MOUNT SEFTON
Four years later came victory, final and complete, and won in a fashion peculiarly gratifying to young New Zealand. News came that Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald, a skilled mountaineer, was coming from Europe to achieve the technical success which Green and Mannering had just missed. Some climbers of South Canterbury resolved to anticipate him, and, for the honour of the colony, be the first to stand on the coveted pinnacle. A party of three—Messrs. Clark, Graham, and Fyfe—left Timaru, accordingly, and on Christmas Day 1894 achieved their object. Mr. Fitzgerald arrived only to find that he had been forestalled, and must find other peaks to conquer. Of these there was no lack; he had some interesting experiences. After his return to England he remarked to the writer that climbing in the Andes was plain and easy in comparison with the dangers and difficulties of the Southern Alps. One of his severest struggles, however, was not with snow and ice, but with a river and forest in Westland. Years before, Messrs. Harper and Blakiston had surmounted the saddle—or, more properly speaking, wall—at the head of the Hooker glacier, and looking over into Westland, had ascertained that it would be possible to go down to the coast by that way. Government surveyors had confirmed this impression, but no one had traversed the pass. It remained for Mr. Fitzgerald to do this and show that the route was practicable. He and his guide Zurbriggen accomplished the task. They must, however, have greatly underestimated the difficulties which beset those who would force a passage along the bed of an untracked western torrent. Pent in a precipitous gorge, they had to wade and stumble along a wild river-trough. Here they clung to or clambered over dripping rocks, there they were numbed in the ice-cold and swirling water. Enormous boulders encumbered and almost barred the ravine, so that the river itself had had to scoop out subterranean passages through which the explorers were fain to creep. Taking to the shore, as they won their way downward, they tried to penetrate the matted scrubs. Even had they been bushmen, and armed with tomahawks and slashers, they would have found this no easy task. As it was they returned to the river-bed and trudged along, wet and weary; their provisions gave out, and Fitzgerald had to deaden the pangs of hunger by chewing black tobacco. He found the remedy effectual, but very nauseating. Without gun or powder and shot, and knowing nothing of the botany of the country, they ran very close to starvation, and must have lost their lives had a sudden flood filled the rivers’ tributaries and so cut them off from the coast. As it was they did the final forty-eight hours of walking without food, and were on their last legs when they heard the dogs barking in a surveyor’s camp, where their adventure ended.
Not caring to follow in the wake of others, Mr. Fitzgerald left Aorangi alone, but Zurbriggen climbed thither on his own account in 1895. An Anglo-Colonial party gained the top ten years later, so that the ice-cap may now almost be classed among familiar spots. Still, as late as 1906 something still remained to be done on the mountain—namely, to go up on one side and go down on the other. This feat, so simple to state, but so difficult to perform, was accomplished last year by three New Zealanders and an Englishman. To make sure of having time enough, they started from their camp—which was at a height of between 6000 and 7000 feet on the eastern side—three-quarters of an hour before midnight. Hours of night walking followed over moonlit snows, looked down upon by ghostly crests. When light came the day was fine and grew bright and beautiful,—so clear that looking down they could see the ocean beyond the eastern shore, the homesteads standing out on the yellow-green plains, and on the snows, far, very far down, their own footprints dotting the smooth whiteness beneath them. It took them, however, nearly fourteen hours to reach the summit, and then the most dangerous part of their work only began. They had to gain the Hooker glacier by creeping down frosted rocks as slippery as an ice-slide. Long bouts of step-cutting had to be done, and in places the men had to be lowered by the rope one at a time. Instead of reaching their goal—the Hermitage Inn below the glacier—in twenty hours, they consumed no less than thirty-six. During these they were almost incessantly in motion, and as a display of stamina the performance, one imagines, must rank high among the exertions of mountaineers. Many fine spectacles repaid them. One of these, a western view from the rocks high above the Hooker glacier, is thus described by Mr. Malcolm Ross, who was of the party:—
“The sun dipped to the rim of the sea, and the western heavens were glorious with colour, heightened by the distant gloom. Almost on a level with us, away beyond Sefton, a bank of flame-coloured cloud stretched seaward from the lesser mountains towards the ocean, and beyond that again was a far-away continent of cloud, sombre and mysterious as if it were part of another world. The rugged mountains and the forests and valleys of southern Westland were being gripped in the shades of night. A long headland, still thousands of feet below on the south-west, stretched itself out into the darkened sea, a thin line of white at its base indicating the tumbling breakers of the Pacific Ocean.”
THE TASMAN GLACIER
Mr. Green, as he looked out from a half-way halting-place on the ascent of Aorangi, and took in the succession of crowded, shining crests and peaks surging up to the north and north-east of him, felt the Alpine-climber’s spirit glow within him. Here was a wealth of peaks awaiting conquest; here was adventure enough for the hands and feet of a whole generation of mountaineers. Scarcely one of the heights had then been scaled. This is not so now. Peak after peak of the Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar defaces the landscape. Nor do tourists, yet, throng the valleys in those insufferable crowds that spoil so much romance in Switzerland and Italy. Were they more numerous than they are, the scale of the ranges and glaciers is too large to allow the vantage-spots to be mobbed. Take the glaciers: take those that wind along the flanks of the Mount Cook range on its eastern and western sides, and, converging to the south, are drained by the river Tasman. The Tasman glacier itself is eighteen miles long; its greatest width is over two miles; its average width over a mile. The Murchison glacier, which joins the Tasman below the glacier ice, is more than ten miles long. And to the west and south-west of the range aforesaid, the Hooker and Mueller glaciers are on a scale not much less striking. The number of tributary glaciers that feed these enormous ice-serpents has not, I fancy, been closely estimated, but from heights lofty enough to overlook most of the glacier system that veins the Aorangi region, explorers have counted over fifty seen from one spot. Perhaps the finest sight in the alpine country—at any rate to those who do not scale peaks—is the Hochstetter ice-fall. This frozen cataract comes down from a great snow plateau, some 9000 feet above the sea, to the east of Aorangi. The fall descends, perhaps, 4000 feet to the Tasman glacier. It is much more than a mile in breadth, and has the appearance of tumbling water, storm-beaten, broken, confused, surging round rocks. It has, indeed, something more than the mere appearance of wild unrest, for water pours through its clefts, and cubes and toppling pinnacles of ice break away and crash as they fall from hour to hour.
THE CECIL AND WALTER PEAKS