In December 2008, I joined a commercial mountaineering instruction course in New Zealand, organised by a Wanaka based adventure company. (and Yes – without doing advertising for them, it is the one that lead the ill-fated 1996 Everest Expedition featured in the best selling book – “Into Thin Air”) Let me start by saying I have got absolutely no ambition to climb Everest or the like. However, my goal is to do a few much easier peaks with a guide or a group of friends experienced in mountaineering once I acquired the necessary skills. I enjoy landscape photography and I hope one day I can get on top of a 5000-6000m peak, taking panoramic photos of snow-capped mountains above the clouds as the morning sun slowly rises above the horizon.
We had five students and two guides on the course, all students are from Australia. I have prepared the shortened form of my trip diary to give you a taste of what it was like. You can find more photos taken on the trip on my pbase gallery here.
Day 1 and 2: Rain Rain Rain!
We spent two days in the tiny town of Fox Glacier while waiting for the notorious weather in the West Coast to clear up. The area gets 7 metres of rain per year and by the end of Day 2 I was wondering if we should just build a pipe from Melbourne to Fox Glacier instead of the Desalination Plant in Wonthaggi. More reliable, less impact on the environment and possibly cheaper! We learned a bit of theory, different knots, rope-work and even did some Prusik-ing up a rope indoors in the community hall! It felt strange trying to imagine the roof of the community hall were the lip of this huge crevasse I desperately need to get to…
Day 3: Lift Off
The weather window finally opened early in the morning. It was a truly amazing experience sitting in a chopper for the first time, flying over the majestic Fox Glacier, catching glimpses of Mt Cook and Mt Tasman, before landing on a tiny icy ledge just above Centennial Hut. Moved all provisions inside and learned how to build different snow anchors for the rest of the day. It was a lot of fun learning the different ways of self-arresting. (Using an ice axe to halt a slide down an icy slope) The hardest technique to master was to dive head first, face up, down a steep icy slope and try to self-arrest to halt the slide. It was hard to concentrate on where to plant the axe when I all I could see was the sky above as I was zooming down the hill at high speed on my back. Practised a number of times but the best I could manage was to slow the fall, not arresting it. Well, hopefully I won’t be falling face up, head down first during any stage of this course!
We had to melt snow/ice for dinner as the water tank was broken by a climber last week who decided the easiest way to loosen the ice in the tank was to kick the tank with his crampons on… Sigh…
Day 4: Trapped indoors
The wind speed exceeded 100km/h and it rained/hailed/snowed heavily for 24 hours non-stop. If you want to know how bad this was: consider these two facts: (1) Nobody got out of the hut to the toilet hut which was a mere 5 metres away for fear of being ripped off the mountain by the ferocious storm. We used the super high-tech Bucket Method™ instead. (2) I felt the wall of the hut moving during the night, the steel frame gently swaying with the wind.
Just after I convinced myself there was nothing to worry about, the guides informed me another hut nearby was blown away a few years ago in a similar storm, along with all 4 or 5 occupants down the sheer cliff …
Day 5: Fantastic day of sunshine
Learned crevasse rescue, more anchoring and rope-work. The views were absolutely stunning, well worth the price of the course alone. I kept re-applying sun-screen every hour to combat the blazing sun reflected off all the snow around me. Believe me, I felt just as warm during the 43° heat-wave in Melbourne as the kind of heat/sun I experienced in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Unfortunately I only brought along 2L of water for the outing and I paid dearly for it near the end of the exercise as I was very dehydrated and slightly dizzy by the time I returned back to Centennial Hut. The worst thing was having to wait for the snow to melt to get a drink!
Day 6: The Walk-out/Fly-Out day
With the weather window closing on Day 7, we had to get back down to the village in order to avoid being trapped for days up the mountain. Quite often, there are people who get stuck high up in the mountain huts for more than a week because they missed their opportunity to get out while the weather window was open. We walked along Fox Glacier to get to Chancellor Hut for our chopper ride, making full use of our newly learned glacier travel technique. We climbed our first New Zealand Peak - Von Barlow after making a couple of pitches under supervision. We even practised our summit poses on top!
