Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 3 (August 1, 1931)

Among The High Alps

Among The High Alps

Pictures and Pleasuring in the Aorangi Region.

In this article, timely just now when many New Zealand lovers of the out-of-doors are turning their thoughts to snow sports, the writer draws upon his memories of holiday excursions about the Mt. Cook Hermitage, the attractions of easy walks and climbs and ice traverses, and the dramatic beauty of the mountain landscapes in that grand central region of our Alpine world.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when a trip to the Mt. Cook Hermitage, as a base for alpine pleasuring was a rather formidable undertaking, calling for much expenditure of time, trouble and money. It took at least three days each way from Christchurch or Dunedin, and it was only in the summer months that the visit could be made. Now the leisurely old horse-coach has given place to the comfortable and fast motor car; the ramshackle old place of stay has been replaced by a beautiful and quite luxurious hotel on a commanding site, and this holiday place is open for travellers all the year round. It is quite an easy matter now-a-days, and comparatively inexpensive, to spend a glorious week or two amidst scenes that are the completest change imaginable from the surroundings, the conditions, and the atmosphere of our working world.

The average visitor to the Hermitage finds that the maximum of enjoyment of this wonderful region lies in just “pottering around.” The high climbs are only for the extra-vigorous few. Such easy ascents as Sealey and the Ball Pass across the lower part of the Cook Range, and the various glacier excursions are quite enough to satisfy most people. True, some who do not know anything about alpine work come here quite confident of their ability to tackle even icy Aorangi. But a day's clambering on the lower hills and ice-flows usually convinces the tyro that a ten or twelve-thousand foot peak is not for him this season. He is captured, however. Once he sets foot on the mountains, samples the peculiar joy of page 20 chipping steps with an ice-axe in the clean, hard, bottle-green or blue-shadowed ice, or descending some snow-slope on the dizzy ski—even if he lands nose-down and feet up in the process—the mountains have him in their grip. He—or she—will return again and again, to live a few too short days or weeks in a landscape and an atmosphere that seem a different world from the land of towns and bustling business.

The tonic of the mountains—there is no medicine like it, alike for body and brain.

Pukaki's Land-and-Water-scapes.

You skirt the shores of Lake Takapo and Lake Pukaki on your way through the Mackenzie Country—a storyland of the sheep-raising days—to the wonderful valley where the Hermitage sits under the shoulder of a tussocky mountain. Pukaki is a kind of settling-tank on the grand scale. It receives the many-streamed Tasman River, bearing the washdown of the central part of the Aorangi glacial system, and its upper part is gradually being filled up with the gravelly silt of the mountains. From its lower end rushes the strong Waitaki River, clear, clean and blue. The lake bed receives all the debris borne down from the Alps. Pukaki means a river source, the waterhead; so the name is literally descriptive.

The lake has no beauty in itself, but it is a perfect mirror at certain times of the day and in the right weather, for the alpine glories at its head.

In the old days of coaching to the Hermitage we used to stay a night at the Pukaki Hotel, and never have I seen greater glory of crystal morning light and projection of mountain splendour on glassy water than that early vision from the Pukaki bridge crossing the blue river just where it issues from the lake.

And should you chance to be at the lake-foot in the evening, just after sunset, you will have a scene enchanting in its tender wealth of colour and its air of dreamy restfulness. The purple forms of the encircling ranges and the exquisite blue that dyes the distant alpine shoulders and the foothills are thrown far across the glimmerglass of Pukaki. High and beyond, the ice-peaks and sierras gleam in cloudlike pinnacles, all tinged a warm and rosy hue by the afterglow; a vision celestial.

The Name Aorangi.

At such a time, and at sunrise, you can appreciate the fine Maori fancy, the thought of a poetic people, which gave the supreme peak the name Aorangi. Frequently, but quite incorrectly, the name is said to mean “cloud-piercer.” “Ao” means “light” or “cloud,” and “rangi” is the sky. There is nothing in its name to signify piercing, or anything like it. A literal translation of Aorangi leaves one the choice of any of three equivalents— “Light of Heaven,” “World in the Sky,” or “Cloud of Heaven,” each of which is descriptively appropriate.

Wild Garden of the Hooker.

Of all the places of charm within easy walking distance of the Hermitage, the pleasantest for a stroll is the tussocky valley up which a track leads between the crumbling precipices of the Cook Range and the lateral moraine of the Hooker Glacier. This glen is strewn about with huge lichen-crusted rocks either fallen from the heights or borne by ice in the era when the glacier was wider and longer than it is to-day. A stream ripples through the glen, a beautiful little stream of purest, coldest water, almost as blue as the sky; it is filtered of silt by its passage underground from the glacier. It goes cascading and murmuring down in curves and half-coils, and sometimes you may see the blue mountain duck swimming on the pools, and hear their peculiar whistling call, the “whio, whio” that gives them their Maori name. It is a wild park, but without trees; small alpine shrubs cluster about the grey rocks; and in the season of flowers all the mountain blossoms are here—the golden-eyed celmisia daisy with its curious soft white furry thickness of stem and leaf; the great cupleaved page 21 buttercup, or mountain lily as it is popularly called; and the carpeting of sweet little gentians and their like. And all around is the tremendous sweep of sky-high peaks, alive with the voice of avalanches and many waters.

