Alone in the Snowy Mountains: The 13 Days Hadi Nazari Shouldn’t Have Survived

Published: 1 Aug 2026

He Was Less Than an Hour From Safety — Then He Walked the Other Way

A search and rescue helicopter had been circling for days over one of the most punishing stretches of wilderness in Australia, and the news kept getting worse. Fourteen days without a confirmed sighting. Three hundred searchers combing steep, snake-filled gullies. A missing 23-year-old medical student, last seen taking photographs on a trail, now presumed to be somewhere in a maze of cliffs and canyons where even experienced bushwalkers refuse to go off-track.

Then, on a January afternoon, a group of hikers near Blue Lake heard a voice calling out from the scrub. A man stumbled toward them — thin, sunburned, but standing upright, walking in a straight line, and able to shake their hands and thank them.

It was Hadi Nazari. Missing for 13 days. Alive.

What searchers didn’t know yet — and what would only come to light weeks later, after a mountain guide painstakingly retraced his footsteps — was just how close Nazari had come to walking straight back into the arms of his search party on day one, and how a single decision sent him deeper into the wilderness instead. Investigators would later find a campfire he built barely 900 metres from the river that led directly to base camp. He was less than an hour’s walk from safety.

He didn’t take it. Instead, he turned and walked east, into terrain so remote that even the guide who tried to reconstruct his path called it “a needle in a vast haystack.”

This is the story of how a young man with no map, no compass, and a phone that had already died survived nearly two weeks in one of Australia’s harshest landscapes — and why, months later, the people who searched for him still can’t fully explain how he did it.

Where Normal Life Ended

Hadi Nazari grew up far from the Snowy Mountains. He is a member of the Hazara ethnic community, and his family fled Afghanistan for Pakistan, where Nazari spent his early years. The family arrived in Australia in 2019. By December 2024, Nazari was 23 years old and studying to become a doctor, living in Melbourne — the kind of steady, disciplined path that medical school demands.

Hiking was his escape. On December 26 — Boxing Day, one of Australia’s biggest outdoor holidays — Nazari set out with three friends on the Hannels Spur track, a route on the western flank of the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales. It’s not a casual trail. The 15.5-kilometre track climbs 1,800 metres to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest peak, offering the greatest elevation gain of any walk in the country. It has a serious pedigree, too: the route follows the same spur climbed by Polish explorer Paul Strzelecki and James Macarthur in 1840, when Strzelecki became the first European to summit and name Kosciuszko.

Nazari was, by all accounts, an experienced hiker. He wasn’t a novice wandering into danger unprepared — he was carrying a tent and, according to searchers, was outfitted for a genuine wilderness trip. That detail would later fuel cautious optimism among rescuers: an experienced hiker with shelter had a real chance of holding out.

But there was one glaring gap in the group’s preparation. None of the four friends carried a personal locator beacon or dedicated navigation equipment — they relied on a phone app, and in Nazari’s case, that phone had run out of battery on or before December 26. In terrain this remote, that single missing piece of equipment would matter enormously.

The plan was simple. Nazari and his friends had arranged to meet at a campground after the hike, and partway along the trail, Nazari wanted to stop for photographs. He told his friends to go ahead; he’d catch up. It was an ordinary, unremarkable moment — the kind hikers experience constantly. Nobody thought twice about it.

He never caught up.

The Moment Everything Changed

By early evening, Nazari’s friends were waiting at the agreed meeting point, and he hadn’t arrived. Around 8:45 p.m. on December 26, his companions called police after he failed to show up at the campground where they’d planned to reunite. They told authorities they’d last seen him roughly six hours earlier, descending the trail alone to take photos.

For a search and rescue team, those first hours are critical — and they moved fast. A major land and air search was launched the very day Nazari went missing. Police, park rangers, and volunteer search teams began fanning out across the western slopes of the Snowy Mountains, an area locals distinguish sharply from the gentler, ski-resort side of the range to the east. This western side is a different world: steep, glacially carved canyons; boulder fields the size of houses; dense, near-impenetrable forest. It’s wilderness only the most adventurous off-track hikers ever enter, and only on known routes.

According to the reconstruction later pieced together by mountain guide Keith Scott — who retraced much of Nazari’s path for the Canberra Times — Nazari likely became lost in dense bush almost immediately after leaving the main track, at around 900 metres of altitude, roughly three kilometres and 550 vertical metres above where the walk had started.

From there, the logical, instinctive thing happened: he tried to walk downhill toward water and, he likely hoped, toward people. On-the-ground investigation later showed he took a route north and downhill through thick scrub, following gullies and waterways to a small flat creekside clearing where he made camp.

It’s what he did there that would puzzle everyone who later tried to make sense of his journey.

