Monsters’ ball

I feel so high, I even touch the sky
Above the falling rain
I feel so good, in my neighbourhood
So here I come again...

That's Bob Marley, and you know he wasn't singing about climbing in the Darrans, but when good weather and good people come together those words sum it up better than any others I can think of. This is the story of that trip when everything came right.

For five days the sun shone in the northern Darrans. The glaciers went on cracking and melting. Waterfalls emptied thoughtlessly into their huge grey cirques. The brief mountain summer was on the wane, and every living thing knew it. Flies flew and grasshoppers leapt without thinking where they might land, in amongst the thick heat of the tall tussocks. And perched up on Donne Saddle, gazing out to where the ocean dissolved into the horizon across the serrated northern perimeter of Fiordland, three climbers grinned from ear to ear.

Now, as anyone who has spent any time in the Darrans will know, it's not always like this.

'If you knew what was going to happen before you started,' a famous old climber once told me as we made our way back through the crevasses on the Quarterdeck in the dark, 'nine times out of ten you'd stay in your pit.'

Maybe – surely – the odds can't be that bad, we tell ourselves. Weeks in advance, we arrange time off, book flights and dream dreams of golden tussocks, golden rock, golden weather.

There was the old man, Tūtoko, who lived at Martins Bay with his wife and daughters. It was colder then-and probably wetter. I find it hard to imagine they led anything but a miserable existence, enduring the harsh landscape, relentless sandflies and spartan diet. And always, the mountain squatted behind them at the head of the lake. Snow sloughed off its precipices, collected on its broad shoulders, deepening and compressing, and scoured the cirques. At best, I imagine moments of beauty on bitingly cold clear days, watching the recurring tragedy that happens at sunset, over the sea to the west.

But Tūtoko survived. He was transformed – maybe even transfigured. Accidents of time and geography created a monster. He squats there still.

Ten, maybe eleven years ago, Dave Vass and I came down off trying a route on Moir’s north face, and as we packed up to cross towards the ridge back to Homer, the snowfield above us broke apart; giant blocks of ice leaped and bounded across our path.

But below us the Cleddau valley lay open, the peaks were familiar and close. After several sunny days, the heat was radiating back from the dark mountain walls. The sky was warm. Early next morning I learned my mother was critically, terminally ill. By afternoon I was in Wellington. I’ve been there ever since.

Rich Turner I met less than a week before we flew in to the Ngāpunatoru Plateau. We spent the night on top of Aoraki after climbing the Sheila face: caught out in a chilly southwesterly, we shivered and huddled and prodded each other to keep awake until it was light enough to get down to Plateau Hut. Nothing short of fantastic; after what seemed like too long away, I quickly felt at home again in the mountains, just like in Gary Snyder’s brilliant poem ‘On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After Thirty-One Years’:

Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.

Kingston. Garston. Five Rivers. The plains and pine trees of Southland. Swollen brown creeks swept out from beneath curtains of rain that hid the Eyre ranges. Drizzle misted Te Anau, giving the lake a soft steel sheen.

But over the Divide, just at that point of exhilaration where the road drops into the mossy canyon of the Hollyford, where the bush-covered bluffs on Mt Christina look so close and disappear up into the sky and you realise you just can't see to the top any more – and you know this is Fiordland now – the cloud began to break up. By the time we arrived in Milford the air was thick, humid and richly salty. The sandflies began to poke out from wherever it is they hide while it rains.

And suddenly there we were. Just minutes after rising up out of the lush sea-level forest the chopper lifted, turned and left us, heads still spinning, eyes a whirl of crags, canyons and glaciers.

Cloud still scudded over the snowfield from the southeast. Quiet now, we began to listen to that huge calm, to open ourselves to the space that emptied over the Tasman Sea and streamed north towards the Olivines. We picked up our packs and turned south towards Tūtoko and the saddle where we would camp, between the Donne Glacier and Stickup Creek.

At the saddle, Dave unearthed a heavy steel spade, a relic from the past which we used to dig and flatten a sleeping platform. A chill and constant breeze blew from the south for most of the time we stayed, but tucked down on the north side we were reasonably sheltered.

The light deepened and blurred; far in the north, Red Mountain cleared and burned fiery in the dusk. Tūtoko kept itself hidden in the mist above us, much as it was the last time I was there, 10 years earlier with Murray Judge and Doug Carson.

