Whitney Thurlow is a professional mountain guide with more than 50 ascents of Tititea Mount Aspiring. But it was a boredom-induced walk up the road that nearly did him in.
It was the kind of mood where a bad idea could take root and flourish. I had just returned from an aborted guiding job in Italy, suddenly ground zero of the Covid emergency. New Zealand had gone into lockdown, and, having just arrived from overseas, I was midway through my 14-day self-isolation period. I was living, ostracised in a bus, in my driveway, and the gnawing discontent was getting the better of me.
Epics sneak up on you. No matter how audacious your plan, everything always goes smoothly in your mind, at first. For example, Robert Falcon Scott said he had “come to the conclusion that life in the Antarctic Regions can be very pleasant”, then promptly froze to death in his tent.
The idea was simple enough. Getting into the mountains may have been illegal, but at least I could make myself feel like I had. I would walk as far from my house as possible, until I was totally exhausted and could walk no more. Then I would have to get back. This would guarantee a level of pain that hopefully would take me the rest of my isolation to recover from. The clincher was, if things got bad, I couldn’t call someone to come get me. Driving wasn’t allowed under lockdown. Then there was the fact that I was still self-isolating. The headline, “Quarantined man calls for help, endangers rescuers”, wrote itself. I was on my own.
Armed with a boatload of poetic licence, I would head off on a new kind of adventure, a sort of urban mountaineer pushing extremes with only myself to rely on for a safe return. There was an epic out there waiting for me, and by God, I was going to knock the bastard off.
Previously, the closest I’d come to dying from the cold had involved a stuck rope and an unplanned overnight on a wall in Yosemite. It was the typical story, a big climb tackled with more eagerness than experience. With no extra food or clothing, my girlfriend and I spent the night on a thin ledge alternately laying on top of one another. Not in a fun way. Daylight saw freezing rain, difficult route finding, and one final insult when we finally reached the car: my hands were so cold I could no longer hold a key to unlock the door. That was proper drama, a bold adventure in the hills gone wrong. But with a stupid enough plan, you don’t need open ocean or high altitude for things to spin out of control. Even a country lane will do.
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The urban expedition started off well. There were almost no cars on the roads, and ambling down the deserted centerline was odd but liberating, a pleasant dystopia. The lack of backpack added to the strangeness. I had figured if I was looking for true exhaustion, food, water and extra clothes would be counterproductive. I was going light and fast on my horizontal big wall.
In truth, I hate walking on the flat. After just three hours, my mind was tiring faster than my legs, and my steely determination was turning to putty. But my illusion held. British mountaineer Doug Scott spent a week crawling down a peak in Pakistan known as “the Ogre” with two broken legs. He was so tough, his mates kept sending him ahead, on his hands and knees, to break trail in the deep snow. I could make it to the next intersection.
After 20 kilometres, reality gave fantasy a good punch in the face. I was done. My feet were sore, I was hungry, and staring at the ever-converging white lines had crushed my will. I turned and headed for home. In my normal life, 20 kilometres is not a distance anyone would “ooh” or “aah” over, but whatever rats had been chewing at me were slain. In the boringness of the walking, I reached the same Zen state that seemed to possess motionless cows I was passing. My pace slowed, and I knew my cunning plan was working.
An epic often turns on what first appears to be an insignificant detail. A light rain started, and the afternoon sun lost its warmth in the increased cloud cover. I could feel a cold mould growing inside me, but with only a couple hours to go, I was not concerned. I picked up my pace. There was no corresponding increase in warmth. In fact, there was not even an increase in speed. I was watching my progress on my phone’s GPS and could see the downward trajectory of the graph. That was until the phone screen quit reacting to my touch. Apparently, it could no longer detect life in my wet, freezing fingers.
Five kilometres from home, the shivering became uncontrollable. I was lurching along, my mouth making a loud sewing machine-like noise. Still, the reassuring familiar details of my morning jogging route were in sight. A shortcut across the golf club and I would be back to my basecamp/bus.
One of the rules of alpinism is that the slower you go, the slower you go; once the feedback loop of depleted energy starts, the distance you cover decreases geometrically. So, I blame it on geometry. That damn golf course almost killed me. The grass felt sticky, with each step required lifting a leg and dragging it forward against an invisible force. Time started to warp curiously. Looking across a fairway, I could see the other side, but all my effort seemed insufficient to get there. It took me an hour to go a distance you would cover looking for your lost car keys.
They say when you freeze to death, your brain ceases differentiating between hot and cold, and a pleasant numbness overtakes you. Not true. Ask a still-conscious victim suffering from the slow-squeezing vice of hypothermia if there is anything peaceful about their situation, and you can expect slurred expletives. Even in my semi-hallucinatory state, I knew: freezing sucks.
It took me ten hours to finish my route. I slumped on the shower floor and lay there twitching until I had drained the hot water tank. I crawled into bed and went into a deep, satisfying sleep.
The king of mountaineering epics was French alpinist Lionel Terray. He was involved in so many historic dramas they named a traffic circle in Chamonix after him. He called his memoir Conquistadors of the Useless. I think he would be proud of me.
Words: Whitney Thurlow
Image: Laura Williamson
