The team received a call to say that a party of two 18 year olds and a 24 year old had become lost in the mist on Kinder.  It was now going dark and snowing heavily on the tops.  The had started to walk out on to the plateau and were now lost and very cold.  They had no mobile service, but fortunately were able to raise the alarm using the iPhone SOS satellite service.  This gave us a lat / long which placed then close to Kinder Gates.  Unfortunately at the moment we are not able to communicate back to the missing people using this service and as they had no cellular service we could not let them know we were on our way to help and for them to stay at that location.  This also meant we were unable to confirm this location with our PhoneFind service.

As we weren’t sure if the group were going to still be at the location, we sent three parties in via different routes, with the hope of picking them up on the way.  When our first search party arrived at the location, there was no sign of them.  We searched the immediate area and found nothing.  We also carried out a check of the Edale carparks and found that their car was still there, meaning the group was still on the plateau.  As conditions were very poor, we quickly decided to scale up the search.  We implemented a pre-defined “Kinder plan”, calling in help from Buxton MRT, Glossop MRT, Edale MRT and two search dog teams.  We had been calling the mobile phones all night, but they constantly were going to voicemail.  We continued searching areas of the Kinder plateau and escape routes with no success.  Finally one of the phones started to ring.  The group had come across another group of walkers who were able to walk them down in to Edale.  They were now in their car and had managed to charge their phones enough so they could switch them back on.  All three were cold, shaken by their experience, but fortunately unharmed.

Kinder Mountain Rescue Team is staffed by volunteers who give their time free of charge and is funded entirely by public donations.

https://www.justgiving.com/kmrt

– Time: 15:00

– Type: Lost walkers

– Location: Kinder Scout

– Team members: 25 + Buxton MRT, Glossop MRT, Edale MRT & MR Search Dogs England

– Duration: 4:30 hours

– Volunteer hours on this incident: 112.5 hours

– Total callout hours in 2025: 1132.5 hours