A ski traverse of the Hooker Range.
This is the tale of a bucket that went on a long journey to the wild places west of the village. It’s a yarn about three mountain guides (sometimes four), spanning three decades in age (sometimes four) on a much-needed week off. And it’s the story of a probing of why.
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The Landsborough River in South Westland is a wilderness icon, one enshrined not only by collective belief, but by policy, in the form of its official recognition as the Hooker-Landsborough Wilderness Area. This is no mere title. A “wilderness” designation means no roads, grazing, or mining, no motorised access, no helicopter landings, no huts, nor even tracks. Here, ploughing 60 kilometres southwest from the border of Aoraki / Mount Cook and Westland Tai Poutini National Parks, the gulf of the Landsborough Valley separates the Main Divide from a chain of more remote, alluring satellites: the Hooker Range.
The names of the range’s glacial giants resonate in Aotearoa’s mountaineering and transalpine circles. Hooker, Dechen, Fettes, Strachan. There have been attempts to traverse the range in summer, including scaling most (if not all) of the largest peaks, but a search of the New Zealand Alpine Journal archives for a winter traverse returns squat. If it happened, it’s not recorded there. This is a serious place, tiger country.
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I had been dreaming of traversing the Hooker Range on skis for a few years when I found someone else keen to give it a go. Anna Keeling is an IFMGA-certified IFMGA Mountain and Ski guide and examiner for the New Zealand Mountain Guides Association, and she had examined me on my final guides’ course. Examiners are often pariahs to the candidates. But Anna’s cackling humour, emotional intelligence and alpine badass-ness convinced me I could re-imagine this relationship. She was immediately enthusiastic; her only concern (which proved ironic, later) was not keeping up.
Winter 2024 was uniquely challenging. We committed large chunks of September and October to the project, watching hawkishly for a combined window of suitable weather and acceptable avalanche hazard. But when winter comes late, winter comes hard. Tremendous storms repeatedly buried the mountains in cloud and blowing snow; enormous avalanches poured off the Divide; highways closed, re-opened, closed. September was looking like a write-off. And then, just as the weather began to mend, disaster: one friend buried and rescued from an avalanche. Another one caught and, this time, killed.
Everything was in doubt.
“I really don’t want to get hurt or die. I can’t believe I’m actually writing this, but it feels relevant.”
“Weather looks questionable and emotionally… we may not be ready.”
We thought about motivations, life. We examined everything. Several weeks later, we were ready and so, too, was the weather. With the last-minute addition of up-and-coming ski mountaineer and junior mountain guide Troy Forsyth, mid-October saw us converge on Aoraki / Mount Cook Village. A short way across the valley, ice from Mount Sefton rumbled unseen inside the low, drizzly cloud.
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Redefining locality
Where are you going tomorrow?’
“The Sentinel.”
“Centennial?”
You can understand the confusion. We were challenging our perception of neighbourhood; not far in space but a leap for the imagination.
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Four guides, four decades
“I’ll do it my way.” It must be three guides on a week off. The OG guide (Anna), the sorta-guide (myself) and the almost-guide (Troy). Three, and waiting at each end, Jane, the (self-described) retired guide. Her smiles, hugs and tucker would bookend the trip. Four guides, four decades, and the chemistry is good – among us, and between us and the land. It’s no wonder the nicknames we go on to make for each other are avian (Mother Eagle, The Ruru and Baby Bird): a love of flying free on skis and a fascination with the fastnesses of the Landsborough brought us here. The dream of an elegant line through the sky, soaring above the scrub and slabs of south Westland, above tiger country.
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Connection
Leaving the valley floor for the Mueller Hut in scattered showers, an hour behind Anna, weight and worry peel themselves from me and float away by the minute. The pack is tolerable and it is equal parts solid and special to be headed into the hills with Troy. We have previously set out from the same campground on another West Coast vision quest together. It is great to be with him again. My mind slows; I ask questions; I hold my tongue and listen. Much lies ahead of us, but right now we are here. This is enough.
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Cliché
I love an alpine cliché when you’re living it. Soon, we are asking where “here” is. Snow falls thickly through the gloom around us, wrapping us in peace. Cold wind in the face – too far left. Anna’s yodel from the hut – head right. Sliding our feet forwards faithfully into the murk until a lighted window materialises. We stab our skis into a high snowbank and kick steps down to the door, laughing.
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Crossing the Rubicon
Last swishing turns to the end of the corn, skis swung on shoulders. With dry boots and barely a pause, we jump across the Rubicon. A lake of electric blue lies ahead. We will go on. But not just yet: when Anna asks me if I will really swim, I can only respond that no known force on earth could stop me. Arrowing through the sapphire water, ripples of light V-ing across the rocks below and electric jolts rippling through my shoulder muscles, I hear the splashes and shrieks of the others.
