WAIHO AND FOX.

Hokitika Guardian, 29 September 1917, Page 4

WAIHO AND FOX.

WHERE TEUTON NAMES SHOULD BE DISCARDED.

(By James Cowan in Lyttelton Times.)

A recent newspaper reference to the “ Franz Josef” Glacier is a reminder that the loudly-expressed Government announcement, made more than a year ago, that enemy names should be expunged lrom our Southern Alpine map has not yet advanced beyond the _kept-steadily-in-view stage. It is not practicable, of course, to alter the present maps, but it is perfectly easy to decide for public use upon official substitutes for the numerous names of Teuton origin which decorate the central sector of the Alpine chain, on both sides of the divide as well as on the saddle ot the Aorangi region itself. Ihe Lands and Survey Department is believed to have the matter in hand, but apparently it is unable to flecide what British designations are the most fitting to replace tbe vons and Fritzes with which the snow peaks and ice flows were so plentifullv sprinkled back in the ’sixties, Among the many pioneer climbers and the Alpine guides who followed the early-days surveyors and explorers there should be no trouble in making a worthy selection. The one thing needful is that, whatever names are chosen for the rechrislening of the icy spires and the waterfalls and glaciers that give a wild glory to the South Westland ranges, the nomenclature shall be appropriate to the spot and memorise some climber who has carried swag and ice axe over that mountain land. A danger is that some politician or other, whose association with the toilgand adventure of mountaineering and path-finding is nil, is the first person likely to be honoured in such a way ; but a sense of what is fitting in name-giving surely will prevent the Survey Department, at any rate, from recommending an incongruous rebaptism. <! LAC IKK OJ- Tint “SWIRT.INT. RIYKK’” So far as the “ Franz Josef’’ Glacier is concerned, there need be no delay in gazetting a new name. What better could there be than the original Native name of the river which issues from the- terminal face of this great writhing tongue of ice and goes roaring down in a swift torrent to the sea—the Waiho or River of the Swirling Current ? That is the name put on record by von Haast when he explored South Westland in 1565 : it has been corrupted in later times to Waiho, the present name of the hotel and post office at the end of the motoring road from Hokitika, on the river bank, two miles below the glacier. Yon Haast unfortunately did not consider the descriptive'Maori term worth the giving to the glacier which led the Swirling Waters; and so we find him inflicting upon our maiden maps his Franz Josef and Unser ID it/, and Moltke and sundry other names of alien and uncouth sound. We may certainly set all these in our index of expurgations, most of all ‘Tlnsea Fritz," tire which was clapped upon a splendid waterfall, plunging down 1200 feet over an enormous sheer wall of rock about three miles up the glacier. 011 the other side of the Divide two or three exceptions may quite properly he made—the great Hoclistetter icelall and the Haast bivouac, commemorating the two greatest explorer geologists of our early davs, and the Meuiler Glacier, called after a worthy pioneer surveyor and Commissioner of Crown Lands, who is now resident in Auckland. But the names of Teuton monarehs and princes and Prussian soldiers are worse than out of place on a New Zealand map.

About this Wailio. tumbling down there through the jungly bush that fills most ot the sloping eleven miles between the. glacier lace and the Tasman Sea. It well deserves its mime. It is a narrow but dangerous river, swift-running, deep and full of treacherous eddies and whirlpools. A suspension bridge for foot passengers spans it at the terminus of the driving road, ninety-one miles from Hokitika, but when I last saw the river there was no way of crossing on horseback but at fords, which frequently were unsafe for days at a time. A curious feature about these short-coursed glacial rivers on the West Coast is the rapidity with which they rise in the summer afternoons. On a warm day the Wailio would be a raging torrent at three o’clock in the afternoon, quite unfordable ; at dark it would be quite down to its ordinary level. The cause of this could readily be understood on visiting the glacier face, watching the surface streams hurrying down every little ice-valley and observing every now and again huge blocks of ice, loosened by the sun's influence, come tumbling from the lofty undermined snout of the frozen river and smashing into whole squadrons of bergs in the stream flowing from the glacial | cave. I THK LEGEND OK THE ICE-CAVE. I That cave under the Wailio iceface is a wonderful place, and it is one of the very few places in these parts to which a scrap of Native history or legend hangs. The river, in a dirty-white stream, comes plunging out of the shadowy cavern, a river powerful even at its source in summer time. The cave is arched of roof and surrounded and topped by concentric rings of ice, cracked in half-moons, as if in readiness to part company with the parent glacier and crash into the turbid pools The river tunnels its way under the half-mile-wide tongue of ice lor a long distance before it emerges from this cave. Higher up, here and there, it can be heard roaring over its hidden bed, and there are deep moulins or glacier wells, and tremendous cracks, through which the melted waters of the surface trickle until we heartbeat drop with ringing tinkles from ledge to ledge, many scores of feet below. This is the legend of the Waiho iee-face, as I heard it from Charley Douglas, the wonderful lone-hand explorer of South Westland, who landed here with the first golcU

