Pat Deavoll knocks off a long held ambition to climb the Hillary Ridge and makes a sweet earner out of it to boot
In my 35 year climbing career I’d never climbed the Hillary (South) Ridge of Aoraki/Mt Cook. I had tried sporadically over the years to arrange a climbing partner and a spell off work for the climb, but plans always fell through. When Rob, a friend from Canada on sabbatical from his university, asked if I would climb Mt Cook with him, I wondered in the back of my mind if he would be up for the Hillary Ridge. It is no pushover, with only a couple of ascents in the last 30 years and Rob was of the ever-growing breed of modern-day climbers with money to spare, a busy life and little time to commit to their climbing. They relied on professional guides to get them up. Rob regularly employed a guide; in fact he had recently been on a commercially guided trip to the Himalayas where he’d summited an 8000m peak…along with 200 other climbers. I didn’t think anyone had guided the Hillary Ridge since Ayres guided Sir Ed and I was no guide, but maybe I could pull it off? “What do you think of trying the Hillary Ridge?” I asked cautiously. “I’d have to do all the leading, of course.” Rob’s eyebrows rose in query. “You think I’m up for it?” “Maybe.” I paused. Was I about to commit to a route that was beyond both me as a guide and Rob as a climber? After all, I’d never climbed with Rob and didn’t really know where his skill levels lay. Our relationship was through skiing. He was a small neat man in his late 40’s, with a Canadian reserve and two children and a wife back in Ottawa. He’d been in the same university department for 22 years, liked to cycle and work out at the gym. I sensed a growing excitement as Rob thought about the prospect. “I’ll pay you a proper guide’s fee,” he said. “I’ll pay all your costs. I’ll buy great food. We’ll have wine.” “But what if the New Zealand Mountain Guides Association finds out I guided for money,” I said. “Or the Department of Conservation? I’ll be lynched.” Without a guiding qualification or a National Park concession I’d be in serious trouble if I was caught. Twelve years earlier I’d taken part in the first of four exams towards becoming a mountain guide and failed. That was the end of my guiding career. So the NZMGA and I weren’t on great terms. A nasty little seed was sown – perhaps I could get one back at them? “Oh come on,” Rob begged, clearly warming to the thought of adding the Hillary Ridge to his climbing resume. “I won’t pay you cash – I’ll buy your air fare to Afghanistan instead.” I was off to climb in Afghanistan later in the year and the financial hurdle of the air fare loomed large. Ok,” I finally said, with a modicum of conviction. “Let’s try it.” Two days later we were tottering up the Hooker Glacier in the mid-afternoon heat of a peerless day. For an hour-and-a-half we’d tripped around the terminal lake, teal blue and bobbing with icebergs as serene as swans. Along a stony beach at best six inches wide, dodging rocks as they bounced down the moraine wall and plunked into the water. But Rob seemed happy enough following on my heels as we reminisced on our ski days. Six hours later we used steel cables to haul our way off the ice to Gardiner Hut. Ten kilometers of tenuous, irritating glacial moraine was behind us, where each step risked a fall and a hard slam on the ice. Rob had gone quiet as we stumbled along – he was concentrating on his feet. The hut perched in a magnificent position atop a rock dome with views up glacier to the imperious Sheila face of Aoraki/Mt Cook, and down glacier towards the button buildings of the Mt Cook Village. The day had cooled, and Rob seemed dejected. But he perked up when he looked inside the hut. “Splendid,” he said taking in the comfortable bunks on the back wall, the neat little bench, the water buckets and cooking pots arranged on the shelves under the sink and the hooks for jackets. The sparse comfort of the hut was enticing, but I had to disappoint him. “Rob, I’m sorry,” I said gently, “I don’t think we should stay here. I think we need to go higher up the slope and bivouac in a crevasse so we can get a good start on the ridge in the morning.” Rob looked crestfallen, but nodded solemnly. “I guess you’re right,” he sighed as he scuffed back outside. By 8pm we were settled in a small flat-bottomed crevasse at the junction of the Noeline Glacier. As I sat in my sleeping bag, leaning against the blue ice wall and cooking up a packet of bacon, Rob said, “Hey this bivouacking isn’t so bad.” Earlier, he had looked at the crevasse with disbelief when I announced it would be our shelter for the night. “We climb in this end here, see, and there are two walls that keep the wind off us, and that end has a roof,” I’d explained, pointing to where a snow bridge made a natural ceiling. “And look! The bottom is flat, so it will be comfortable.” We hunkered down for the night as a million stars flared against the black. A slight breeze teased the edge of the crevasse. All was quiet but for an occasional phat phat of stones trickling down the slope and the clatter of ice in the glacier below. “Hey, can you see that satellite up there?” Rob said before falling asleep. I stared at the stars and fretted and fretted about the next day. In the dark of the earliest part of the morning I’d need to negotiate the crevasses and towering seracs of the Noeline Icefall by the threaded beam of my torch. The galloping icefall was our only access to Endeavour Col, the lowest point of the Hillary Ridge. Would Rob have the headspace to cope with the wild, mad exposure of the Caroline Face, or the stamina to stand on the front points of his crampons for many hours? We may get only so far, and for a myriad of reasons have to turn back. I may never get him down. [caption id="attachment_5490" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]