There are kilometres yet to travel by nightfall: the food stash, the high sidle, the Townsend Glacier forever-run down to the bonsai-beech and boulders of The Sentinel, where we will camp under the first stars. But for this long moment, here, the future does not exist. And the past? In the hours of this day, I have harvested months of life. For us all, today has been an answer to recent questions raised by loss. We are reminded of why, and of worth. Thorny matters of responsibility and risk to others are not erased, but neither are they posed in this moment: we are human beings, completely and utterly alive.
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Wilson
Wilson went whizzing up the West Coast from Wānaka in a shiny wheeled box. He jolted up the Karangarua, brim-full with food and tea. He listened to rain on the roof at Christmas Flat, cries of awe on The Gladiator, cries of kea at Harpur Rock Biv. He listened to Geoff and Ruari arguing about campsites in the Upper Landsborough – at which point, after only four days’ wilderness walking, he was shoved unceremoniously under a rock.
A week passed, then a month, another month. A gecko ran across his lid. Tahr drifted past, and more quietly, snow. Then voices! Shovels, light.
After eight long moons of stasis, a familiar face. Wilson had been angry, but now he couldn’t help but cry. Wilson had learned that loneliness can become solitude, if you hold the frame right.
Wilson also remembered that he liked to move. And move he did, now. Every night Wilson was transported swiftly from alpine otherworlds to sit in soft herbs, warmed by a fire and supporting a human on his lid. That was fine: there was reciprocity here. He had lightened their load; they were lightening his by the day.
And the names rose and fell away again with the days: Fettes – Zora. Strachan – Dechen – Eyetooth Falls. Otoko Lake – Mount Hooker – Murdock. Mount McCullough. And more slowly now, savoured: Tunnel Creek Rock Biv, Tunnel Creek Hut. Then a misty, light-hazed stroll out the Paringa, and another shiny box waiting to whisk him back to Wānaka in the company of grey skies, tired smiles and laughter.
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Hyperreality
From The Sentinel we follow a ridge up the shoulder towards Mount Fettes and Zora Creek beyond. The land in front of our eyes and under our skis assumes unfamiliar forms and textures that don’t seem to fit existing patterns in the mind. It’s impossible we are only a day from the village. A hush steals over us as we skin separately, and the distant mutter of the Landsborough River is no intrusion. Tilted planes of snow are bisected by mad grooves, snow mushrooms, overhangs and cracks; each roll of ridge is a fresh render from a bottomless palette of whites, creams, blues. This world is outlandish. Have we come to a place beyond our experience? Is this surreal, or hyper-real? A large cornice looms on the ridge ahead, encouraging us to make up our minds.
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Mantras
Spearpointing (NOUN). As in “now we’re spearpointing!”.
1. To move through rough country with a modicum of ease and a whiff of woodsmoke.
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Mueller Pass eavesdropping
(i) Anna, to the world’s most excited kea: “Wanna see my tat?” Orange wings flash in both parties.
(ii) “If we’d gone another way then saw this we’d be saying, thank GOD we didn’t go that way!”
(iii) “Out-RAAAGE-ous!” (utterance #22)
(iv) “We could be on the Tasman, listening to helicopters all day.”
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Dechen
The sun warms the back of my thighs, the sounds of distant rivers waver up to meet me. Tussocks shine yellow in the sun somewhere below. The present connects seamlessly with long ago. I am transported, back above Berg Lake, Canada, in the high peaceful. Alone with gentle light over the terraces and snow-shaded peaks, a glimpse of what we mean by beauty.
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Tunnel Creek
I sit back, feeling the sleeping bag hugging my legs, the support of the rock behind, the heat from the cup in my fingers. Snatches of unhurried conversation drift in and out, fire crackle, warbler song. Off above the ridge the sky is sliding across from the north: cloud and blue patches in a quiet light. Later we will walk, but not far – we’ve decided to ease our way back slowly. And for now, there is this – Eagle, Bird and Ruru on holiday – and this is good. And would you believe, if you’d watched them slide uphill and down-dale, the weights contained in these three bodies: life-long Type 1 diabetes, years-long waves of depression and anxiety, a recent leukaemia prognosis?
You wouldn’t. But there it is.
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Direction
Early morning, the sun not yet on the trees. A faint blue haze, almost a mist, hangs over the clear water of the Paringa River. Two whio whistle past, then it is quiet again.You can traverse however you please. You may traverse from the east, forcing a path into the blue-lit interior. A journey for youth perhaps: from nourishing roots into a world of risk, challenge, reward. But moving west – at this stage of life anything else feels mistaken. A hard and perilous road, like most of the worthwhile ones, but finishing downhill into soft green-tinted light and the welcoming arms of beech. Life flourishes on all sides. The mountains are behind, and ahead lies the great breathing ocean, silver-bronze in the early evening sun.
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Alpenglow
Two weeks later, I sit on a bus winding its way around a shining harbour. I wonder at the tug and bustle of daily life. A sense of wellbeing and perspective shore me up – for now – but I can feel task-life slopping about the footings. Reaching inside my jacket pocket for coins, my fingers instead clasp a crystal of quartz. Between my fingers it flashes, dazzling white in the sun. I squint my eyes against the light, pure and brilliant, and I am there.
Ruari Macfarlane
