Big BayIt was a custom of the miners on moonlight nights to walk around the beach of Big Bay to catch wekas, which came out on the beach in hundreds and fed on the the insects among the seaweed. Wekas made a welcome change in the menu, as meat was brought to the bay in casks, salted in strong brine. |
Mr Big |
Handfuls of sandflies This is a deceptively simple book. It starts at Bainham right up in the northwestern corner of Golden Bay and makes straight for the Dragons Teeth, barely letting up until reaching the coast at Precipice Cove in Fiordland, by which time handfuls of sandflies are trapped between the tent outer and inner. |
This chord of soundI pointed to the only place that seemed to afford a perch, and insisted that we should stop on that spot whatever it was. As we neared it we found that our perch was a big tree jutting out from the precipice, on which we managed to find room, on its base. There was just enough room to lie down on the damp leaves, one ice-axe on each side, and the rope coiled under us. |
Tableau |
Taoka This is the first photograph of rock climbing in the Darrans I remember seeing. |
Chasm danglers On a single day last Easter, 3,300 people walked the Tongariro Crossing. My Facebook feed shows photographs of tourists shitting in the grass at the White Horse Hill campground at Mt Cook. Are there too many people on the mountains, or just not enough toilets? |
Afternoon light |
IncantationThere are the big walls you know about. Routes you've walked under or looked across at and thought, Yes, I have to climb that. The classics. Some are close to home: Sabre's blunt grey North Buttress. Others are farther away: the stern exfoliations of the Cassin Route on the Piz Badile. |
I’m new here The others had a party to go to in Queenstown, but as for me, I didn’t think I’d finished with the Darrans for the year, yet. So after crossing the stream that drains Rainbow Lake, we said our goodbyes and they bounded into the tall tussocks and dracophyllum, brimming with the happiness and contentment earned from a long week in the mountains. |
The modernist |
Little things |
Singing in the rain |
Wall to wall |
A very modest pioneerJack 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. |
Clearing southerly |
Kind looks |
Dark precipices |
Hemp ropes and oilskinsFor 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. |
It ended badly 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. |
Diorite |
Old man |
A windy day |
Main trunk |
