Land of Majesty

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 877, 22 January 1930, Page 8

Land of Majesty

Scene of Mount Cook Tragedy

THE calm, impressive silence of great mountains broods always over the upper flats of the Tasman Valley in the heart of the Southern Alps. There stands the famous Hermitage—large enough as an hotel, yet dwarfed to puny insignificance by the majesty of the snow-clad peaks surrounding it. Across a bridge spanning the sparkling Tasman River that leaps magically from the foot of the glacier, and along the winding road over the flats, comes a pathetic funeral procession. Five young bodies are being borne from a region of eternal snows. . . .

Once again the Alps have taken their toll of midget humans who clamber, ant-like, over vast white spaces, seeking enjoyment in their defiance of slippery ridges and deep snow drifts: braving even the austere heights of Mount Cook itself. Not that there is undue risk or even hardship in a Mount Cook holiday. All that is humanly possible has been done for man’s convenience and delight. Roads are there, and bridges; well-made tracks, and broad huidle-paths; amply-stocked huts, and snug camps. In summer horses, motor-cars and tractors aid travel and, in winter, happy parties journey far on skis and snowshoes. The hostel is a home of warmth and luxury where one dances and plays, with the snows stretched in a glorious panorama beyond sheltering glass windows. Yet the mountains, in their silence, are coldly relentless. The midgets who move to and fro from the Hermitage at their feet must place a martingale on hot-blooded adventuring, and follow the calm instruction of expert guides who know and respect the latent powers in the glistening ranges above and beyond. There comes a time, as it did on Sunday last, when the unexpected happens and the mountain snows and winds rouse themselves to sudden fury. Then the little plans of man are as nought and, if mischance has set the stage, the toll is claimed. “YOU NEVER KNOW” Were you to visit the Hermitage tomorrow and chat to the guides—powerful men born to climbing as the sparks fly upwards, and picturesque in their thick corduroys topped by heavy wool jackets—the chances are they would tell you that, last week, tragedy on the glacial track between Malte Brun hut and Ball hut was unthinkable. “But,” they would add, “up here you never know.” Guide Alf Brinstead, a jolly Norwegian mountaineer and ski expert, might relate, in his self-effacing way, of a time when he and two tourists, man and wife, were caught in a blizzard far up on the mountain side. Then you might learn of how the woman died from heart failure following exposure; of a husband’s tragic vigil beside her body; and of Alt’s nightmare journey for help, when ho accomplished a magnificent feat of endurance, won through to the Hermitage, and returned to guide the way for others. To Alf the principal point of the story is his enjoyment of the hot cocoa at the Hermitage. “Eef you are cold and tired you cannot beat ’ot cocoa with lots of sugar,” he says. “Eet was goot.”

These guides would recall tlie mountaineering accident in 1914 when three climbers were overwhelmed by an avalanche after ascending Mount Cook. At the time, the body of one was recovered and, a few seasons ago, the ice of the Tasman glacier gave up portion of another. v From tlie position of this discovery it was clear that the body had progressed steadily down the mountain in the ever-moving ice and had been broken to pieces when passing over the mighty Hochstetter Ice Falls, the most remarkable of the glacier’s many unique features. LAST EARTHLY SIGHT

It was within sight of the Hoclistetter Ice Falls that the young people lost their lives on Sunday last. If visibility was clear before the blizzard swept down on that great shelterless space, their last view of the world in which they lived and ventured was one of awe-inspiring, almost startling beauty—a view that reduces matter-of-fact, undemonstrative men and women to that wordless appreciation more eloquent than speech. The scene is viewed from another angle when one reaches the Ball Hut after journeying on horseback from the Hermitage. For almost the entire distance the way lies behind the high rocks of a glacial morraine but, at the goal, one tops the moraine and pauses, spellbound. Below and beyond is a vast world of virgin white —an enormous amphitheatre, the distant sides of which are great icy peaks. The floor of this immense glacial basin carries the broad Tasman Glacier with its icecliffs, ice-grottos, ice-caves of limpid green, and ice-creeks. It comes sweeping in a magnificent curve from the distant right in the direction of the Malte Brun hut. To the left are the Hochstetter Ice Falls —towering cliffs of broken, jagged ice which crashes at intervals to the glacier beneath. The falls are 4,000 ft high, yet they look scarcely a tenth of that height, so rarified and clear is the atmosphere in that unearthly land. Behind towers Cook himself, Serene in his lofty solitude. When a man has once seen the pearl-pink glow of a sunrise on Cook’s clear-cut summit, and marvelled as a “feather” of snow flies like a white pennant from his summit, propelled by a strong wind, he must return. The fascination of the mountain and that glittering land is irresistible. . . . But now that sad procession has traversed the winding road on the flats and has reached the quietened Hermitage. This time the mountains have given up their dead, and Cook’s greatest tragedy is written. E.H.S.M.