The great south road
A months-long trek across the Southern Alps would put any friendship under stress. So, why did a group of mates put themselves through it? Charlie O’Mannin reports.
On the top of the Katzenbach Ridge, in the heart of the Southern Alps, five people stuck in a three-person tent huddled in the middle of a thunderstorm. Lightning struck the snow less than 100 metres from the tent, and the occupants screamed. The tent bent over to the ground in the wind’s ferocity, putting a permanent kink in the tent-pole. In the background, avalanches rumbled down a nearby ice wall.
Inside, Maddy Whittaker, Conor Vaessen, Tom Hadley, To¯ rea Scott-Fyfe and Jamie Gardner discussed what they would do if the tent ripped.
Their best option was a small cave between two gigantic boulders nearby, which they thought they might all be able to squeeze into and hope the storm would pass. “It was definitely some big group apprehension and nervousness,” Hadley said.
The five of them were top-and-tailing in the small tent, and at one end there wasn’t even room to sit up. Going to the toilet was a major undertaking, flooding the tent with snow and freezing the occupants.
Vaessen said it took an hour back inside your sleeping bag to get warm again. “A bathroom break was something you had to really work yourself up to do,” he said.
For Whittaker, “just lying in different positions was the main activity” over the 36 hours the storm lasted.
The storm was just another day on Whittaker, Vaessen, Hadley and Scott-Fyfe’s threemonth traverse of the Southern Alps, with Gardner accompanying them for the first section.
Over the course of the traverse, the group travelled 651km of backcountry and mountain from Arthur’s Pass to Fiordland, and climbed 50km of vertical – the equivalent of climbing Mt Everest from sea level six times.
The trip took a year to plan, with months spent drying food for the journey and carrying it into remote huts in big plastic drums that formed a lifeline down the ridge of the mountains, spending only 1 or 2 per cent of the whole traverse on established tracks.
It was as the group were climbing up to the Bracken Snowfields that they were caught in the thunderstorm. The weather forecast they had received by satellite phone had forecast a bit of rain, but nothing like the storm they found themselves stuck in.
‘‘When you are just getting 160 characters of text and that’s your weather for the next week, your world just shrinks,’’ Whittaker said.
After a month of traverse, the group had scheduled to come out for a few days in December to attend graduation at the University of Otago.
‘‘We got out at about 9pm and drove to Hokitika and all the Christmas lights were out, and we were just tripping out; we were like ‘wow, civilisation is just too much’,’’ said Veassen.
Whittaker said they were ‘‘driving at like 50kmh down the highway being like ‘this is too fast’.’’
‘‘We went to this public bathroom and we all crowded in front of the mirror and were like, wow, that’s what we look like.’’
But as the shock wore off, Hadley said, ‘‘we were kind of itching to get back into it’’.
The next section, around Aoraki/Mt Cook, was mostly glacial travel, with the group roped together 10 metres apart, forging new tracks through the snowy heights while navigating crevasses and abseiling.
Scott-Fyfe said that terrain changed a lot of how they did things.
‘‘When you’re in glacial places you can’t really move in the heat of the day. We ended up doing a lot of things at really weird times, like going all through the night or getting up at 1am.’’
Whittaker said: ‘‘Some of our routes hadn’t been done before, and they weren’t particularly difficult, but no-one had tried to do what we were doing.
‘‘That was quite exciting, going into it not knowing if it will work, but giving it a try. I think that was one of the things that was really special.’’
But for Whittaker things started to take a downward turn. During the Aoraki/Mt Cook section she started vomiting regularly.
‘‘There were a number of days when I was throwing up every day; walking when your body’s not coping well, every step is like a huge act of willpower and that wears on you. I’d been sick quite a lot in the months leading up to the traverse, and then it got better for a bit and I thought ‘oh am I going to get away with this?’ and then it started coming back, with the huge physical stress I guess.
‘‘The decision to stop was ultimately the hardest part... for me. I don’t like quitting things, particularly when it’s something you’ve put a lot of effort into planning, when it’s been your dream for a really long time.
‘‘It was a really big challenge to reframe it to ‘I’m not quitting, I’m just putting it on hold until
it’s a better time for my body to be out there’. That was really hard.’’
Veassen decided to accompany Whittaker out. ‘‘At that point I had decided that I had achieved what I wanted to achieve going in. It was exactly how I wanted to spend my summer. Anything more was just for the sake of it at that point,’’ he said.
Hadley and Scott-Fyfe kept going. Together they covered the second half of the traverse, from the Copeland to the Divide Shelter, in 50 days. At Haast Pass, Whittaker and Veassen rejoined them for a few days as a second try to see if they could continue after a break. They realised they couldn’t and headed back out.
Whittaker said she’s ‘‘super stoked that these guys carried on and carried it through. It’s super inspiring, and it’s got me excited for what’s in store for me in future.’’