The Investigation: A Trail That Made No Sense

At that first campsite, on the bank of a shallow, moss-lined creek shaded by tree ferns twice his height, Nazari built a small, carefully constructed rock fireplace. From that spot, an easy 50-minute walk downstream would have taken him to the Geehi River — and another hour beyond that to Geehi Camp Ground, where the search headquarters and his waiting friends were based. Had he simply followed the water down, he likely would have walked out of the wilderness within a day or two, in time to celebrate his 23rd birthday on New Year’s Eve.

Instead, according to the physical evidence found later — a campfire, discarded rubbish, hiking poles — Nazari appears to have turned due east from that camp, roughly toward smoke from a distant fire burning in the bush, and away from the camp ground where rescuers were based.

Why would an experienced hiker walk away from the easiest route to safety and into some of the most difficult terrain in the country? Nobody — not search commanders, not veteran bushwalking guides, not doctors who study survival psychology — has been able to answer that question with certainty. It’s understood that in debriefs with police, Nazari has struggled to recall much detail about where he went or why he made the choices he did.

What is clear is what came next: days of what searchers now believe was an unrelenting, disorienting slog through wild country. Making headway off-track in that terrain is slow, punishing physical work — pushing through thick scrub, bracing against boulders and trees to avoid slipping downhill, sometimes dropping to hands and knees to crawl under fallen timber. Nazari would have travelled close to dangerous cliff edges and, especially at lower elevations, through territory home to eastern brown, black, and tiger snakes — some of the most venomous species in the world.

Meanwhile, above him, the search machine his disappearance had triggered was expanding by the day. More than 300 people — police, park rangers, and trained volunteers — were eventually involved in what became a multimillion-dollar search operation, conducted by both air and land. Searchers found scattered signs of Nazari as the days passed: garbage and his hiking poles turned up near the Kosciuszko River on New Year’s Eve, and days later a campfire, a lighter, and a camera bag believed to be his were discovered.

Each discovery answered one question and opened another. He’d been here — but where was he now? He’d built fires — but was he still strong enough to move? The clues suggested he was still walking, still fighting, but they gave no indication of where he was headed or whether he’d survive long enough to be found.

Then, on January 5 — nine or ten days after he vanished — searchers found something unexpected: a camera, apparently his, containing a recorded message. In it, Nazari appears to have spoken about his hope of being found, his trust in God, and a message left for his family in case he wasn’t. It was recorded on the first or second day of his ordeal — meaning it had been sitting in the bush, undiscovered, for over a week while the search intensified around it.

For the family and the search teams, it must have been a gut-wrenching find: proof of life, but a recording made so early that it couldn’t say anything about whether Nazari was still alive now.

The Twist: A Needle in a Vast Haystack

As the search stretched past the ten-day mark, most experts privately feared the worst. A specialist doctor who serves as medical adviser to police search and rescue teams, Dr Paul Luckin, later explained that food is rarely what determines whether a lost person survives — the body first burns fat reserves, then breaks down muscle, and in later stages of starvation begins consuming internal organs. Luckin noted that declining electrolytes and vitamins compound fatigue and confusion, and that over an extended period this damage — particularly to the heart and nervous system — can become permanent. Bluntly: “Generally, by two weeks at the most, people are moving very slowly. They are more likely to stop, find basic shelter and hope to be found. It’s very unusual to keep moving after two weeks,” Luckin said.

Nazari, remarkably, kept moving. And that’s where the story takes its strangest turn.

According to the reconstruction of his path, sometime in his first several days lost, Nazari climbed a long, high ridge extending from Mount Townsend, Australia’s second-highest peak. From high on that ridge, he made — by any measure — an extraordinary decision: rather than continuing up to well-marked hiking trails above the tree line, he plunged down the western wall of a steep canyon, descending roughly 400 vertical metres over half a kilometre of treacherous ground.

At the bottom of that descent was a stone hut so remote that finding it, guide Keith Scott concluded, was essentially a matter of luck — “a needle in a vast haystack and not a place anyone would normally happen upon.” It’s called Opera House Hut, a single-room stone building constructed in the 1960s by the Snowy Mountains Authority to house hydrologists — nicknamed for local folklore that it cost more per square metre to build than the actual Sydney Opera House, then under construction. It is, by Scott’s account, the single most isolated structure in the entire mountain range.

Nazari had stumbled onto it. And inside, waiting on a table, he found two muesli bars — left behind days earlier by other hikers who had signed the visitors’ logbook and, unknowingly, left a parting gift: a note at the bottom of their entry reading, “ps: enjoy the muesli bars.”

It was almost the only food Nazari would eat in two weeks.

The Climax: Found, Against the Odds

Dr Luckin believes discovering the hut — and with it, a sense of civilisation and evidence of other human beings — would have provided Nazari with what he called a “big psychological reset.” Nazari reportedly told a fellow hiker, while waiting for the rescue helicopter, that he spent two nights inside the hut and read entries in the visitors’ book, which helped guide his route out.

But here is where the mystery deepens rather than resolves. The logbook Nazari apparently read contained a detail that should have saved him days of additional suffering: entries in the book made clear that a nearby engineering tunnel offered an “easy way” out of the hut — a route that, while officially off-limits to hikers, would have been a reasonable emergency exit. Nazari didn’t take it.