We'd dug a snowcave and spent several days inside telling unlikely stories while it drizzled and blew outside. Murray and I walked down the Donne Glacier one morning and marvelled at the thought of Samuel Turner glissading down from his eponymous pass in 1921 – now there are vertical, dripping rock walls hundreds of metres high. Even making it down from the saddle where we were camped looked like it would soon be problematic, and icebergs floated in the lake at the terminal of the glacier. I'd tried to eye up a route on Tūtuko's east face as we climbed back up, but the lower buttresses of mountain soon rose out of sight into the clag.

Now, in the last of the evening light, we were eating our noodles and fish, staring up into the mist again with a shared belief that simply walking to the bottom of a big unclimbed face of rock and climbing it to the top was just about the best thing you could do in the mountains. And then we saw Tūtoko.

'That's the route to do, right there,' Dave said.

It was too. From the highest neve snow on the mountain's eastern flank, directly above the saddle, a clean face of rock dropped from the summit dome.

None of us had climbed Tūtoko before, though Dave had come very close. We had weeks of memories between us of arriving in the Darrans in the rain, sitting under rocks in the rain, leaving in the rain. Old enough and scarred enough by now, we slurped our noodles and shared the excitement of knowing we had a chance to climb the mountain by a new route – marvelous, we thought.

But not just yet. Next morning we headed down the Donne Glacier and around the base of Tūtoko Knob, which forms the end of the ridge that leads up to Mt Alice from the saddle. Tūtoko deserved another day of preparation, and wasn't the only stupendous rock wall I'd spent 10 years dreaming about. The south face of Tūtoko Knob is a kilometre or so of pristine crystalline granitic gneiss, around 300 metres high. After rapping over the schrund we made our way under the wall, hardly knowing where to start climbing, and stopped under the second of two prominent pillars on the face, where a rock ledge was still keeping the morning sun.

Dave led off, keeping right in the centre of the initial steep buttress. It was good. It was great. It was quite hard, too, especially with all our tramping boots tied together and swinging from the back of my harness. I decided we'd need two daypacks for our next climb.

Rich climbed past the top of the first pillar, and then I took a pitch where the route forced its way out rightwards, against the grain of the rock, up to where the vertical edge of the pillar seemed to lean out over us. Making the choice to climb up towards the steepest piece of rock I could see was a jubilant moment of trepidation and excitement: the reason for being here.

The pitch that followed was no disappointment. Dave had to stop halfway up to laugh out loud, and Rich and I in turn leaned out from the vertical riot of huge, coarse and well-spaced holds to savour the delicious feeling of exposure.
After that the route gradually eased off for a further two pitches and we were back in the sun on the ridge. Smiles all round.

There was still plenty of time to scramble along the ridge and up to the summit of Alice. This peak dominates the great corner of the Hollyford, where the river is joined by the Pyke and slips quietly into Lake McKerrow. Far beyond the peaks of West Otago we could make out the tent-shaped bulk of Aoraki, pitched on the horizon. Looking the other way the dark mass of Tūtoko was shaded by the setting sun. That would be tomorrow.

As we rapidly gained height on the frozen snow above the saddle, the mountain began to offer some shelter from that constant southeast wind. Below a short rock step the glacier perched against the cliff, and we squirmed through a tight gap underneath the dripping snow before climbing on to the upper neve.

At the head of this we made a rubbly traverse, and discovered we'd inadvertently arrived at the top of the first pitch. We would have happily put this down to bad luck, had it not been a great sweeping dihedral, one plane of which was a slick, sheer facet of milky-green quartz.

That settled it. Rich had missed out on the choice pitches the previous day, so this one was definitely for him. He and Dave rapped down to the bottom while I made myself comfortable on abseil for some photos.

The descent showed that while the corner was stunning, the arete at the far edge of the quartz facet was superlative. A crack ran up just to one side of the arete before petering out, along with most of the protection, some way below the top. On a crag, we all agreed, it would be the sort of pitch that deserved a long and constant line of climbers queuing at the bottom to climb.

Though only one pitch up, we decided it was time for lunch. In any case, I was glad to have a spell out of my new slippers, which climbed superbly but were not wearing in as fast as I wanted.

