You’ve hurt yourself in the mountains, and you’ll never make it out on your own. What happens next?
The Darran Mountains lie deep in the marrow of northern Fiordland—a chunky, perplexing range of diorites and sandstones, gneisses and granites. This is a land of extremes, with the country’s most remote summits, the greatest rainfall and the longest, hardest-to-climb alpine rock walls. Adventurers have been coming here since William Grave and Arthur Talbot in the late 1800s, to test themselves and forge new routes through this vertical landscape.
In summer, a team of climbers embarked on what would be an ambitious and gruelling attempt to traverse the Southern Alps. They began on bicycles in Christchurch and, more than a month later, finished in Haast, having walked 200 km—some on trails pioneered by Charlie Douglas more than a century ago, other times taking routes no one had attempted before.
The face of mountain climbing in New Zealand is changing. As glaciers retreat, access to our high peaks becomes more difficult and, in some cases, near impossible. Climbers are pioneering entirely new routes to reach summits. This summer, a small team of climbers forged their way into the heart of the Spencer Glacier, and struck a new line up the sheer rock flank of Mt Walter—the first new route there in over 30 years.
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