tried to stem tlie torrent, but were were born back by the furious rush of the river. They could get no further than t.iie gales of the cave, and at last they gave up in despair and abandoned the idea of reaching those seductive realms of the bright Ao-Marama.” The mystic light they saw glimmering in the cold blue cave was simply the sunshine from above glinting down through a deep moulin in the glacier, and refracted in a pinky glow from the walls of the ice-tunnel.

.Nowadays there are sightly farms and comfortable homes in the valley of the Waiho. a grateful relief from the eternal dark green of the hush, and the roads are good. The rivers alone, where they remain unbridged, as is tbe case practically everywhere south of the Waiho, are as intractable and fomidable as they were in the days ofthe pioneer diggers, when scores of lives were lost in the pitiless “ SwirlingWaters.” For gorgeous beauty cl landscape and glory ol colouring, there is scarcely a spot in all our wonderful land so grand as that approach to the glacier from the Waiho. A KOOK-C.AKI)RNOK TIIB KUSH. Close to the glacier is the Callerv Gorge, a tropically wooded canon of gloomy grandeur. Typical of the queer things of the Coast was a bush-hut we saw at the mouth ot the Gallery ; it was a wliare owned by a gold fossieker, one of the old hands who still find flood-borne gold in the thick velvety cushions of moss which cover the riverside boulders. The hog backed roof of the hut had been covered with sods and turf in the past, presumably to make it cool in summer and warm in winter, just as the Urewera Maoris heap up the earth around their totara-bark-roofed houses. The ancient wliare was overgrown with thick grass and moss, fostered by the almost perpetual drip of the tree-shadowed gorge, and up on the house-top was a little garden patch. The venerable proprietor was perched on his cave-like* lutt gathering strawberries from tbe roof-garden. Last season he had a crop of sweet peas in the same place. This Gallery creek was so christened after a digger who discovered seven pounds weight of gold in the gravels ofthe river-bed.

From’another pocket in the creekbottom worth of gold has been taken. Rut the goldfossickers don’t seem to trouble the actual glacierstream. That is left to the holiday traveller, who has a craze for getting on the ice which rather amuses the old hands. Some of them declare that in all their fifty years on the Coast they have never set foot on the ice and don't intend to. They “ don’t see any sense in it.” The Waiho ice-flow is a rough-and-tumble snot, quite unlike the Tasman glacier, on the eastern slope, where for mile after mile you liny travel up a gently inclined plane almost as smooth as a table, interrupted onlv by the crevasses. The terminal face, breaking suddenly off into high cliffs ol solid ice, is about half a mile wide and a hundred feel thick, or deep. Its length is eight and a half miles, and in that distance it descends nine thousand feet, until it dissolves in a discoloured torrent within 700 feet of the sea level. In that fact lies the explanation of its amazing rnggedness, its ice-falls and mountainous pinnacles. The great icefall three-quarters of a mile up the glacier is an amazingly wild bit of ice architecture.' The glacier follows the unevenness of the ground like a river, and the rocky obstacles and sudden declivities cause it to heave aird fall like a mountain cascade. The ice-fall is a monstrous confused mass of squirming packed ice, broken into sharp spires and aiguilles. TIIE KOX GI.ACIEE. But the Waiho glacier is now fairly well known to summer-time travellers from Canterbury. Much less frequented is the Fox, which ; really is a still more magnificent spectacle. It is only about nineteen miles beyond the Waiho, but the want ot a driving road and the necessary bridges sufficiently accounts for its lack of fame among New Zealanders. For its name there is ample warrant; the late .Sir William Fox visited it during his Premiership of New Zealand, when a Westland journey was not the simple matter it is to-day. But at its head, among other great heights are the “ Bismarck Peaks,” a name with which we can now quite well dispense. The Waiho and the Fox are separated by a series of sharp forest-clothed ridges aml deep rocky valleys, across and around which the horse-track winds ; and I am never likely to forget the wonderful picture of thunderous mountain gloom and mountain glory which presented itself one afternoon, clearing tip after rain, looking up the wild bush gorge of the Wai-Kukupa—- “ Pigeon Creek ” —to the giants of the central Alps. The terminal lace of the Fox is only some /^pfi

