SCRAMBLING down a 40ft cliff without safety equipment, being trailed by a wild cougar and wandering lost in sub-zero conditions for 24 hours.

It sounds like an incredible adventure story but it was a real-life ordeal for former Gillingham FC goalkeeper Harvey Lim.

Lim was a regular goalkeeper for Gillingham during the Eighties and early Nineties. He and his wife Sonya now live in Whistler, British Columbia, where he runs a picture framing shop.

An experienced skiier and outward-bound enthusiast, Lim, 37, and friend Jean-Michel Toriel, 38, last month decided to tackle one of the most challenging ski-routes of the nearby Coast mountain range.

The trip involved crossing a range of glaciers that joins two of the area's biggest peaks.

Lim told Ski and Board Magazine editor and former Kent Messenger Group reporter Arnie Wilson: "We planned to spend two days and a night on the trip, and the first day went fine. We reached the place we had planned to get to and camped out there.

"On the second day we set off again, but around noon we realised we had made a mistake and had gone down a glacier that was on the wrong route," he said.

It wasn't until they were halfway down the glacier that they realised their mistake.

"Going back up would have been far too risky, so our only option was to follow the glacier down and see where we ended up.

"We came out onto a cliff. Underneath us was a sheer drop of about 40ft. We had no choice, our only option was to somehow try and climb down it.

"I was beyond fear by this point," he said. "Your body goes into survival mode, you just do what you have to do."

Lim has some rock-climbing experience and was able to clamber down the exposed rock face, even though he was still wearing his ski boots.

Toriel, though, couldn't face the drop and tried to find another path, at which point he got stuck.

Lim said: "I could hear him but I couldn't see him I was just shouting into thin air. So we agreed I would go and get help."

As temperatures on the mountainside dropped to below zero, the ex-footballer set off into the wilderness leaving his friend alone on the cliff-face with nothing but a half litre of water and the clothes on his back.

He hiked for another four hours, until exhaustion forced him to stop. He camped in a sheltered spot and lit a fire to keep warm by.

Lim didn't know it at the time but from the moment he left his climbing partner behind, he was being trailed by a wild cougar that circled him as he lay sleeping. A helicopter team late spotted the ferocious cat's tracks and said the fire was the only thing that kept it at bay.

When he woke up he walked for another three hours until he came to a lake he recognised and asked a couple hiking nearby for help.

They drove him back to Whistler, where they alerted the search and rescue helicopter team. Within minutes the rescuers had located Toriel.

"We had a few cuts and bruises and were pretty shaken, but other than that we were fine" said Lim.

"It could have been pretty nasty. Death is never far away when you're in a situation like that."