THE WESTLAND GLACIERS
I was back at Waiho Gorge and content—seventy miles from the nearest train, and with a mail once a week.
At Waiho, there are a few small huts, three cottages and the hotel. The Glacier Hotel is a two-storied wooden building, with verandah and balcony, and accommodation for between thirty and forty; it has a dining-room, smoking-room and two sitting-rooms, in one of which is an excellent piano; there are two bathrooms with a good supply of hot and cold water, and soon the house will be lighted by electricity—the power to be brought from a convenient waterfall close by. Under the same roof is a store, where you can buy groceries, boot-laces and tobacco, and in the same store you find a post-office with a telephone—that indispensable luxury of the back blocks. It is in the parish of Ross, and four times a year the Anglican clergyman drives seventy miles to hold a service. While I was staying here, the Bishop of Christchurch took a journey of two hundred miles to conduct a Confirmation in the smoking-room: there were nine candidates, some of whom had come more than forty miles. The Presbyterian minister also comes from Ross and holds a service, and sometimes the Roman Catholic priest spends a night at the hotel.
At this hotel, tourists may feel that they are visitors and friends, so kindly is their welcome, and so homelike and pleasant are the arrangements made for them. No one need be dull—something is always happening—a draper comes through with his pack of goods for sale; a farmer rides up with his daughters from a homestead thirty miles south, on their way to a dance held in a hall twenty miles further on; news too continually filters through—for the settlers all know one another, and take the keenest interest in each other's welfare. Catering is sometimes difficult. There are cows for milk, chickens and a kitchen garden, sheep too, in paddocks not far off; but all other provisions must either come in the weekly coach or by steamer to the small township of Okarito, seventeen miles away. Okarito is like other west coast harbours, in having a bar, which, in stormy weather, makes it impossible for even a small steamer to enter or leave the port. Often, for weeks at a time, the inhabitants of Waiho Gorge must depend on the mail coach for their supplies.
I had come back to learn more of the mountains and their ways, if only the weather would allow me to climb.
For a short expedition up the Franz Josef Glacier, a hut stocked with provisions and blankets stands ready a few hours' tramp from Waiho, and for a day on the Fox, the farmhouse at Weheka serves as base; but for any long climb up either glacier, the climber must be equipped with tent, sleeping-bag, food, clothes, and sometimes a small spirit-stove. The great drawback to such mountaineering is that these necessaries must all be carried, and, as my guide considered that I had enough to do to carry myself, my only share was my own small camera.
In Westland, an Alpine tent is made of thin white mackintosh, with mackintosh floor and loose outer fly, also of mackintosh. The tent measures six feet by seven feet. The ridge-pole is of rope slipped through the top of the tent, and fastened securely to the spikes of two ice-axes set up at each end. The rope is next made firm round heavy stones, and the strings of the fly are held in place by more stones. Sleeping-bags are of eider-down or of blankets doubled over and stitched. For food you have bread, butter, tinned meats, tinned fruit, tea and milk. I spent several nights in a tent and found it surprisingly comfortable. When the tent has to be pitched on bare rock, the floor, in spite of extra clothing and a sleeping-bag, makes a hard bed, especially if bad weather compels you to stay in the tent longer than one night; but if it is possible to camp near shrubs, you can then collect branches and ferns, and these, packed closely together under the mackintosh, make a floor like a spring mattress. Whichever it was—either soft or hard—I contrived to sleep very well.
My first long expedition from Waiho was up the Franz Josef Glacier to Cape Defiance Hut, with a climb next day up Mount Moltke, a mountain which rises immediately behind the hut and is between seven and eight thousand feet in height. It is an easy climb.
After an early breakfast we left the hut at half-past seven. First we climbed up a rough track through the bush, where coprosmas and currant-trees bore dense and gorgeous clusters of berries—red, yellow and pink; then over grassy slopes, and on and up, by rocky ridges and snowfields; again more rocks and more steep slopes of snow, until at eleven o'clock, we stood on the summit, with the pure air and the view for our reward.