‘But that day we were loafing.’

Each spring, the sun's return teased the dark rough rock and moistened the snow, causing tiny rivulets of clear water to spread across the fractured faces of the peaks - and as its beguiling heat roused the winds that circle the southern edge of the world, they roared and brawled among the tenebrous mountains, a cogent song that called towering banks of cloud from the western ocean to drench the drab ground with the sweaty energy of life.
Each living thing unfurled and stretched with quick desire. The kea soared again on the draughts the sun unleashed from the shivering valleys. Tiny herbs plotted outrageous displays of passion. The silver beech trees began again on their millennia-long march, licking into the cirques left by vanished glaciers.
And even as each organism burned to climb higher, to find bliss and comfort amidst the incandescent power of the sun's beauty, the decades-old ice, forced by unimaginable pressures against the undulating rock slabs, began to lose its harsh edges to the relentless melt. At last, some time that summer, it announced its own relief. The brittle glacial shield cracked open and apart, collapsed, subsided, and came to rest.
But the blocks pressed in against one another. Each prised the other apart, the sun's heat was insatiable, and drip by drip what little friction remained was lost - the pile heaved and shuddered – until, finally, all resistance gone, another misshapen white accretion would slide regally away, gaining velocity over the bluff . . .
The rock met each cascading blow with crushing indifference, leaving a whiff of white dust and countless facets of grainy ice twinkling at the sky.
The energy that propels the universe has an erratic desperation that both confines us and compels us. Maybe the most dangerous place I've ever been – despite being on the road – was in Pakistan, where the Karakoram Highway had been battered nearly beyond recognition by a violent rainstorm. Trucks zig-zagged between huge boulders and around washouts until they reached a point where, for perhaps 100 metres, rough scree had flooded out of a sinuous cleft that had no origin you could see from down near river level, where rocks continued, hideously randomly, to rocket across the rubble and dive into the roiling water.
The locals were taking people across early in the morning, before the sun loosened more stones up high, but even then the slip kept up a degree of activity. It was scary and I needed to time to think. As I'd not long finished breakfast, I stepped back up the road a short way and ducked behind a large rock.
By the time I'd finished, the scene at the slide was chaos. Most of the group I was travelling with had decided to run for it, and been pinned down out in the open as a hail of rocks fired down the shute. The more nimble of this group were almost across, although one was bleeding from his forehead and another limped badly. The others had been making their way on to the scree when a huge rock had bounced awry and smashed through their midst, killing an American woman instantly. Her gaunt, stunned companions were carrying her body back to safety.
Out the middle, three people still huddled, petrified, beneath their backpacks. With two Pakistanis, I ran across the base of the scree, shouting to those above to throw down their packs and slide down to us. The rockfall had eased, but it was uncanny the way that you never saw the stones coming – only heard and felt each ghastly sound manifest beside you as it flew by.That experience more or less confirmed for me that the kind of fear you find in the mountains is a kind that can't be run away from. So when, 15 years later, after three of us had examined the narrow ledge between that delicately perched jumble of ice and the bluff below, Dave and Rich skipped across and I waited just a moment before following. And when, just as I'd committed to the hop across onto the most exposed stretch, an awful shuddering groan erupted from the depths of the ice, I froze and stared into the gaps between the stacked blocks, looking for any sign of movement.There was none. I carried on – faster now – to where the other two were laughing at how I'd stared down the glacier.
It was later in the following year by the time we returned. The lichens seemed to have lapped up the moisture left by a heavy autumn fall of snow, and the rock had relinquished the firm grip it gave in summer.
To reach Lake Turner, we had sidled high above Chasm Creek on grey, snow-worn slabs. Early rain eased to misty drizzle as we passed below a titanic knife-edge of rock leering down at us to reach the terminus of the Te Puoho Glacier, which slouched into a milky lake that was like a dull, purblind eye. The Darrans rock, that always looks as if it has suffered unspeakable burdens during its interminable history, here surpassed itself in grotesque twists and contortions.We climbed onto the glacier and into the mist again, higher and higher, up around the toe of the North Ridge of Karetai as the rain set in again, and then down across ledges on the Lake Turner side as darkness fell. Mentally and physically, each step became more difficult, and by the time we reached the stone cairns that mark the narrow traverse into the Eyrie, we were drenched to the skin. Home seemed an odd word to describe this strange and unfriendly world.
