With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps

by George Edward Mannering

During the day the gale blew itself out, and next morning at 3.45 we were in our steps of the day before, reaching the plateau in an hour and a half. The morning sun lit up the peaks with a rosy glow, soon his piercing beams forced us to put on the goggles, while the crust of the snow began to soften under the great power of penetration which the rays possess in the rarefied air. This forced us to plod onward in slushy snow as we headed right for the Linda Glacier, which we could see rounding the point of the north-eastern arête of our mountain.

On our right rose Mount Tasman clothed in ice, from which during the night an immense avalanche had descended. We walked close to its furthest point of motion as it lay stretched out on the level snow-field like a gigantic breakwater, and found it to be 300 paces in width; Dixon estimated that it covered from forty to fifty acres.

We now put on the rope, as crevasses began to appear in the gently rising slopes to the Linda Glacier. On our left we thought that the north-eastern ridge looked practicable, but deemed it better to rely on a route chosen by so able a mountaineer as Ulrich Kaufmann, and kept on our course for the Linda Glacier, taking ten-minute spells at leading and breaking steps in the soft and slushy snow, and winding our way amongst ever-increasing crevasses in search of snow bridges over which we would cautiously crawl.

Now we would have a stretch of gently rising snow, then a crevasse or perhaps a bergschrund, followed by a steep ascent for 100 or 200 feet, then a divergence to one side or the other to avoid a chaos of séracs or blocks of tumbled and broken ice; and so on, hour after hour. About noon we had gained a considerable elevation above the plateau and were well round the corner on the Linda Glacier. Into this elevated valley the sun poured down through a rarefied atmosphere on to slopes on either hand which reflected all the light and heat. The glare was something dreadful, and before midday our faces and hands had assumed the customary chocolate colour, and the skin was literally broiled off me; Dixon did not suffer to such an extent. The heat was most intense, though not of the enervating kind which one feels at lower altitudes.

Viewed from this quarter Aorangi presents a totally different form than from any other, and we began to be sanguine about accomplishing our task. I was in possession of notes and sketches of the route kindly sent me by Mr. Green, and these were of material assistance to us.

Before us lay the final peak with its capping of ice. From the summit, now in full view, descended in a north-westerly direction to the right a steep rocky arête connecting with the ridge leading on to Mount Tasman. From the lower parts of these rocks steep ice slopes streaked with marks from falling rocks descend to the upper portions of the Linda Glacier, bounded all along their lower termination by an immense bergschrund which severs them from immediate contact with the glacier itself.

On the left of the summit slopes the north-eastern arête, consisting of a ridge of alternate knife-edges of ice and gensdarmes or towers of rock. The northern side or face of this ridge descending to the Linda Glacier is composed of very steep slopes of ice set with three immense masses of red sandstone rocks, with two ice-filled couloirs or ditches between them. Up these two couloirs lay our route. We thought, however, that by leaving the glacier and taking to the crest of the ridge we could improve on the route, but soon found that the change was a mistake, and so struck back on to our old course up the middle of the glacier, the final slopes of which were very steep and exposed to the chance of avalanches from either hand.

It seemed a hopeless task this plunging through soft snow hour after hour, and it was nearly one o’clock ere we gained the edge of the big bergschrund and with difficulty discovered a sound enough snow bridge. Shortly before this an incident occurred in crossing one of these snow bridges which brought forcibly before our minds the serious nature of the work in which we were engaged. I—the lighter man by two stone—had crawled over in safety, and planting myself well in the soft snow above, was taking in the slack of the rope as Dixon followed, when suddenly he went through up to his armpits and was dangling in space, held up by a thin crust of snow and by the rope from above. I pulled with the strength of despair, and Dixon struggled till he secured a hold somehow on the other lip of the crevasse and got out.

That sort of thing is all very well to look back upon and talk over afterwards, but I am not likely to forget for many a long day the sensation of holding up a thirteen-stone man under such circumstances, and I must say that I should have been much easier in my mind if we had had such a man as Emil Boss or Ulrich Kaufmann on one end of the rope.

Immediately after crossing the big bergschrund step-cutting commenced; and from this point upwards every step, other than those on rocks, had to be cut in hard ice.