Lloyd “Kiwi” Gallagher’s adventure career has taken him to the Greenland icecap, where he over-wintered for six months some 644 kilometres north of Thule; to the Amazon River, the headwaters of which he explored with Graeme Dingle on a balsa raft; and to Peru, where with his New Zealand team mates he made the first ascent of Yerupaja Norte and first traverse of Yerupaja Grande (6632 metres) in 1968. “Kiwi” has also climbed Mount Logan in Canada’s Yukon Territory and Pumori (7145 metres) in Nepal. In 1981, he traveled to China where he delighted in a mock ski descent of the Great Wall before skiing up and down Mount Muztagata in the Pamir mountains of Southern Xinjiang province. The following year, he was deputy leader of the 1982 Canadian Mount Everest Expedition, climbing to the South Col. His reaction to not reaching the summit was not one of disappointment. “If the mountain wants you to climb it, then you can. If it doesn’t there’s not much you can do about it”, he noted.

After being inspired at an early age by Maurice Herzog’s book Annapurna and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest in 1953, “Kiwi” arrived in Canada in 1965 on a one-way boat ticket from his native New Zealand. A member of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides, he worked for 14 years as a guide and manager with Canadian Mountain Holidays, founded by Hans Gmoser in 1957 and now the world’s foremost operator of heli-skiing and heli-hiking tours. In 1978, shortly after the creation of the 4,000 square kilometre Kananaskis Country recreation area in the Canadian Rockies, “Kiwi” became emergency services coordinator for a region now visited by over four million people annually. Over the next 18 years, he personally worked on more than 500 rescue missions and trained a search and rescue team of some 30 members, now recognized as one of the best in North America.

In 1999, his concern for solving the problems of others was recognized by the Government of Canada, who awarded him the National Search and Rescue Secretariat’s “Outstanding Achievement Award for Search and Rescue in Canada.”