But to see the garden valley at its best you must come here in or about the month of December. Then all the flowers and the blossoming shrubs are out, and the glen of the blue stream is fragrant under the midsummer sun. The celmisia is particularly plentiful. It has a Maori name not generally known, tikumu (with the accent on the first syllable).
A Favourite Glissading Field In The New Zealand Alps. A scene on the slopes of Mt. Sealey (near the Hermitage) shewing Mt. Cook, 12,349ft., in the centre of the picture.

A Favourite Glissading Field In The New Zealand Alps.
A scene on the slopes of Mt. Sealey (near the Hermitage) shewing Mt. Cook, 12,349ft., in the centre of the picture.

The Ngai-Tahu and Ngati-Mamoe people came to the upland parts of the land hunting the weka, the woodhen, when it was fat with feeding on the mikimiki berries, and they took the opportunity to gather tikumu for personal decoration. The thick gleaming leaves were worn as a head adornment, a substitute for feathers. The leaves were sometimes split—you can do it with a pocket-knife, they used thin flakes of stone—and were made up into soft waving bands which the girls wore as anklets and armlets in their dances and on other festive occasions.

From the Malte Brun.

It is much easier now to reach that wonderful little alpine camp, the Malte Brun Hut, than it was in the days when I first visited the Mount Cook country, nearly thirty years ago. That was in the days of the old Hermitage, a dilapidated yet comfortable hostelry built by Mr. Huddlestone, down on the plain between the present fine hotel and the Hooker River. There was no bridge across the Hooker then, and we had to cross the swift and dangerous glacier river on horseback. There was a cage there, running on wire ropes, high above the river, and it was hard work hauling oneself across, so the sure-footed horses were preferable; and there was the rough ride up the side of the Tasman Glacier to the Ball Hut. Now the river is bridged, the roads are good, new huts have been built. It is an easy walk up along the Tasman Glacier to the Malte Brun Range; no easier and more wonderful ice traverse in New Zealand. The picture from the snag little terrace on which the hut stands is more than enough to compensate for the trouble of reaching the place.

What a look-out it is there, nearly six thousand feet above the sea and five hundred feet above the level glacier, early in the day before the haze dims the bright glories of the dividing range. The great king peaks of the New Zealand Alps are all there before you, a bare two miles away, across the ice-floored valley, peaks page 22 page 23 ten thousand to twelve thousand feet, lifting from enormous bases of black rock, seamed with snowfields, glittering with glaciers. Up and up they soar, into heights sharp-etched in white fire against the stainless blue. Dazzling—it is more than dazzling—it burns on your eyes; you had best put on your snow-glasses.

Those pinnacles of fire, those minarets of Tasman and De la Beche and their fellow rangatiras of the Alp world, how they throw back with redoubled radiance the strong light of morning!—how grandly their ice-mailed shoulders stand up, glacier-armoured through the ages, seemingly for ever defended against man's assault by their circumvallation of crevasses and bergschrunds, their knife-sharp aretes, their streams of avalanches. The marvel is that so many men—and women too—of clear heads and stout and limber muscles and strong lungs, have been found to scale those heaven-high shining walls.

Iceland's Eternal Work.

Peaks of eternal silence, those mountain domes and pinnacles—yet not silent, for as we gaze out from the Malte Brun a mighty avalanche comes plunging down from De la Beche's ice cornices. It thunders from ledge to ledge, powdering like spray, until it comes to rest on the Tasman far below. And now and again we hear the voices of the cataracts that sparkle like living dancing silver against the black rock, their distant music rising and falling with the breeze.

Over those precipices directly opposite us, the flanks of the mountains, avalanches are constantly falling, and their size and number increase as the sun mounts the heavens. The continually accumulating masses of snow and ice sag slowly out over the black and grey battlements until they split off and crash with far-echoing roar, bearing with them the bones of the mountains to make moraine and silt and build the lower lands. So before one's eyes goes on the never-ceasing process of erosion and levelling down, the eternal miracle of Nature's navvy-work.

A Little Storm in Alpland.

Two of us were up on the sharp terminal spur of the Sealey Range one day. Sealey is nearly six thousand feet high and between three and four thousand feet above the Hermitage, at the range foot. From the little mountain tarn we worked along the narrow rocky summit until we reached the extreme end of the spur overlooking the Mueller Glacier. A vertical precipice dropped at our feet. Directly opposite, across the glacier, was giant Sefton, ice-sheathed, shedding avalanches every few minutes. Glaciers and snowfields blazed all around in an intense burning whiteness.

