“At length, upon a sunny day,
They started off once more,
And climbed as they had climbed before,
Till, all their troubles past,
With scarce a halt upon their way,
They reached the top at last.”
Another Fragment.
All the attempts by Green’s route having ended in failure, Fyfe and George Graham now decided to try the western side of the mountain for a more direct route to the summit. Fyfe had always held the opinion that a practical way to the summit might be found from the upper part of the Hooker Glacier. On December 11th, about a month after our first arrival at the Hermitage, they started off one day to explore the Hooker side of Mount Cook. Fyfe eagerly scanned the mountain, and, on the way up, had picked out two routes by which he rightly thought the summit of the mountain might be reached. One was by way of the western spur of the lowest or most southerly peak, and thence along the ridge over the middle peak to the northern or highest point. The other route was from the head of the Hooker Glacier and up a nasty-looking couloir leading to Green’s Saddle and thence by the arête direct to the highest peak. The latter was the route by which they were eventually successful.
They left the Hermitage on December 16th with a tent and five days’ provisions. On the 18th, after camping for a couple of days in the valley, they made their way up the Hooker Glacier through badly broken and crevassed ice. In one place they found a wide crevasse where a snow bridge had fallen in and wedged itself lower down. It was so wide that their 60-feet rope would not reach across it, and, to make matters worse, steps had to be cut on the upper face of the crevasse. Camp was pitched on a rib of rock above the glacier on the right, and a reconnaissance made. On the following day, taking with them only blankets, provisions, and a little firewood, a second camp was made farther up the glacier.