WILDEST NEW ZEALAND

Hokitika Guardian, 10 January 1929, Page 2

WILDEST NEW ZEALAND

(Auckland Star)

Mount Hooker, the alpine peak which that tireless climber Mr Samuel Turner has just ascended and explored rises from a huge confusion of ranges anu gorges in quite the most savagely beautiful corner of the South Island. It has no connection, with the famous Hooker Glacier, which comes down the great valley between Mount Cook and Mount Softon and gives rise to the Hooker torrent which, with the Tasman Glacier’s waters, flows into Lake Pukaki. This Mount Hooker is on the \\lestern side of the main dividing range, some distance to the south-west of the Aorangi-Sefton zone, and its ico waters form the source of the Clark River, a tributary of that powerful river, the Haast, and also help to feed the Landsborough, a remarkably long alpine river which rises in the McKerrow Glacier, on the south-western side of the Sefton. All that countcy about the Clark, and the Landsborough is very little known to the present generation of our alpine explorers. It is a tremendously rugged territory, quite as rough as imy parts of the south-west Fiordland.

The survey maps give the altitude of Mount Hooker as 8644 feet. Mr Turner reckons it a thousand feet higher by his aneroid measurement. Even so, it will not outrival Mount Aspiring (9975 ft.) the higher peak south of the Aorangi group of alps. There is a. Glacier marked on the large-scale maps on the western flank of the mountain; this again is not to be confused with the great glacier on the Canterbury side of the range. The pioneer surveyors gave some picturesque names to thewonderful landscape features. Away to the west of Mount Hooker is a great gouged-out ravine that they mapped as “Yale of Darkness.”

The way of approach to this wilderness alp is from the Haast Valley—if you go from the Otago side you ride over the Haast Pass from Lake Wanaka and begin the rough tramp where the Clark River joins the Haast. It is not a trip to he recommended to the ordinary holiday tramper. The horseback journey over the Haast between lake and ocean, a ride of some fifty miles, is sufficiently rugged and exciting. Those glacier-fed rivers are the traveller’s nightmare. One never knows whether the torrents ahead of his night’s camp will be fordable or not. Three of us were once held up two nights in the Burke hut, just above where the Clark and Landsborough join the main river; iit was a risky ford even when, the flood waters subsided somewhat. Also there fare the mosquitoes. I have fed the musical brutes all over 'New Zealand, from the northern forests and swamps to infamous Anita Bay, in Milford Sound, but there are none to beat for size, voracity and demoniacal persistence the mosquitoes of the Haast bush. They work the whole round of the twentyfour hours in shifts; when the dawn comes and you are hoping for perhaps an’ houc’s sleep the day watch comes on for its bloodthirsty raids by a good night’s rest. And there is the silent partner, the sandfly, which covers whatever area of flesh the mosquito leaves opdn. Mr Turner is an alpinist of remarkable perseverance and powers of endurance who has done a good deal to make known the secret places of wild New Zealand. He is a! nuggety Yorkshireman, and his climbing motto is the good old Yorkshire adage “It’s dogged as does it.” He delights in the “conquest” of the high places of the earth. It was his ambition to join one of the'British parties for Mount Everest, but organised efforts in that direction seem to be off for the present. In the meantime, the dogged little peak conqueror might find ai certain mountain immediately overlooking the Haast Pass, a height worthy of his ice axe. This is Mount Brewster, which towers over you as you go over the Haast saddle; it has a very beautiful glacier seeming to hang in the air viewed tli/rough the beechwoods on the pass top. Tlw mountain—which the Maoris of Wanaka called Hau-mai-tiketike, “The Wind that Blows from the Lofty Height”—is 8265 ft- . almost exactly the altitude of Mount Egmont, but it is far more craggy 'tfhd precipitous than Taranaki’s peak. So far as my mental data goes ht the moment, it has never been climbed. Some day the trans-island journey by way of the Haast Pass will be al famous jaunt, but a motor road through that formidable bit of country is a long way in the future. The snow rivers are the hurdles.