"Cars passed him and nobody picked him up ... he was covered in blood and then he managed to raise someone at a house."
At first fire crews thought he was the only one in the car until he mentioned his female friend, understood to be a 22-year-old who was staying locally, and that he couldn't find her.
"He said 'I had a passenger with me and I can't find her' and then he couldn't tell us, because he's not from this area, where the vehicle was.
"All he could tell us was it was on the Waitotara River and he wasn't sure how far up, and was at least three kilometres, and he said it was on the hill."
Parekama Hill is the first hill on the way up, so firefighters got out of the truck and began scouring the roadside for any clues, with the help from the lights of their truck.
Fortunately they spied a couple of tyre marks within the first few minutes.
"You couldn't physically see it from the road ... it was just a couple of little wee tyre marks in the grass and if you weren't looking for it you would have missed it," Mr Hickford said.
"We just started combing the side of the road for something that looked wrong, and we were lucky we found it real quickly."
He was flabbergasted that the man was able to clamber back up the hill and choose the right way to go back towards Waitotara town, let alone walk carry on walking for a further 30 minutes for help.
"He had been knocked around pretty bloody bad, so how he got as far he did nobody knows.
"He'd gone past two houses but he can't have realised he'd walked past them. I don't even know how he found his way back up to the road.
"You get disorientated when things like that happen and he could have walked completely the wrong way. The nearest house going the other way is about six kilometres away."
After finding the injured woman, firefighters carried her about a further 100m to the waiting Palmerston North rescue helicopter.
She is believed to have suffered head and spinal injuries, and was stablised at the scene by paramedics before being flown to Wellington Hospital. Last night she was still critical in Wellington's intensive care unit.
Helicopter pilot Lance Burns said the crash occurred on a "very steep bank".
"The car came to rest about half way, or two thirds of the way down," he said.
The driver was taken by road to Whanganui Hospital for treatment.
Twenty firefighters, including crews from Whanganui and Patea, attended the scene, along with police, St John Ambulance and the helicopter.
The police serious crash unit will investigate the incident.
