By Dave Vass (Potton & Burton, 2023)
In Not Set in Stone, Dave Vass tells the story of a life spent in the mountains, and now spent without them. One of Aotearoa’s leading mountaineers, Dave broke his neck in 2015 while walking out from a climbing trip in Fiordland, resulting in incomplete tetraplegia.
Much of the book chronicles his time in the outdoors before his injury. There are his early exploits as an inexperienced caver (hello, claustrophobia), close calls with the Canterbury University Tramping Club (a subsection here is cheekily called ‘Don’t Tell Mum’ – as a mum myself, I concur), and, eventually, the big walls of the Darrans in Fiordland.
Without delving too much into the “why”, Dave expresses viscerally how compelled he felt to get into the mountains, in both healthy and unhealthy ways, and how lucky he was to make it as far as 2015 – many didn’t. The final section details his very unlucky accident, and “the realisation of what has happened, and what it means”.
Dave has said that writing the book was a way of processing his way into a new life. As he writes: “climbing wasn’t about the summit. The mountain journey was worth it in itself, and this journey I’m on now will be worth it too.”
Not Set in Stone takes the reader, memorably, on this journey too.
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LAURA WILLIAMSON
