Johnson—always self-denying and considerate for others—was out photographer-hunting again, having gone on to the Ball Glacier and shouted himself hoarse; he arrived back in camp at 1 a.m. (having been guided home by a fire which I had kept going on the moraine since our return), after having experienced a fruitless hunt of eight hours over rough rocks and ice. This finished the photography, and on the following day Cooper and Low went down to the Hermitage. A finer week for securing negatives could not have been wished for, and the thirty exposures resulted in the best set of mountain views yet obtained in New Zealand.
Now ensued a few days’ rest, Dixon, Johnson, and I being left in camp with a week’s provisions and designs on Aorangi, when Dixon should have recovered his strength.
Only one short excursion did Johnson and I make, to see if it were possible to reach the Great Plateau from the eastern buttress of the mountain, and so save crossing the Hochstetter Glacier and climbing the Haast Ridge beyond. Our endeavours were fruitless, for at a height of some 6,300 feet we were brought up by a high wall of rock. I still think, nevertheless, that the plateau could be reached in this manner when a good deal of snow fills the rocky couloirs or ditches which in places descend in this wall of rock. Should this be so, it will no doubt prove to be the route of the future for reaching the Linda Glacier and Aorangi.
The rock-climbing here, however, is very dangerous, as the frost has split the rocks up in all directions. One small stone thrown down from above sufficed to start many tons of loose matter in the couloirs, which rattled down to the glacier below, sending up clouds of dust in its descent.
CHAPTER VI
THE ASCENT OF THE HOCHSTETTER DOME
Camp under De la Bêche—Twelve Hours on Snow and Ice—The Pangs of Hunger
Thursday, April 4, was a memorable day, for Annan coming up from the Hermitage with a further supply of the ever-welcome ‘tucker,’ we started on one of the finest mountain expeditions I have seen in our New Zealand mountains.
It was not part of our original plan to ascend the Dome; we merely intended to reach the Lendenfeld Saddle and get a glimpse of the opposite coast and the western ocean, and it was with this object in view that Johnson, Annan, and I shouldered our swags and tramped off to the foot of De la Bêche, which was made in three hours’ hard walking.