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 and ready to plunge down through the bluffs towards the far-off bush and the Moraine Creek track.
Looking up, a broad spur led to the towering end of the south-east ridge of Tūhawaiki Peak. I followed it and was soon looking down at the lake sparkling below the rim of its basin, modestly sheltering from the huge expanse of the Hollyford Valley and the Otago mountains beyond.
Where the ridge reared up, I dropped down to the south and crossed a scree-filled valley that was bounded by massive slabs of red rock on one side and the dark and fractured south wall of Tūhawaiki on the other. High on the scree I stopped beneath an especially large boulder and was joined by several rock wrens. Higher still I chased chamois up steep gravel and a brief rocky haul to reach a notch in the ridge.
It wasn’t far to the top of a round knob of red rock, where I was encircled by a spectacular panorama of the Moraine Creek peaks. The tussock slopes and rock terraces around Lake Adelaide, I thought, looked quite kindly compared to the seracs and dark precipices closer by, where the Kōrako Glacier was crumbling into a noxiously blue-green lake.
Now I could see where I was going – Darran Pass, across the valley, a low point on the ridge which would take me over and then down to the Donne River. For a long time I’d thought about walking from Homer Hut to the central Darrans, and had actually tried to once. Now I was walking back the other way. The day before, as a party of six, we’d left Turners Eyrie, jostled for space on Lindsays Ledges and then shared our single rope around the crevasses on the Te Pūoho Glacier. In the afternoon the shadows had lengthened in time with our stride and growing distance from the inner peaks. We’d traversed high rock slabs beyond the glacier, past the mighty chasm of Chasm Creek, and stopped in awe where the summit of Mt Madeline and the Hollyford River far below both came into view, separated by a thousand shades of blue.
I was on a circuitous route, avoiding old ground and glacier hazards, but taking in a few features (I was standing on one now) which I’d pieced together in my mind during a rainy day in the eyrie. The way was clear down to the old moraine wall above the Kōrako Lake and I skipped along the narrow crest, pushing a few rocks off down the scree into the water. I saw more rock wrens, but no bivvy rock.
A narrow channel drains the lake and water pours out over the cliffs underneath. I fossicked about in the cleft, admiring the cataract, until it occurred to me what would happen if an especially large serac should topple off the glacier and land in the lake.
Everything was unfolding smoothly. I found the high route on to the Kōrako Ledges without any trouble, just where you’d expect it to be, and skipped across the slabs. Little puffy clouds were gently touching the summits and their soft whiteness seemed to blanch and diffuse the afternoon sun. Soon I was beneath the boulder wall that hems in Lake Adelaide, striding on a rare stretch of flat ground.
The footsteps in the sand stopped me. It was a science fiction moment: the realisation that the distant planet I’ve landed on is inhabited. I read a lot of science fiction when I was a teenager, lone wanderers through the vast immensity of the universe, dying spacescapes of techno-dystopia, that sort of thing. But my interest waned as I spent more time in the hills – inside my own life-support bubble of technology on my own journeys into the sublime.
Apirana and Mihj Peaks were in the cloud. I didn’t look up as I filled my water bottle from a pool at the avalanche-pummeled base of their bleak slabs and then began climbing to the pass. Just below the ridge the route fizzled out into a loose and difficultly angled gully and I had to pause for a moment to gather concentration and climb out onto the steep wall to the right. It was not as easy as I’d expected but it wasn’t difficult to reassure myself that this was normal for the Darrans. (In fact, it seems the better route avoids the low point on the ridge and instead climbs those bleak slabs below Mihj to an angling ledge and then descends the ridge to a low point north of where I was.) Standing on the ridge, all I had to go on was an unreliable memory that the route traversed north over the sharp crest of a small peak. That was an idea I quickly rejected. Descending right away looked a much better option, and I could see a promontory down below, lit up golden by the late sun, which would be the perfect place to bivvy.
I threw my pack down on a mattress of cushion plants sheltered by ancient boulders, inhaled the air rising from the depths of the Cleddau Valley, and discovered there was no water and no firewood. On down I went, on a diagonal descent across the upper cirque, almost to the flanks of Apirana. I stopped for the night on the very edge of a scarp that drops all the way to the Donne River. The mountains in the south-west turned to black obelisks as the sun set behind them, firing rays of slow-strobing light around the great amphitheatre.