It was another blazing hot day in the Southern Alps. The snow was softening at an alarming rate, making glacier travel more dangerous as the snow bridges got weaker and weaker. Near the end of the day, I punched straight through a severely weakened snow-bridge across a crevasse. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing the snow crumpled and a bottomless crevasse appear right in front of my eyes! I must have done something right as the chest harness I tied in the morning held! Understandably, my guide didn’t want me to practise my Prusik-ing skills to get out while he was on the other end of the rope attached to a novice climber dangling above a crevasse. I was dragged out instead…
We got to see the beautiful Fox Glacier one more time as we flew back on a helicopter from Chancellor Hut.
Day 7: Franz Josef Glacier
We visited the nearby Franz Josef Glacier to learn ice-climbing. Once the ropes were set up, we were like the circus monkeys performing tricks for the hundreds of tourists visiting the Glacier as they stopped, watched and photographed us playing around. I must say the ice-climbing session was one of the highlights of the trip.
Day 8: Another rainy day in South Island
Travel Day from West Coast back to base in Wanaka. Boring apart from travelling on all those one-lane bridges on the 100km/h highway, wondering if the NZ traffic engineers got all the sight distances correctly worked out for vehicles coming from the other end…
Day 9 & 10 Rock Climbing
We practised our outdoor rock climbing skills, which included setting up rock anchors and trying to climb on rock wearing rigid mountaineering boots. We learned a bit of abseiling as well near the end. All the students got issued with certificates on the last day. A couple of them climbed Mt Cook a week later with the guides!
After the course - Coming to terms with the dangers of mountaineering
Around the time I was in New Zealand, four people died in three separate accidents visiting similar places I went to during the course. Even though I won’t be doing anything extreme like climbing Mt Cook without a guide, these events really highlighted the dangers that are associated with the sport.
When we were staying at Centennial Hut, two Japanese climbers were attempting the nearby Mt Cook. On the day we were trapped in the hut by the 100km/h+ raging wind, they were struggling to survive in their snow cave on Mt Cook. Details of what happened are still sketchy and might never be known. Their snow cave was hastily excavated with a ball point pen as hell descended fast upon them. Rescuers could not get to them for days due to the appalling weather. Somehow the rescuers managed to drop a pack of supplies & radio 2m away from their tent and yet the climbers could not hear or see the pack in the ferocious weather. The Japanese guide died a couple of days later due to prolonged exposure. The client was rescued relatively unharmed, suffering hypothermia. It was a real shock when we got out and read it on the newspaper.
Three other Australians died in Mt Cook and Fox Glacier within a couple of weeks later.
We had five students and two guides on the course, all students are from Australia. I have prepared the shortened form of my trip diary to give you a taste of what it was like. You can find more photos taken on the trip on my pbase gallery here.
Day 1 and 2: Rain Rain Rain!
We spent two days in the tiny town of Fox Glacier while waiting for the notorious weather in the West Coast to clear up. The area gets 7 metres of rain per year and by the end of Day 2 I was wondering if we should just build a pipe from Melbourne to Fox Glacier instead of the Desalination Plant in Wonthaggi. More reliable, less impact on the environment and possibly cheaper! We learned a bit of theory, different knots, rope-work and even did some Prusik-ing up a rope indoors in the community hall! It felt strange trying to imagine the roof of the community hall were the lip of this huge crevasse I desperately need to get to…
Day 3: Lift Off
The weather window finally opened early in the morning. It was a truly amazing experience sitting in a chopper for the first time, flying over the majestic Fox Glacier, catching glimpses of Mt Cook and Mt Tasman, before landing on a tiny icy ledge just above Centennial Hut. Moved all provisions inside and learned how to build different snow anchors for the rest of the day. It was a lot of fun learning the different ways of self-arresting. (Using an ice axe to halt a slide down an icy slope) The hardest technique to master was to dive head first, face up, down a steep icy slope and try to self-arrest to halt the slide. It was hard to concentrate on where to plant the axe when I all I could see was the sky above as I was zooming down the hill at high speed on my back. Practised a number of times but the best I could manage was to slow the fall, not arresting it. Well, hopefully I won’t be falling face up, head down first during any stage of this course!
