Click photo to enlarge
Photo by Stephen Jaquiery.
A hundred years ago, Major Bernard Head and his New
Zealand guides became the first men to climb Mt Aspiring.
Marjorie Cook looks back.
1.15am on Tuesday, November 23, 1909 three men left their
bivouac perched 1700m high on the Mt Aspiring snow fields,
and prepared breakfast.
Major Bernard Head, of England (who died at Gallipoli on
August 12, 1915), did not record what he and his New Zealand
alpine guides actually ate.
Almost certainly they would have melted snow for a cup of
tea, as they did the day before.
Jack Clarke of The Hermitage, Mt Cook, and Alec Graham, who
with his brother Peter owned the Franz Josef Glacier Hotel,
had not spent all the previous day just drinking tea.
They had also kicked steps into the route they planned to
take to the 3033m summit.
For two days, the three climbers had risen early, examined
the weather and returned to bed for a few more hours.
But this day was to be different.
For a reason not recorded in Maj Head's remarkably concise
diary, and in the face of an advancing northerly storm, they
gave the mountain a crack.
Breakfast was consumed by 1.45am, and less than an hour later
they had left camp.
A second breakfast was consumed in the fog on a plateau, at
about 4am.
The fog must have cleared, because they continued, and by
9.25am they were on top, where it was windy.
"Just got on top in time," Maj Head wrote.
The weather was so bad the team sheltered for half an hour
under a rock on the way down.
By 2.30pm they were back at their bivvy.
They then retreated to a lower camp and were in bed by 8pm.
It had been very cold climbing.
"(Barometer) jumping, owing to the bad weather," was Maj
Head's last note of the day.
A month later, Maj Head gave more details to the Taranaki
Herald.
"After (the northwest arete) we came to the top, which
consisted of a heavy corniced ridge, about 160ft long. Clarke
said it was safe, but we had to cross it to get to the actual
summit.
"The only way was to step aside, with one's feet in Westland
and one's axe driven into the cornice at the top. Looking
over, one saw a sheer drop of 8000ft into Otago, as it was
the boundary line.
"It was a weird experience. We spent about five minutes on
the top, and then left, as it was very cold. The
side-stepping down the 160ft was almost worse than the going
up.
From the top, we got a fine view of Cook and Sefton, but the
lower mountains were blotted out with fog."
So that was that.
No lyrical reflections and nothing about a celebration.
That's tonight instead, at the Lake Wanaka Centre, from
7.30pm.
It's taken 100 years.
(Sources: Scott Gilkison, in his 1951 book Aspiring and the
Department of Conservation.)
