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NEW ZEALAND’s highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook, lies at the heart of a national park that combines dangerous mountaineering opportunities with simple, scenic daywalks and the start of the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail, which goes all the way down to Oamaru.
At the heart of the national park there is a tourist village called the Aoraki/Mount Cook Village. The village is totally accessible by car and bus, and you can use it as a base for activities that are as adventurous as you like.
You get to the village by way of a road up the side of Lake Pūkaki, a huge and scenic lake which has been raised fifty metres for hydroelectric purposes since the mid-twentieth century.
The surface elevation of Lake Pukaki is 500 metres or 1,640 feet above sea level. The summit of Aoraki/Mount Cook, which is only a short distance from the actual head of the lake, is 3,724 metres or 12,217 feet above sea level. The difference is 3,274 metres.
As such, the view is spectacular, in fact almost Himalayan in terms of the actual prominence of the peaks above the lake.
Here is a detail from a sign at one of the lookouts along the road, which describes how Lake Pūkaki itself got to be so big, in ways that rather oddly included the submergence of an island that once appeared on New Zealand banknotes.
There is a display at the dam which describes traditional Māori ways of life in the area, the so-called Mackenzie Country (after a nineteenth century sheep-stealer) or Te Manahuna in Māori. This landscape is fairly bleak and moor-like for many kilometres in all directions even before you get into the mountains. All the same, it used to be an important source of eels and weka for South Island Māori.
The village includes a famous tourist hotel called the Hermitage, which was rebuilt by the New Zealand Government in Mad Men days to be the last word in sophistication, by the standards of the time.
The Hermitage has since been enlarged with more picture windows on the pattern of the original one. And of course they’ve got rid of the ashtrays! Here are a couple of photos I took in September 2021. If you look carefully, you can see mountain snow and ice reflected in the big windows, in both photos.
There are two airports in the vicinity of the village, Glentanner Aerodrome and also the actual Aoraki/Mt Cook Airport. Both have really good tourist flight packages. You can look at the glaciers for as little as NZ $150 to $200.
If you take the option of an hour-long flight, the things you can see include not only the mountain peaks but also the Fox and Franz Joseph glaciers, which run separately down toward the West Coast, and between the coastal glaciers and the peaks, an icecap of more confluent glaciers which lies to the west of the mountains at the head of Lake Pūkaki.
Aoraki/Mt Cook and its neighouring mountains tower three thousand metres and more above the lake, but not so high above a small plateau to their west, which is mostly at an altitude of about 2,500 metres. The mountains force prevailing westerly winds to drop snow onto the plateau before the winds carry on to the east over Lake Pūkaki. This creates the icecap to the west of the peaks, a lake of ice which feeds the separate West Coast glaciers.
The planes and helicopters land on the safer parts of the icecap on some flights, dropping off skiers and sightseers and also delivering people to and from alpine huts in the area, notably Centennial Hut and Pioneer Hut.
I got tips on things to do from a very good receptionist at the Hermitage. Even if you don’t stay at the Hermitage you can still have a meal. And you can also drop in to the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Museum and Theatre, dedicated to the exploits of New Zealand’s most famous mountaineer and modern-day explorer. I watched six movie episodes of Sir Ed’s life while I was at the Hermitage. I did not know that he made it to the South Pole on a tractor!
Another good place to stay at near the village is the New Zealand Alpine Club’s Unwin Lodge, which costs NZ $40 a night for non-club members. There is also a Youth Hostel, the YHA Aoraki Mt Cook. And the Old Mountaineers Café is also a good place to have dinner at.
Here is an old poster I saw: the area has been popular with tourists for ages, since the nineteenth century in fact.
Walks you can do in the vicinity of the village without getting into actual mountaineering include the Hooker Valley Track, which gets close to the Hooker glacier, and walks along the Tasman Valley, which in their turn bring you to the Blue Lakes and the Tasman Glacier.
See the webpage doc.govt.nz/hooker-valley-track, and also download the brochure Walking Tracks in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park from the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC), which covers the Hooker Valley Track more briefly and also a range of others including the Tasman Valley walks.
For the cycleway from the Hooker Valley to Oamaru, see alps2ocean.com. The Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail also has an alternative beginning at nearby Lake Tekapo.