We had to melt snow/ice for dinner as the water tank was broken by a climber last week who decided the easiest way to loosen the ice in the tank was to kick the tank with his crampons on… Sigh…
Day 4: Trapped indoors
The wind speed exceeded 100km/h and it rained/hailed/snowed heavily for 24 hours non-stop. If you want to know how bad this was: consider these two facts: (1) Nobody got out of the hut to the toilet hut which was a mere 5 metres away for fear of being ripped off the mountain by the ferocious storm. We used the super high-tech Bucket Method™ instead. (2) I felt the wall of the hut moving during the night, the steel frame gently swaying with the wind.
Just after I convinced myself there was nothing to worry about, the guides informed me another hut nearby was blown away a few years ago in a similar storm, along with all 4 or 5 occupants down the sheer cliff …
Day 5: Fantastic day of sunshine
Learned crevasse rescue, more anchoring and rope-work. The views were absolutely stunning, well worth the price of the course alone. I kept re-applying sun-screen every hour to combat the blazing sun reflected off all the snow around me. Believe me, I felt just as warm during the 43° heat-wave in Melbourne as the kind of heat/sun I experienced in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Unfortunately I only brought along 2L of water for the outing and I paid dearly for it near the end of the exercise as I was very dehydrated and slightly dizzy by the time I returned back to Centennial Hut. The worst thing was having to wait for the snow to melt to get a drink!
Day 6: The Walk-out/Fly-Out day
With the weather window closing on Day 7, we had to get back down to the village in order to avoid being trapped for days up the mountain. Quite often, there are people who get stuck high up in the mountain huts for more than a week because they missed their opportunity to get out while the weather window was open. We walked along Fox Glacier to get to Chancellor Hut for our chopper ride, making full use of our newly learned glacier travel technique. We climbed our first New Zealand Peak - Von Barlow after making a couple of pitches under supervision. We even practised our summit poses on top!
It was another blazing hot day in the Southern Alps. The snow was softening at an alarming rate, making glacier travel more dangerous as the snow bridges got weaker and weaker. Near the end of the day, I punched straight through a severely weakened snow-bridge across a crevasse. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing the snow crumpled and a bottomless crevasse appear right in front of my eyes! I must have done something right as the chest harness I tied in the morning held! Understandably, my guide didn’t want me to practise my Prusik-ing skills to get out while he was on the other end of the rope attached to a novice climber dangling above a crevasse. I was dragged out instead…
We got to see the beautiful Fox Glacier one more time as we flew back on a helicopter from Chancellor Hut.
Day 7: Franz Josef Glacier
We visited the nearby Franz Josef Glacier to learn ice-climbing. Once the ropes were set up, we were like the circus monkeys performing tricks for the hundreds of tourists visiting the Glacier as they stopped, watched and photographed us playing around. I must say the ice-climbing session was one of the highlights of the trip.
Day 8: Another rainy day in South Island
Travel Day from West Coast back to base in Wanaka. Boring apart from travelling on all those one-lane bridges on the 100km/h highway, wondering if the NZ traffic engineers got all the sight distances correctly worked out for vehicles coming from the other end…
Day 9 & 10 Rock Climbing
We practised our outdoor rock climbing skills, which included setting up rock anchors and trying to climb on rock wearing rigid mountaineering boots. We learned a bit of abseiling as well near the end. All the students got issued with certificates on the last day. A couple of them climbed Mt Cook a week later with the guides!
After the course - Coming to terms with the dangers of mountaineering
Around the time I was in New Zealand, four people died in three separate accidents visiting similar places I went to during the course. Even though I won’t be doing anything extreme like climbing Mt Cook without a guide, these events really highlighted the dangers that are associated with the sport.
When we were staying at Centennial Hut, two Japanese climbers were attempting the nearby Mt Cook. On the day we were trapped in the hut by the 100km/h+ raging wind, they were struggling to survive in their snow cave on Mt Cook. Details of what happened are still sketchy and might never be known. Their snow cave was hastily excavated with a ball point pen as hell descended fast upon them. Rescuers could not get to them for days due to the appalling weather. Somehow the rescuers managed to drop a pack of supplies & radio 2m away from their tent and yet the climbers could not hear or see the pack in the ferocious weather. The Japanese guide died a couple of days later due to prolonged exposure. The client was rescued relatively unharmed, suffering hypothermia. It was a real shock when we got out and read it on the newspaper.
Three other Australians died in Mt Cook and Fox Glacier within a couple of weeks later.
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