STAY FOCUSED AND SURVIVE
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ABOUT US
Trail Rescue Australia was founded by experienced trail safety, operations and rescue specialists who have directly supported and assisted over 13,000+ hikers, trekkers, trail runners and MTB riders since since 2010.
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CAPABILITY PILLARS
We exist for one reason: to make remote trails safer. We do this by reducing incidents and risk through training, education and awareness, and by providing a highly specialised, multiskilled rapid-response capability that bridges the critical gap between an incident and the arrival of help
TRA operates as a network of pre-selected, approved specialists — contractors and subcontractors vetted against our standards before engagement. Together they bring extensive skills, qualifications and experience across trail response, UAV/drone search and rescue, trail medical support and emergency-services coordination.
Our Team & Network
Trail Rescue Australia was founded by experienced trail safety, operations and rescue specialists who have collectively supported more than 13,000 hikers, trekkers, trail runners and mountain bikers since 2010. We operate through a lean core team backed by a network of pre-selected, approved contractors and subcontractors — each vetted against our standards before engagement, and each matched to the task their skills, qualifications and experience best suit. It is a model built for reach and rigour: the right specialist, in the right place, every time.
Experience & Skills
Our strength rests on decades of hands-on experience earned in some of Australia's most remote and demanding country — the Kimberley, Central Australia, the Wet Tropics and the Australian Alps. That experience spans both sides of trail safety: the preventative knowledge that reduces incidents before they occur, and the field capability to respond when they do. Our teams are deliberately small, highly skilled, well-equipped and thoroughly trained to move quickly in difficult terrain and conditions — a specialised rapid-response capability for which no equivalent presently exists across many of the remote trails we work.
Quals & Accountability
Capability means little without currency and accountability. Every individual engaged by Trail Rescue Australia — core team or approved specialist — meets defined credentialing standards before deployment. Our people hold nationally recognised pre-hospital emergency medical qualifications; our aerial operations are conducted under CASA certification at both organisational and individual level; and every contractor, whatever their discipline, holds a minimum wilderness first aid qualification. Trail medical support and patient evacuation are undertaken only by specialists qualified to EMT level. It is how we ensure that what we promise is matched by what we can prove.
MANAGEMENT
Zak Dragic
FOUNDER / OWNER
General Manager
Zak has worked on remote-area trails for more than 20 years, across the Kimberley, Central Australia, the Wet Tropics and the Australian Alps. His focus has been rapid-response trail search and rescue, trail safety and risk management, preventative trail care, and specialised field-skills training.
He is the founder of Larapinta Trail Trek Support and Australian Alps Trek Support, which together have supported more than 10,000 hikers to complete end-to-end journeys since 2016 — across the Larapinta Trail, the Australian Alps Walking Track, the Heysen Trail and numerous other remote-area, long-distance hikes throughout Australia.
Zak has worked in the trail safety, SAR and complex remote operations space across the Kimberley, Wet Tropics, Top End, Cape York, Australian Alps and the Torres Strait Islands.
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Maya Krueger
CO-FOUNDER
Operations Manager
Maya has worked in trail safety since 2011, beginning with the trail safety planning for Home Valley Station in the East Kimberley. Today she manages Trail Rescue Australia's operations, networks and contractors across the Northern Territory and Western Australia, as the organisation progressively extends its services and capability into other states and onto further long-distance trails. An experienced long-distance solo hiker and cross-country trekker in her own right, she brings a practitioner's understanding to the way TRA plans, coordinates and delivers in the field.
Maya specialises in helicopter search and rescue in complex, remote and rugged terrain across Central Australia, the Kimberley and the Australian Alps. She also leads TRA's testing programs for the most demanding conditions the organisation operates in — extreme desert and human thermal environments — ensuring capability and equipment are proven before they are relied upon in the field.
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All rotary support services on the Larapinta Trail are provided by
Alice Springs Helicopters (HM Air)
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