The group lived off the dehydrated food they had spent the previous year preparing. Each drop had food for 10 days, enough to last them to the next drop; if the weather forced them to stay still for a few days, strict rationing kicked in.
During the second half of the traverse, Hadley and Scott-Fyfe arrived at Colin Todd Hut on the Bonar glacier at 10pm starving. They had eaten the last of their food, depending on the food drop a friend had taken to the hut.
They couldn’t find the drop.
Scott-Fyfe said they were ‘‘getting a bit frantic’’ searching, and weighing up their options.
‘‘If there’s no food here we have absolutely no food, and we definitely can’t keep going if we don’t have food, but can we even get out to the road if we don’t have food?’’
Eventually, ‘‘pretty relieved’’, they found the drop, stashed behind some rocks behind the toilet, a fair way from the hut.
‘‘It was only maybe half an hour of searching. But it was a pretty tense half an hour,’’ Hadley said.
Eating the same peanut butter and dehydrated hummus in wraps every day also started to have an effect.
‘‘In the last week we were bush bashing up a hill and I really wanted a banana,’’ Hadley said. ‘‘And then under To¯ rea’s foot there was this big curvy stick, and it looked so much like a banana that I took a bite of it just to make sure it was really a stick.’’
During the last few weeks, Scott-Fyfe and Hadley travelled through the Olivine Wilderness area in Fiordland, crossing the Olivine Ice Plateau and coming out the Forgotten River.
‘‘It was 10 days of the most remote difficult travel we’ve both ever done,’’ Hadley said.
There are no tracks or huts in that area and visitors are rare; it is one of the most isolated places on Earth.
‘‘You fight your way through really difficult resilience-testing terrain, but then you’re rewarded for it by the incredible sense of remoteness. You are really deep into wild places.’’
Vaessen and Whittaker both said they got a similar feeling from their favourite part, the Lower Balfour, which sees fewer than one party every 10 years travel through it.
Whittaker said there was one night in the Lower Balfour when they ‘‘were camping up really high and there was a full moon with this huge arc of massive mountains around you. I felt really small in there and I think that’s why I really liked it.’’
The isolation was awe-inspiring, but also difficult. ‘‘Within the second part when it was just Tom and I, there were definitely some moments when it was just trying,’’ Scott-Fyfe said.
‘‘Just keeping going and just missing people so much. We’d been walking along just saying, ‘imagine if all our friends were just magically there. I know they’re not going to be, but just imagine.’’’
At Colin Todd hut, Hadley and Scott-Fyfe did spend a day with a few friends who had tramped in to climb Mt Aspiring.
‘‘Leaving and knowing we weren’t going to see anyone else until we got back to Dunedin a fortnight later, it was a big struggle. We had super heavy packs and were walking across a glacier being like ‘why can’t I just go out with my friends and make pancakes? Why am I doing this to myself?’’’
One of her friends reminded her that while what she was doing was hard, it was also rewarding.
‘‘He was right, but at the time it was like ‘I hate rewarding things’. It was so worth keeping going.’’
Vaessen said the experience has expanded his view of what is possible. ‘‘You realise you can go and do so much more than what you’d originally thought. You’re no longer held back by any terrain or apprehension of what you might come across, because you know it’s well within your capability to deal with any obstacle you come across.
‘‘Just being out there in that mountainous landscape for so long you gain a real appreciation for the scale of life. You come back into the daily grind, and you see how insignificant all the little troubles people have are. Nothing bothers you as much any more. You realise the scale of life.’’
Whittaker agreed. ‘‘You spend such a long time in such a special environment that it kind of fills you up with a little bit of magic. You’ve got a bit more wonder coming out of it that allows you to see a bit more magic in all of the world around you.
‘‘I think people think that if you’ve been in these big mountains all the things you used to do must seem insignificant, but I think it makes them even more significant, because it’s a portal that takes you back.’’
For Hadley, living in the mountains brought home the impact humans are having on the natural world.
‘‘Being first-hand witnesses to glacial recession, where something that used to be a straightforward walk on a glacier has now become a really challenging rock climb is really frustrating, and seeing the evidence of where those glaciers have retreated is really sad.
‘‘You become very aware of the impacts of the way that you’re living, not in an abstract sense of ‘I need to live sustainably because that’s what we get told to do’, but it’s important because you have firsthand evidence of what’s happening.’’
One of the things all four of them emphasised was that they’re not special, that anyone could do what they did.
‘‘What makes it extraordinary is that we are very ordinary people doing it, and I think that anybody who has a passion for climbing and the outdoors, some determination and is keen for some tough but really rewarding experience should definitely do something like this, they should totally give it a go,’’ Whittaker said.
The group is embarking on a tour of alpine clubs across the country to talk about their trip and encourage others to follow their footprints in the snow.