The Mountain

The Kaponga district owes the very nature of its existence to the peak that dominates its skyline. Its weather and climate, its soils and topography, the location and shapes of the landscapes its settlers crafted, are all only adequately explained when the mountain is included in the picture. We leave the larger story of Egmont's geological and human history to others, but we must say something of its place in the psyche of the Kaponga community and of their involvement in its affairs.

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Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.

So wrote William Blake, and the settlers' involvement with Mt Egmont owed something to the spirit of the Romantic movement, which had turned to wild landscapes to gain insight into the beauty, terror and mystery of the universe. Their interest was also shaped by a probing curiosity encouraged by the rising realm of science, and by a widening world of sport in which mountaineering was one option. When for a time they made their settlement the most convenient doorway to what was then the North Island's one really accessible major peak, they found their enthusiasms to be widely shared.

In their first year or two the settlers had too many other pressing concerns to give much attention to Mt Egmont. Though the surveyors knew differently, there seems to have been a common belief that a ‘treacherous swamp of large dimensions and sullen aspect’ lay between them and the mountain.⁵⁸ The lead in unravelling the mysteries of Egmont's southern slopes was taken by Thomas Dawson, who came to Manaia in 1881 as its first postmaster, bringing valuable experience of the mountain from his time as telegraphist at Okato, 1873–78. Using E.J. Ellerm's farmhouse, about a mile up Manaia Road from the Kaponga township site, as a base, he began probing the southern slopes over weekends and holidays. On a Sunday in March 1883 he first heard the falls that bear his name. On his way back he arranged for three Kaponga settlers, F.W. Wilkie* and E.J. Ellerm and his brother, to join the expedition that located the falls the following Easter Monday.

The next summer with E.J. Ellerm's help he set up a base camp near the falls. Over 13 and 14 April 1886 he led the first, rather foolhardy, ascent to the summit from the south. The Star of 17 April 1886 carried a detailed account by the Rev William Grant, a young Presbyterian minister, who was one of the party of three who made the climb. Dawson had invited Grant to join a party leaving Manaia on the afternoon of Monday, 12 April, Dawson himself having gone up several days earlier to make a track through the bush, set up a camp, and do some exploring. Arriving in Manaia around midday, Grant found that the rest of the party had changed their minds. He therefore went up to the mountain alone, finding out as he passed through Kaponga that Dawson had taken a party up to the lower crater (later named Fantham's Peak) that day, and being warned that he could not possibly reach the camp before dark. After finding the start of the track that Dawson had made he decided to turn back and spent the night at F.W. Wilkie's whare. Wilkie and Grant set out early next morning and reached Dawson's camp at 8.30am. Equipped with a rope, a tomahawk for cutting steps in the ice, a field glass and a knapsack of sticks to boil the billy at the summit, the three began their ascent at 9.30. Grant's account has vivid pen pictures of the mountain scenery and of the great panoramas of countryside which they page 52 saw through shifting clouds as they climbed. Dawson had expected to reach the summit by early afternoon, but much of the climb was through snow and ice and they did not get there till 4.30pm. They waited for the moon, by whose light they made a cold and hazardous descent. Grant wrote:

Wilkie, having the rope tied to his arm, went first, I followed, and Dawson came last. I was put in the centre as being liable to slip, not having my stick shod. Then, feeling our way very cautiously at first, we began the descent. Once, in getting over a ridge, my stick missed its hold, and away I swung, but providentially the rope was there to pull me up, and I soon got righted again. Shortly afterwards, and just as I had got my heel firmly jammed into an ice step and was leaning back, Dawson cried out, ‘I have lost my footing!’ and came down gently upon my shoulders, and soon recovered himself again. These little episodes made us even more careful than we had been, but we did not breathe freely until we reached the lower crater.

Once below the bush-line they became half lost in the darkness. Eventually at 1.30am. Grant and Wilkie gave up hope of reaching the camp before morning, and wet, weary and cold, being lightly clad, they lit a fire and waited for dawn. But Dawson kept going, possibly because he was due at his Manaia post and telegraph duties that morning, and, mistaking the Kapuni for the Kaupokonui, he bypassed the camp. In due course the other two found the track Dawson had made earlier, reached the camp, and were thrown into some anxiety on finding Dawson had not been there. They breakfasted and eventually pushed on. Grant was much relieved when Dawson got into Manaia shortly after he himself did.

Visits to Dawson Falls and climbs of the slopes above it now became very much the fashion. In March 1887 Dawson and F.W. Wilkie led a party of about 14 on an ascent. On this trip the lower crater was named Fantham's Peak after a member of the party, Fanny Fantham, who was the first woman to climb to it. Five men of this party went to the summit.⁵⁹ By April 1887 Dawson, with the help of one or two youths, had cleared a good walking track from the top of Manaia Road to the falls. Manaia's ‘Our Own’ wrote on 28 April that since this was done ‘fully two hundred people from Wanganui to Opunake have visited the falls, about one-fourth of the number reached the summit by this route, whilst as many more made the lower crater’. Others were clearly catching Dawson's enthusiasm. In May 1887 the Road Board applied for a government grant ‘to open up Dawson's track to Mount Egmont’. In June moves began for a subscription list and voluntary labour to fell a few acres of bush at the falls and sow grass for a horse paddock. Their success is indicated by an August 1888 Road Board resolution to sow the six acres felled at Dawson Falls. For the rest of our period Kaponga was very much ‘put on the map’ by the steady flow of New Zealand and overseas visitors who made their way up Manaia Road to the mountain. But Dawson's constant treks up and down the road came to an end in November 1888 when his superiors decided to transfer him because page 53 the mountain was too much of a rival to his work. Three months later he and a young Manaia man who had helped cut the Egmont track were drowned in a boating accident on the Wanganui River.