Open Writing

On the eve of our gracious Queen’s coronation, a humble bee keeper from the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand, turned to an even humbler Sherpa from Nepal and said, “We knocked the bastard off.”

What a fine gift for our Queen. What a fine omen for the start of her reign. One of her Commonwealth stood on the summit of the highest mountain in the world, the first person to climb it, and in true New Zealand understatement said, “we knocked the bastard off.” No blasphemy or swearing intended; just the New Zealand way of saying, “we did it, Hoorah!”

Sir Edmund Hillary, as he is known today, has gone on to do great things. He has been our ambassador to India and has done sterling work establishing schools and hospitals for the people of Nepal. He hasn’t forgotten that Sherpa who was with him on the last bit of the climb to the top of the world’s highest mountain. He had no grand speeches prepared, no “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” No, just a simple statement and a sigh of relief. Had he been thinking of the time and date or the special Coronation gift he was giving to the Queen, he might have launched into more epic words, but being a New Zealander I doubt it, New Zealanders are masters of the understatement.

Where did this man learn his skills and the love of the mountains? Need one ask? That great spine of the Southern Alps was his own backyard. Mountains which rise from the sea to almost the height of Mont Blanc, with no gradual ascent to high plateaus, no, just straight up. You have to be good to climb around these things, they are not just a day’s walk.

Years ago my husband and a group of enthusiastic climbers decided to attempt the Copland Saddle, one of the lower passes around the Mount Cook area, over from the east side to the sea on the west. For four days they were holed up in a mountain bivouac in blizzard conditions before they decided to abandon the climb and return they way they came. A very disgruntled husband greeted me with his ice axe and pitons, but you have to bow to nature’s power. To go on would have been foolhardy and no doubt Sir Edmund felt this way on many occasions, he wouldn’t have been on the Everest team without a healthy respect and understanding of nature. Climbing Mount Cook is a hazardous business as is any climbing in these Southern Alps.

However people come to New Zealand to see the glaciers which flow into the sea and gaze on mountains which seem higher than they are, Everest size, and the tourist dollar helps to fill the coffers and we also like tourists, they are interesting folk. So how did I, a mere tramper and average climber, get to have a close look at the summit of Mount Cook?

A road straddles the West Coast, clinging to the cliff edges with steep drops into the rolling Tasman, at times descending to the black iron sands which make up the beaches along the western coast, sands which are exported to Japan for their iron content. Islands, which have not yielded to the breakers, stand off shore. Tall stacks such as the five knights, a haven for birds and seals and the Pancake rocks at Punakiki, with their blow holes spouting high into the air at high tide, are great tourist attractions.

Three passes cross the alps, the Lewis, the Arthurs and the Haast, just three ways to this tiny strip of land which holds some of New Zealand’s largest coal deposits and along which grow some of the finest native hardwood trees, clinging to their right to live on the sides of the mountains. Such beautiful country. To sit at sunset on the edge of Lake Matheson, on the coastal plain below Mount Cook and watch the afterglow at sunset or to watch sunrise, with the mountain mirrored in the lake, is more than impressive. It is indeed a beautiful country.

But to get back to the tourist and their need to see these places, and why shouldn’t they? After thirty two years in New Zealand I am still a tourist and want to see more. The glaciers which flow into the sea, namely the Fox and the Franz Joseph come down from the Tasman glacier on the slopes of Mount Cook, Mount La Pérouse and Mount Tasman, the three highest mountains in this area.

They no longer flow into the sea, they recede and advance from year to year, leaving huge boulders and glacial moraines and the water in the rivers they form is grey with glacial dust. The Franz Joseph township, with access to its glacier, is found in a deep dark valley which seldom sees the sun, so Fox at the foot of the Fox glacier is really the main tourist stop. From here helicopters and light aircraft take off to land on the Tasman glacier and give the tourists and less able amongst us a chance to get close to Mount Cook’s summit, or even fly round it. Trained guides will take you for a day’s walk on the glacier, and you do need a guide, for crevasses have a habit of hiding themselves beneath the snow, the amateur has no place here. Or you can simply take your car as far as it can go and then, climbing boot clad, you can follow the ever changing marked track over the boulders and moraines, formed in centuries past and still being formed today, to the foot of the blue ice which marks one of the tongues of the glacier, the place where it melts and sheds its bergs into the pools below to form the Fox river. The last moraine drops into a valley. The temperature changes and you chill. A wind blows off the ice and you hear it creak as another lump falls with a splash. You are in front of a moving, living monster, it is stronger than you, beware!

Where has it come from? Let’s go and look at the top end of this monster. No, we don’t have to don crampons and clutch ice axes. We don’t have to join guided tours and be prepared to camp out on the ice under the stars, we will leave that to the Ed Hillary’s of the world. We will simply choose a nice, clear, sunny morning and climb aboard a helicopter with a glass bubble for a floor. The pilot will give us a set of headphones so that we can hear him and, feeling as if we were part of a “Mash Unit,” we will rise into the air and head for the glacier. He will dip about, edging from side to side of this crack in the mountain which the Fox has created for itself. He will descend close to the guided glacier walkers and we will give them a wave. Then onwards and upwards, above the ridges on either side to the flat, gentle rise of the mighty Tasman glacier, with its many tongues descending by their chosen routes to the sea.

Here we are on the very edge of the final assault of Mount Cook. You could say the last base camp on Everest. We land and, step out and realise how thin the air is. We walk about on the crisp, pristine snow and gaze at the peaks, now close to us but still so inaccessible. We feel we have reached the final frontier, “Where no man has gone before,” and we make snow balls to throw it at the pilot. We are no Ed Hillary. We are tourists who have taken the easy way up, and aren’t we privileged?