnhout (70kg) the final 500m or so to the hut where, the following morning, they used a mountain radio to call a helicopter.
Initially, the hunters had tried to devise a splint from their ice axes but that had failed and the axes became makeshift crutches.
Mr Van Turnhout described Marty as "bloody marvellous".
He expects his leg to take at least four months to heal but the ultra-keen hunters plan to return to the Horace Walker glacier to hunt tahr again next Queen's Birthday.
• The Horace Walker hut was the refuge sought by Middlemarch man Mathew Briggs and his dog, "Little Dog", after he had spent eight days in the bush in March with a suspected broken ankle, broken wrist and deep lacerations. r Briggs fell down a 5m bluff on to rocks and spent two days walking to the hut using crutches made from tent poles.