In the remainder of this post, I will talk about a gnarly mountaineering skills training adventure I went on, and then reflect on earlier generations of climbers, including women who went up in long dresses and hobnailed boots.
We started our High Alpine Skills training course near Mt Cook Village, staying at the Unwin Lodge, which was a very eerie place. Every time I had stayed there, I couldn’t believe the stories I heard about dreadful accidents from people who’d actually seen them happen. For instance, one time I was sitting in the lounge and a party of four climbers came up and were let in sombrely by the hut warden, as they had lost someone on the mountain. It was the sort of place where death was quite a frequent occurrence.
As with diving, you always climb with a partner too (at the very least, somebody has to hold the other end of the rope!) Before the course started, I remember talkingto a woman who told me that she and her climbing partner had pitched their tent half under a flat rock face and half out in the open. An avalanche had come down and completely covered her climbing partner. She had to dig her partner out and said they were lucky to be alive because they both could have died.
I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this climbing business is quite risky’; for generally I am fairly conservative when it comes to taking risks.
New Zealand’s tallest mountain, Aoraki/Mt Cook has long offered a challenge for aspiring climbers. To Ngāi Tahu, the peak represents the most sacred of ancestors and it is therefore tapu (forbidden) to climb on its head. Government cultural guidelines recommend not standing right at the top, not cooking or eating right at the top, and to take out all rubbish (which people should do anyway).
All the same, European explorers have come to the area from the time of earliest settlement until now to attempt the climb. These include Sir Edmund Hillary, who learnt his mountain-craft on Mt Cook and its surrounding peaks. The Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park itself was established in 1953 to protect the mountainous area, even though some of the land in the park is still privately owned.
To start with, we trekked some way up the nearby Sealy Range, and my feet became covered in blisters. We did some training and learnt belaying, and then tramped back down to Unwin Lodge. From Unwin Lodge, we flew by helicopter up and over the charming Sealy Tarns to the Barron Saddle Hut to start our alpine training in earnest.
Once we got there, we found out that an earlier hut at a nearby location, the Three Johns Hut, had been blown over a precipice by the wind in 1977. Three people inside at the time were killed. Huts on Mt Cook have also been taken out by avalanches.
The Barron Saddle Hut was a metal cylinder which looked like it been designed by an engineer to handle extreme natural forces. Even this survival bunker had lately had some of its windows blown in, or sucked out, by the local whirlwinds. Their empty frames were covered over by wood. I got no sleep whatever at first, worrying about all the ways the elements seemed to be conspiring against us.
From the hut, we went via Barron Saddle to stay overnight on Mt Annette on the Sealy Range. There was a beautiful sunset over the Mt Cook/Aoraki mountain range. I’d brought a ‘bivvy’ on the trip, a weatherproof bag that zips over your sleeping bag for sleeping outdoors. But I had left it behind in Barron Saddle Hut by mistake, because I was so tired. In the end, I had to borrow an emergency blanket off one of the instructors. I wrapped the survival blanket around my sleeping bag and our group slept outside under the stars that night, huddled together.
It was beautiful, though cold. But I had enough clothes on, about three or four layers, to cope.
The instructors were more than professional, keeping an extra eye on people like me who were relatively inexperienced. After getting nervous initially due to the unnerving Unwin Lodge tales and the history of Barron Saddle and Three Johns, I felt completely safe in the hands of the instructors.
It had been quite an adventure and Aoraki/Mt Cook was stunning, but the whole time I just didn’t feel comfortable with my level of alpine skills. I haven’t given up on that sort of thing, but I’m going to take a step back and think I’m better off witha guide in such mountainous areas.
I figured that I'd probably need to get some better climbing boots too because at the end of the alpine course it took my feet a month to repair from all the blisters I got.
Having done all this training, I am in awe of early climbers who ascended these mountains in hobnailed boots. I was fascinated to learn how the nail-heads poking out of the bottoms of the boots, initially quite blunt, took on more and more pointy forms until one day someone hit on the idea of removable crampons, which could be made pointier still and then taken off when they weren’t needed.
Climbers also ascended in long skirts and generally respectable-looking attire if they were women in the Victorian era, as surprisingly many were. A more informal look had come in by the 1930s, however.
And that's all for now!
If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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