I don’t know about you, but over the last 24 hours I have not been able to get this tragic story about what happened on the Routeburn track out of my mind.

I find it baffling. I can’t even begin to comprehend the circumstances this woman has found herself in.

Some five weeks ago, the woman and her partner became disorientated. They spent a night out in the cold. They had no tent. No locator beacon. So they spent a night in pretty horrific conditions.

Then, the next day, cold, disorientated by fog and strong winds and falling snow, he slips between 5 and 7 metres down a steep slope. The woman says her partner fell further then her, and was tangled in branches and rocks. She couldn't free him - she reached him, but soon after he died. She says she heard him take his last breath.

And so suddenly this woman is alone on a mountain and her partner is dead. She is exhausted. She is bereft. But from that moment on, what has unfolded is extraordinary.

We don’t know the circumstances around his death yet. Was it late in the day? Was the weather horrific? Did she desperately need to find shelter knowing that if she didn't, she would perish herself? In any case, she says she spent two days sleeping above the treeline -- so she was incredibly exposed -- and in the following days, she tried to reach the campsite that she could see in the distance, but failed.

On the fourth day, she made it. So she breaks into the hut – and there’s food and she can keep warm and so she stays there for over a month.

I’m trying to put myself in this situation. What would I do? Probably the wrong thing. In fact, I know I would. The Routeburn is 32 kilometres long, and from where the hut is, you would take about five hours to walk out on a good day, and that's key here. On a good day.

But I know that a combination of panic and shock and grief and anxiety, and a million other emotions you'd experience after witnessing your partner die, I know those emotions would probably send me tearing off down the mountain to try and reach someone. Anyone. Even in that environment, I would tell myself that I could do do it. But could I? I don't know. Chances are it would be the wrong decision. Chances are I’d end up dead as well.

And that's what I find so extraordinary about this story. This woman had the wherewithal to stay put. Day after day, week after week rolled by, she was in that hut for closer to five weeks, and yet she stayed there. Imagine what would go through your mind as each week dragged by?

Your loved one is out there on the mountain, dead. You were with him when he died. You watched him take his last breath. And now you’re alone. You’re in a hut in a remote part of a remote country, a gazillion miles from your home. You have no way of communicating. You don’t speak English. Even if the hut is full of books and reading material, it's a given that nothing will be written in Czech. Do you try to get out? Should you stay? Will anyone find you? Will you run out of food before anyone reaches you?

So many questions, but I keep coming back to this one: Your other half, the love of your life, is dead on the side of the mountain. Just think about that from an emotional perspective for a moment. Your loved one. They're out there exposed to the elements. Their body is out there in the cold. You don't want them to be there. No-one knows they're dead, and yet you stay. And you wait. In a hut. On you own for over a month.

And I think that's what I find so baffling is that in a situation like this, logic always goes out the door. Emotion takes over. You become compulsive. You've got to get down the mountain. You've got to get help. But not in this case. This woman’s logic over-ruled every other human emotion she would have experienced. Grief, panic, fear, isolation, anxiety. Her logic told her not to move for over a month. Her logic told her that in the interests of self-preservation, she should stay where she was.

This is a tragic story. A man is dead, his body is still on the mountain. But this is a story that will fascinate the world in the coming days. And in time, psychologists too, I suspect. There will be books, there will be documentaries. On the face of it, it looks like a remarkable story of survival.