The next pitch was mine. Not totally sure which was the best line to take, I soon found myself in the middle of a quartz wall, where old memories of the days before sportclimbing re-surfaced some way above a Number 3 RP. I mantled on to a reasonable ledge feeling a little twitchy, and thereafter decided to climb rightwards towards the arete, using up most of my gear on the way.

When Dave arrived he pointed out the shortcomings of the sling belay I'd constructed. One of the good things about climbing with people who spend a lot of time in the mountains is their constant focus on doing away with unncessary risks, especially near crevasses, on belays and when abseiling.

Dave took to the arete, which led up to a steep and rubbly ledge system. Rich scrambled on and vanished leftwards around a huge boulder. One of the curious features of the route was its large and loose ledges. But between the ledges, the climbing was consistently steep with almost no easy scrambling.

Dave and I eventually got the call to follow, and soon the face reared up again. We went into shadow under the wall and followed a sharp-edged crack on beautiful white crystalline stone.

'This is what it'll be like on Changabang,' Dave grinned.

Dave, Rich, Al Uren and Brian Alder were off to India in a few months. I think until then I'd felt intimidated more than anything by that prospect, but at that point, hooting and talking nonsense with good friends in the midst of the face, I began to feel pangs of jealousy.

The crack led over the top edge of the wall, revealing yet another magnificent expanse of quartz, where the holds were smooth, white and simply enormous. Rich was in the last sun at the top, perched on a giant boulder.

We'd decided, discussing the line from our camp, that the next two pitches would be the key to the route. There was no luxury here to choose the nicest looking piece of stone. The wall was steep everywhere, with a band of overhangs running across it. An elegant quartz seam which was the only big natural feature visible from the saddle seemed to bulge outwards with little sign of any gear. It was my pitch.

Climbing can be good for those of us who like to procrastinate: because there are times when you are climbing when procrastination is impossible. I knew the other two were stronger and more experienced climbers than me. But it was my turn, and all my inner anxiety stayed inside as I shouldered the rack and crept cautiously up towards a point where a steep, green-tinged groove looked to offer a way through the overhangs.

I thought about finding myself in the middle of the crux, bunched under the lip of the roof losing upward momentum, and that familiar feeling rising quickly-anxiety and fear becoming panic, strength failing, falling . . .

No, I was laughing: this was far from the fierce tussle I feared. It was steep, but once in the groove you could bridge out wide, and I found hidden slot-holds to hang from and place cams.

I wanted that groove to be a hundred times as long, just to keep hold of that feeling of elation, of knowing that we'd cracked it, that we were on our way to the top.

Hanging at the belay at the end of the pitch it was now very clear we were much much higher than anything else around us. The sea stretched out further than ever, and the sky seemed have grown hugely, a big top for a strange circus in which we were clowns, acrobats and freakshow.

'It's a big old mountain,' I said, pointlessly, to Rich as we hung at the belay.

'Fee Fi Fo Fum,' he replied.

We were having a ball. The climbing got better, if anything, as Dave made his way over the next roof using a monstrous fist-sized crack. The rock up here seemed impossibly old and weathered.

Another big ledge, and then Rich took the last pitch and popped out into the sun right on the tippy top at the northern end of Tūtoko's long summit ridge. Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. Fiordland lay before us, in ten thousand shades of blue, further than we could see. I am still in love.

The red orb of the sun melted into the horizon just as we finished the last abseil and stepped on to the neve at the base of the north ridge. We managed to round most of the crevasses on the northeast shoulder before it got dark, but soon after headtorches were dug out of packs. Curt words were spoken about our position in relation to the crevasses we'd avoided on the ascent that morning, and then all of a sudden our old tracks appeared below us and we tumbled wearily down to camp.

Dinner was eaten quickly and we leaned back in our sleeping bags, the rocks at our back sheltering us from the wind that still hadn't quite abated. All the same, you could sense that we were moving right into the very centre of a great high pressure system. From the edges of the silence deep in the valley the rivers still poured over their boulder beds. Stars filled the sky. Shooting stars and satellites swooped overhead. One by one we each found ourselves awake again, rising sweetly out of a deep, dreamless sea of contentment, and made our way into the tent.

– The first ascent of the Donne (East) face of Tūtoko. 'Fee Fi Fo Fum' seven pitches, crux grade 22, Richard Thomson, Rich Turner, Dave Vass, February 2002. This story appeared in the New Zealand Alpine Journal in 2002.