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Last year when I flew out of New Zealand after three months of family-wedding-rugby love and some painting-wwoofing-hiking, I looked down out of my airplane window and saw the peak of Aoraki/Mt. Cook, the boss of the Southern Alps, coming up ferociously through the clouds. My eyes grew enormous with the sight of what I’ve since learned the Maori called “Cloud-Piercer” and I said to myself, “I want to go THERE!” I haven’t been able to shake the bug. Again and again when I see the snowy peaks, my jaw drops and I breathe, “I want to GO UP THERE!” This year I got the chance.
Thanks to Dr. Caroline’s addictive mountain medicine administered regularly since we were in college, I have a lot of hiking miles under my boots, good experience gained from trails and peaks all over the world, and good gear – I’m an experienced and capable hiker and climber, and I love a good long remote challenging hike like nothing else. But I had never spent a lot of time on snowy peaks doing snow and ice climbing. Yet.
This year, the opportunity presented itself for two weeks of heavenly solo climbing on the unbeaten paths and peaks of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. (Hooray!) “Tramping”(kiwi)/”hiking”(yankee) in four different national parks in central South Island fed my wild streak and only wet my appetite for more high-alpine adventure (…European Alps, watch out…). I stayed mostly in alpine huts -- on a few occasions I was the only person there -- and occasionally in beautiful friendly backpacker hostels, made friends along the way but mostly enjoyed my own company. Chekhov and Tolstoy were my trail buddies who provided constant food for thought and amazing insights into human nature, plus amazingly good humor -- I'm smitten.
My body loves being out for very long days climbing: the mountain-goat legs and mind take over with a sense of good balance, intentional movement, and momentum; my breath is strong and clear; mind & spirit really really free and open. The adventure of navigating challenging trails and ridges – across boulder fields, rivers, avalanche fields, sheer rocky faces, and knife-edge ridges – is purely exciting and fun for me. Trail living doesn’t really make sense from a civilized viewpoint (how can dehydrated peas and gummy worms taste so good at the end of the day? why don’t I mind not showering in 5 days of 4-6+ hours a day of sweaty climbing? if you like people, then why is it so wonderful to not see anyone for a while? why did toilets ever seem necessary?) but always makes space for greater sense of life. The intensity that I love in life comes out in a new dimension on long climbing treks, and it makes me glow.
The land in New Zealand is other-worldly. So lightly trodden by humans, it doesn't seem to know about human cares. In tiny NZ’s enormous Southern Alps, two continental plates fight daily and push up new mountain loft by 5-7mm/year, the same rate at which our fingernails grow (!). Though much shorter in total height than their Northern European counterparts, the Southern Alps appear more dramatic to all (Europeans are the first to say) as they rise straight up from sea level and include the longest continuous ridgelines in the world. The terrain, though widely varied, sings a chorus of jagged peaks which may be short and running wearing shorn green grass (thank you sheep), or massively crinkly in bald brown and burnt scrubby brush, or naked to black volcanic sand clinging to powerful giants coming up through the earth. There are few patches of anything growing above hip-level, so sheep and humans on the slopes can SEE everything almost all the time! In the Mount Cook national park, there’s a different event going on. In this range, the most enormous god-spirit mountains confound pesky gravity and seasonality, seeming to take a new breath as they rise up through the clouds into a different world. At their white-tie party in the sky, everyone flexes robustly into their icy white suits (and winks at redheads down below, apparently). There are many glaciers crawling about, which look at first like big versions of what’s on our front yards at the end of a New England winter but when you walk out on them you can see how deep and blue inside and living they are in a way different from solid earth. One mountaineer pointed out to me, talking about avalanches and glaciers moving all around us: “you can see how dynamic the landscape is”. No kidding.
During some of the most exciting days of the trip, I rented crampons and an ice ax (woah!) and put them to very good use in the peaks adjacent to Aoraki/Mt. Cook. A couple of weathered kiwi mountaineers, one a guide for a group on a long trek and had climbed Mt. Cook 15 times, and the other the caretaker of the red alpine hut that was our base, quickly sized that I was excited capable and ready to learn, and took me under their modest kiwi wings. They went ahead & behind me on a long wonderful day hike out on the snowy untouched (frequently very steep and slick) ridge and showed me how to use the ice climbing equipment in different ways and trust myself to get where I want to go. My whole self was beaming!