The morning brought thickening cloud about the peaks, but it was still dry and I dropped down a mossy gully on to wide slabs of avalanche-cleaned rock that spread a thousand metres to the valley floor. Giant beech trees overhung the river’s pools and rapids, moss and fern choked each side and the boulders were green and slippery. There had been a mighty flood at some time in the recent past; entire trees had been torn from the riverbank, stripped of their bark and left crushed between giant diorite boulders, their roots clutching the air.
When I judged I’d come far enough I took to the bush, planning to cross to the Gulliver River and the Esperance Valley track. It worked perfectly. I was back on the tourist route and padded along the track leading up to the Grave Talbot Pass. I took my time at the mouth of the Esperance Valley, where three kākā peered at me from a ribbonwood tree. I’m not sure quite how to tally active pest control with an ideal of wandering through the solitary wastes of Fiordland, although it’s the kind of ethical conundrum science fiction could have been invented for and the birds are definitely doing much better these days. Kākāriki and kākā called across the treetops in the valleys, kererū gorged on subalpine berries in the head of Moraine Creek and a rock wren seemed to pop out from behind a boulder at every high-level rest stop. Where the track runs out into the head of the valley, below the de Lambert Falls, I stopped to piece together something edible from what remained of ten days worth of hill food. Then my troubles began. I convinced myself the track would begin again in the bush around the falls. It did not. Time was getting on, so I trudged determinedly up the hill towards the low point on the ridge. Careful readers of Moir’s Guide South will be smirking. Try not to laugh when I admit I even drew the line on the photo topo which marks the route in that book.
Once again, rock wrens met me on the ridge and far below I could see traffic crawling up the valley towards the Homer Tunnel. Both were comforting. I pulled out the map and discovered I was no longer on it. That was disappointing. I looked along the ridge towards the angular pinnacle of black rock and wondered which overhanging side the route would sidle beneath. That was puzzling.
The sun dipped beneath the banks of cloud that hid the western peaks as I reached the pinnacle. Three things dawned on me more or less at the same time: I was in the wrong place; I had no idea where I should be; and it was going to get dark quite soon.
A narrow ledge on the northern side of the pinnacle soon faded away and I climbed down vertical tussock towards another ledge. A rock groove led back up to the ridge beyond the pinnacle and I began climbing but after 15 metres or so I realised that I needed to get up there faster, so it was back to the steep tussock. On a large ledge below was an enormous iron cable – definitely part of the route, but when I reached the cable I had no idea where to go next. Up seemed obvious, so with hands and feet on compact, grey, square-edged stone, I made my way back on to the ridge again, where I faced another pinnacle. This one could be climbed direct and at the top I could see what must, I thought, be Lyttle’s Gap on the Cleddau side, although there didn’t seem to be any kind of straightforward way down there. I continued along the ridge a short way until there was no choice but to descend. Part way down, smeared across a holdless granite runnel, I looked back and saw the easy descent chute I’d missed.
Then I was running, as much as I could after three long days in the Darrans, through the gap and between the remnant snow patches on the other side, then gently down more slabs around the shoulder of Macpherson. The mist swirled in again as the light faded. I could see a dark smudge of bluffs above and feel the void of cold air below. I set off down but, as the slope steepened, moss thickened on the slabs. It felt wrong and by the time I’d climbed back up under the bluffs it was completely dark. Drizzle began to turn to rain as the wind stiffened. This was not how I wanted to spend the night. I slowed right down, thinking through every hand and foothold, hoping that by continuing to traverse I’d eventually notice the ridge which descends to Homer Saddle.
Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. The void felt less clammy and I could hear the white noise of falling water from Macpherson Cirque. I knew where I was. My head torch lit up a cairn on the ridge. I began the descent: downclimbing, then scrambling, then sliding; onto a narrow zigzag path which disappeared among the boulders below the saddle and emerged again as a gravelled walkway; down the highway tarmac, each step bizarrely identical to the next. And when I sat down at last, after midnight, in Homer Hut, with a cup of tea, and picked up a newspaper, my voyage ended amid alien scenes of the city of Christchurch, ruined in an earthquake six days before.
This story appeared in the New Zealand Alpine Journal in 2011.