hunters fifty-two -years ago. Ir those early days of gold-digging, ir 1865, a party of Coast Maoris, who had penetrated the forests in then roamings, set amazed eyes on thi: strange snout of ice, glittering white against thcliving green of the tore:'! and the range slopes. They hat gotten the prospecting craze, lih<the whites, and they conceived tlu not unscientific idea that the sourct ot the gold dust would be found a the river heads They came to thi: strange cavern, from which tin shallow but swift river issued. Teer ing into the arched recess, they sav a strange light, a rosy eilulgenci from the depths of the ice-tunne far ahead. “ The World of Light! ’ they cried, and then and there the; jumped to the quaint eonclusioi that the cave led right through t< the other side of the sharp mountaii ridge, and that the light they sav was that of some strange, new land a bright region, where all thing were —the veritable land of plenty the matrix oi the golden sands. Si they dubbed out a canoe in the bus! below, hauled it up to the rive source, made hooks with which ti grip the ice-walls, and boldly ad ventured into the mouth oi the cav in search of the promised lam: Paddling and grappling the icy but tresses with all their might, the

n above sea-level; the glacier (loti scene! 3 goooft in a curving course o of nine miles. Its immediate surir rounding's are, I think, even is grander than tlio.se of the YVaiiio. :e the mountain portals from which, it the mighty ice-torrent issues semi d loftier and more precipitous. From e an over-arched fantastic bit of bush e we emerged suddenly, into the re open air, pure and bright, straight it upon a spectacle dazzling in its is beauty. The mountains were right ie above us, sharp ridge-tops looming r- blue. A saw-edged wall of green w forest, deep-cut with purple re ravines, stretched awav on either el baud, but immediately in front " paitcd like a vast gateway, to allow :y the downsweep of a white cause'll way of ice. Far above the milky -o way of the glacier lifted the white 11 heads of the cloud-belted Alps, and w the ranges on cither side sheer :1, steeply into wild and savage black ;s peaks—powdered here and there v. with snow. The picture was savage >o in its vast boldness of contour, conm sisting in the steepness of the er mountain slopes, the frequent vertito eal precipices of dark, ice-work rl- rock, and the sudden outpouringof re the glacier from the open throat of d, the Alps. But as if to clothe the t- original repellint nakedness of the ;y gaunt heights and the outrunning

spurs, Nature bad thrown over mountain and deep ravine a garment of the softest vendure, a forest which spread to the skyin; on either side ol the great gateway, and ior several miles up on either side of the glacier. To the right of the glacier foot sprang “ The Cone,” a symmetrical hill whose shape to our trams-Pacific friends would have suggested the name of “The Liberty Cap.” Here, as on the hill palisades cf the Waiho, the tropic richness and colouring ol

the forest make astonishing contrast to the Alpine architecture. We have climbed above the pines, white and red, and up here on the mountain side the vegetation is the flowering rata, the akeake, the native Alpine broom, the white j blossomed ribbonwood, here and there the flaxlike kiekie, and the semi-tropical pine-topped neinei, half-shrub, half-palm, and forests of fern trees. In summer blossoms ofthe rata flood the mountain sides with crimson—a frame of opulent colour for the pure white picture. The hills spring into wild, irregular sky-lines, sloping far upwards to the cental range. On either side silver threads of water splash down the green precipice, glittering in sprav as they drop from ledge to ledge, now hidden from view in a leafy ravine, now leaping out over a dark rock face and plunging hundreds of feet to lateral moraine. The gorge of the Fox at the terminal face of the glacier is perhaps half a mile wide. This space is filled with the ice mass and the wild heaps of moraine—-disintegrated slaty rock, much of it ground to powder-like gravel, other pieces sharp and rough, and heaped in loose mounds. Quart/, abounds, glistening with mica, borne down from some ice-shattered reel far in the cloudy hills. Soon the face of the glacier is cleared of all deformities "and stretches far up, a clean crystal clant of ice, smoothly cut for broad spaces, then gently undulating and creased and gashed with the ghostly blue lines of crevasses. We travel up over the face to the great ice-fall, a series of splintered pinnacles and needle-like spurs. On either hand are the black ice-filled precipices, topped by bush-clothed slopes. Higher still, where tki Fox widens and the great cliffs impinge even more sternly upon it. there are stupendous sights for the climber, lip there, too".'there is room fora new nomenclature; at any rale, “ Bismarck Peaks " must go.