It was warm, and there was scarcely a breath of wind when we reached the end of the range, and it quickly became close and oppressive.

“Thunderstorm's coming,” one of us said.

In a few moments the still air was heavily charged with electricity. We looked for some place of shelter. There was no cave or any shelter of that kind, so we just descended a few yards below the spur top and waited events. The steel of our ice-axes vibrated and hummed with electricity, and I suddenly snatched off my hat—it felt as if there was a bee buzzing around in it. Jack Clarke grinned; he said, “Better put it on again, or you'll have what little wool you've got singed off you.” Sure enough our hair was buzzing and tingling and standing on end, an uncomfortably eerie sensation. To be on the safe side, we left our ice-axes lying on the ground and moved away.

Presently the heat and gloom were split by a terrific burst of lightning and thundercrash. The lightning did not come in mere flashes, but in blazes that covered the whole sky, and the Alps bellowed with big-gun reverberations. The thunder culminated in a final crash that shook the mountain under us. Then page 24 down came the rain, such rain as comes only in the high country. It ceased as suddenly as it began. The sun shone out; the air was cool and clear. The mountain land seemed all the better for the lightning god's little fit of temper; all the world was fresher for its rain bath. The great cups of the Ranunculus Lyalli were brimming with water as we picked up our ice-axes again, and clambered down towards the little lake on Sealey-side, and then descended to the Hermitage for dry clothes and something good to drink.

That was but a trifle of a mountain storm, a clearing of the air; it only lasted half-an-hour or little more. But the feature such meteorological disturbances have in common with a fierce storm such as that which overwhelmed a party of five young people on the Tasman Glacier some years ago is the suddenness with which they arise. Gales spring up with scarcely any warning on the finest of days.

Ordinarily the traverse of such a glacier is an easy matter, and travellers may not think of consulting the barometer before they set out on a few hours' walk. But in Alpland nothing should be taken for granted.

“Where the mountains lift, through perpetual snows, Their lofty and luminous summits.”—Longfellow. Pinnacle peaks of the Southern Alps, with the Fox Glacier in the centre, seen across the wonderful forests of South Westland, South Island, New Zealand.

Where the mountains lift, through perpetual snows, Their lofty and luminous summits.”—Longfellow.
Pinnacle peaks of the Southern Alps, with the Fox Glacier in the centre, seen across the wonderful forests of South Westland, South Island, New Zealand.

The Sliding Mountains.

Thunderstorms have been known to start avalanches of snow and great slides of loose rock. There is a typical sharply inclined plane of shingly rock and gravel, on the side of the Cook Range above the Hooker Valley. Making for the Ball Pass from the Hooker we used to cross this with caution and in silence, knowing that careless walking and loud talking has been known to set these fans of loose mountain debris in motion.

These mountains, one cannot but observe, are in an advanced stage of disintegration. Tremendous as they are, they are wasting away before one's eyes. Those vast masses of moraine borne down by the glaciers, those huge slides of loose rock that fill the couloirs are gradually reducing the dimensions of the peaks and ranges. The process is comparatively rapid in such slatey Alps as these, so unlike the granite precipices further south. The hills are not eternal here. Still, they will do our time!

page break
“Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?”—Epictetus. Our Children's Gallery.—(1) Betty, Rona and Alan Barnes (Lower Hutt, Wellington); (2) Cora Crocker (Palmerston North); (3) Helen and Alick Gordon (Lower Hutt); (4) Doreen and Johnny Hoskins (Palmerston North); (5) Ngaire and Barrie Sadler (Christchurch); (6) Graham Young (Khandallah, Wellington); (7) Philip and Esme Poppleton (Wellington); (8) Ian Gordon Thompson (Wanganui); (9) Elsie Trolle (Ngaio, Wellington); (10) son of Mr. W. W. Stewart (Auckland); (11) Trever Askew (Lower Hutt, Wellington).

Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?”—Epictetus.
Our Children's Gallery.—(1) Betty, Rona and Alan Barnes (Lower Hutt, Wellington); (2) Cora Crocker (Palmerston North); (3) Helen and Alick Gordon (Lower Hutt); (4) Doreen and Johnny Hoskins (Palmerston North); (5) Ngaire and Barrie Sadler (Christchurch); (6) Graham Young (Khandallah, Wellington); (7) Philip and Esme Poppleton (Wellington); (8) Ian Gordon Thompson (Wanganui); (9) Elsie Trolle (Ngaio, Wellington); (10) son of Mr. W. W. Stewart (Auckland); (11) Trever Askew (Lower Hutt, Wellington).

page 26