Instead, closing the hut door behind him, he headed in the opposite direction — south, up two creeks toward the main mountain range, into another multi-day climb through boulder fields and near-vertical terrain. Investigators also discovered something strange when they later visited the hut: half a page had been torn from the decades-old visitors’ logbook, directly below the entry that mentioned the muesli bars. No one knows for certain who removed it or why, though a source close to the search told reporters Nazari himself may have written — and later removed — a message of his own.

Luckin’s theory is that by the time Nazari reached the hut, starvation had already begun eroding his ability to think clearly — after seven or eight days without food, he explained, there is a dramatic, progressive loss of neural function. “It would have been a perfect storm,” Luckin said, “no food, not enough water, lost, complicated terrain.” That may explain both the strange decision to bypass the tunnel and Nazari’s later inability to clearly recall his own choices.

What followed was a final, brutal ascent: roughly four kilometres of travel that gained nearly 1,000 metres in elevation, climbing back up toward the exposed alpine trails above the tree line, with towering peaks looming on either side and almost no visibility beyond the rocks and scrub immediately in front of him.

And then, near Blue Lake, on the afternoon of January 8 — at around 3:15 p.m. — a group of hikers spotted him. He approached them, telling them he was lost and thirsty. Video of the encounter, later shared by the NSW Rural Fire Service, showed Nazari waiting with the hikers in an open clearing for the rescue helicopter to arrive.

The Aftermath: An Extraordinary Recovery, and Lingering Questions

What rescuers found when they reached him defied expectations. Police Inspector Josh Broadfoot told reporters, “He seems well: Amazing,” and called the fourteen days of searching worthwhile — “for him to come out and be in such good spirits and in such great condition, it’s incredible.”

Broadfoot relayed that Nazari described walking “from morning until night,” surviving on creek and river water and whatever berries he could forage, with the two muesli bars from the hut making up almost his entire food intake for two weeks. Ambulance Inspector Adam Mower said Nazari needed treatment only for dehydration, calling him “in remarkable condition for a person who’s been missing for so long.” Later, Mower elaborated further, describing his surprise at being greeted by a patient who could step out of a helicopter unaided, walk a straight line, and shake his hand — “not stumbling or searching for what to say.” His blood pressure, oxygen levels, and blood sugar were all within acceptable ranges.

The next day, Nazari released his own statement, thanking emergency crews for their “tireless work searching for 13 days in tough conditions” and thanking members of the public, family, and friends for their support. He was flown to Cooma Hospital for a full medical assessment before being reunited with his family. At a debrief with the search team, he offered a simple explanation for how he’d endured: “I am but sinew and bones. God saved me.”

Search leaders who worked with him described him as gracious and grateful, and one veteran of the search team said that in 20 years of this work, he had never seen anything quite like it.

Some questions remain unresolved. Nazari himself has largely stayed out of the public eye since his rescue, declining interview requests, and his memory of key decisions during his ordeal remains patchy — a gap doctors attribute to the cognitive toll of prolonged starvation. Investigators never determined with certainty who tore the page from the hut’s logbook, or exactly why Nazari bypassed a known safe route out of the canyon not once, but twice — first at his own campfire near the river, and again at the hut. What is confirmed is the physical record: the fires he built, the muesli bars he ate, the terrain he crossed, and the more than ten kilometres of some of Australia’s harshest wilderness he survived on foot, largely without food, for thirteen days.

Investigators noted his behaviour on being found — talkative, visibly relieved to see people — fit the pattern typically seen in people who have spent long stretches isolated in the wild. Beyond the immediate relief of his rescue, Nazari’s case has already prompted renewed warnings from park authorities about the risks of the Hannels Spur track and the importance of carrying proper navigation equipment and a personal locator beacon — gear that, in Nazari’s case, was the one thing missing from an otherwise well-prepared hiking trip.

For now, the full explanation for how a lost, unequipped hiker crossed some of the most unforgiving terrain in the country and stumbled — twice — onto exactly what he needed to survive remains, in the words of the searchers who looked for him, something between remarkable luck and a story that “confounded experts.”

What’s confirmed: Nazari’s disappearance on December 26, 2024, the 13-day, 300-person search, his physical condition and vital signs on rescue, the discovery of his campfire, hiking poles, camera, and camera bag along his route, and the presence of the muesli bars and torn logbook page at Opera House Hut.

What’s disputed or unknown: Why Nazari turned away from the easiest route to safety on day one; why he bypassed a known emergency exit tunnel near the hut; who tore the page from the visitors’ logbook and why; and the precise details of his day-by-day route, which Nazari himself has been unable to fully recall.

Sources: Associated Press, Reuters, NSW Police Force, UPI, and a detailed on-the-ground reconstruction by Snowy Mountains guide Keith Scott published in The Canberra Times, drawing on search-team debriefs and a site visit to Nazari’s campsite and Opera House Hut.