When Lindsay Stewart described his discovery of the remarkable ledges that afford a route between Lake Turner and the Te Puoho Glacier and that are now named after him, he wrote: 'Next day we reconnoitered a series of ledges leading down the west face of the rock wall above Lake Turner, and found they would go, but that day we were loafing . . .'After days spent moving solo, edging across damp bluffs, above enormous drops, and trusting completely to feet, hands, and constant intense concentration, when we finally tied in to the rope at the bottom of Karetai's East Face it felt to me like a release and a relief – a moment of humility when I admitted to the mountain that I couldn't do it on my own.For nine rope-lengths we were back in our cocoon of technology, warping the universal biological urge to reach up towards the light into a halting dance as sophisticated and elegantly mannered, in its own way, as an 18th century minuet performed by wigged and powdered Viennese courtiers.
But the sun was shining, a burly crack was followed by a stupendous steep corner, and then we were straddling the crest of the main central buttress on the face. The orange rock on this legendary face was as sound as I'd hoped for, and although its rough crystalline structure cut my hands, deep incut holds and characteristic Darrans sidepulls made for absorbing and physical climbing.
The sixth pitch – clearly the crux – took on an intimidating band of steeper rock that cut across the face. By now mist was hemming us in and it was well past afternoon tea time. There was going to be no release up here.
We climbed the last two pitches in the dark, emerging in to a bitterly cold westerly wind on the summit. Then, traversing the iced-up summit blocks I suddenly saw the light of a head torch just ahead. For a moment, the idea of meeting another person on top of a mountain in the Central Darrans, at night, threw my entire world into confusion. Actually, it must have been the light of a car travelling past the Chasm car park on the way to Milford.
Far below Karetai, so far beneath the Eyrie that all you can see is the top of the valley mist curling up into the cirque that contains Lake Turner, are gentle meadows of grass. Down there, ringed by mossy cliffs and watered by the 260 metre high Turner Falls that tumble from the lake, groves of beech forest dot the valley floor and huge boulders give the promise of shelter. A tiny green lake glints in the forest.

We'd been on edge for six days, so by midday we were picking a way around Turner Falls and down towards that alluring Shangri-la. All that stood between us and the good life of the beckoning low lands was the Cleft, the incredible fault that shears through the rock below the South Face of Milne and provides the only route between the upper and lower parts of the valley.
That the animals have already figured out the best route is a truism for mountain travel. So when Rich and Dave veered off the rough path, muttering something about it looking pretty steep, I figured that it would only be steeper wherever they ended up.
The route found its way down a steepening bluff, to a point of bare rock where many chamois had obviously stood and pawed the vegetation away. Not wanting, I suppose, to believe the evidence, I carried on and was suddenly glad that this vertical cliff had plenty of vegetation growing on it to slow my descent. Clearly, the bare rock marked the point where animals plucked up the courage to jump the five metres or so down to where the terrain moves off vertical again. It was nearly dark by the time we reached the valley floor. After splitting up to check out the closest boulders, we regrouped under the largest of all, to the extreme displeasure of the locals. The pungent stench of guano confirmed that this was the kea house, and they flew around the cirque complaining loudly for much of the night.
The full moon was up, and after warming ourselves by a fire, we clambered out onto a broad shelf of rock for a look. The waterfall from Lake Turner seemed to hang in the air at the head of the cirque and dissipate into fine spray. Cliffs capped in mist reared up on each side. Every detail of boulder and scrub across the valley floor was picked out in exquisite silver light, but at the same time finding any sense of scale was impossible. One reason for going to the mountains is to see remarkable things, and that moonlit mountainscape was one of the most remarkable things that I have ever seen.
Next day we were soon deep in the forest, where soft, earthy moss sprawled across logs and clung to ancient moraine boulders, and suddenly the tiny green lake was not far away, clear and still in its frame of beech forest. All sound in the valley seemed to be deadened by the moss. We stopped speaking, each of us consciously trying to move more slowly and delicately as we neared the water. After days spent where only a few scant tussocks and alpine herbs can withstand the fierce weather, we were lost in wonder at this fertile profusion of life. I was out in front when a decrepit branch, turned to soft mush by the years of damp, its true size hidden by a rich cushion of spaghnum, gave way and dropped me gasping and thrashing into the frigid rippling water.
That was my second skirmish with disaster that day. After breakfast, I'd made my way out from the bivvy to a perch on the edge of one of the high flat rocks that surround it. The sun shone placidly on the flats. Up high the recent snow was gone and the mountains had almost regained their summer warmth. All feelings of tension and unease melted away. Squatting on the edge of the boulder above the scrub, my turd fell to the ground and I looked up to where, in that other year, I'd stared into the deathless blue interior of the unruly ice.
And at that moment, the entire front face of the ice sagged, crumpled and began to pour over the bluff, leaving a whiff of white dust floating on the morning air.
– This story first appeared in the New Zealand Alpine Journal in 2007.