growing wild

Summits and Shadows: Jack Clarke and New Zealand Mountaineering, by Graham Langton

Jack Clarke remains a distant, even difficult figure through most of Graham Langton’s account of his life. This is the man who, at the age of 19, in his second year of climbing, joined the first climb of Aoraki Mt Cook. Who joined the first climb of Tasman the next year, and also Silberhorn and Haidinger, and who later made first ascents of Darwin, Annan, Hamilton, D’Archaic, Malcolm, Tyndall, Nicholson, Edward and Aspiring. Who climbed four new routes on Aoraki. Who became New Zealand’s first proper mountain guide and made a career out of it.

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Mountaineering from the Milford Road: an illustrated history of the first mountaineering in the Milford region, 1895 to 1970, by Gerard Hall-Jones

For many climbers, history in the Darrans probably begins in 1968, when Harold Jacobs and Murray Jones climbed the north buttress of Sabre. This book will correct that misapprehension: with one or two incongruous exceptions, the entire era of high-standard alpine rock climbing which that route inaugurated is ignored.

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Pushing His Luck: Report of the Expedition and Death of Henry Whitcombe, by Jakob Lauper; a new translation and commentary by Hilary Low

The cover of Pushing His Luck shows a black and white photograph of Whitcombe Pass. The mountains on each side are dark and fractured, although the pass itself is bare, open country and hardly difficult travel. But beyond, to the west, the ground drops away sharply, the sky lightens, and there is sunshine on low clouds in the distance that seem to promise an escape from the bleakly inhospitable high country.
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Going Bush: New Zealanders and Nature in the Twentieth Century by Kirstie Ross

In 1989 I learned to ski. In communist Czechoslovakia. The irony inherent in that experience was hugely enjoyable – up until that time, my opinion of skiers had been clouded by the eighties excesses practised on Mt Ruapehu’s Turoa skifield and below, in Ohakune’s bars.
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Buying the Land, Selling the Land by Richard Boast

Between 1890 and 1920 the New Zealand government bought 4.2 million acres of Maori land, for which it paid around £3.5 million. In Buying the Land, Selling the Land, Richard Boast’s “study of Crown Maori land policy and practice”, he estimates that if the money had been divided equally, it would have provided each Maori with just £3 per year for each of those 30 years. In fact, he says, North Island Maori might as well have given their land to the Crown, for all the difference it would have made to their economic situation.

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Tramping, according to Shaun Barnett, is ‘often rough, frequently wet, but regularly inspiring’. Non-trampers will probably be inclined to agree with the first two parts of that description, and it can sometimes seem that for trampers themselves enduring the privations of a trip into the hills brings as much satisfaction as the inspiration to be gained from the countryside. (more…)

Where the Mountains Throw Their Dice by Paul Hersey

In the wake of Ed Hillary’s death, when the simple and unalloyed pleasures of mountain climbing were celebrated as the nation idealised a simple and straightforward approach to adventure, competitiveness and enjoyment of life, Paul Hersey’s wide-ranging and readable book struck a very different tone.

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John Pascoe by Chris Maclean

As climbers, we learn early in our pursuit of alpine sports that the rest of the world cares little for what goes on above the snowline – excepting, of course, the media storms that obscure our view of the mountains whenever tragedy or national tub-thumping are involved. (more…)