Everyone is doing fine after our trip. The three main causes of our situation would be that the trip was significantly harder than it had been advertised by previous tramping club expeditions, that a few of the members in the party were not as experienced as they thought they were and that I should have had a better understanding of our intend path. The plan was always to be off track, however the terrain was much more technical than most in the group had come across before. After some very close calls on a technical descent I decided that continuing was too risky for two of the group members. Ideally, I would have turned around at this point, but i judged that those two did not have the ability to ascend the terrain that they were barely able to descend. At that point, I decided to activate the PLB, as I believed the risk for them was too high to go in either direction. It took roughly an hour for the helicopter to locate us. We stayed warm and waited with a tent fly to signal the helicopter.