UNUSUAL ALPINE JOURNEY

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23263, 25 February 1941, Page 10

UNUSUAL ALPINE JOURNEY

V TRIP FROM WESTLAND TO CANTERBURY LITTLE KNOWN GLACIERS AND PASSES VISITED An unusual and quite original alpine crossing from Westland into Canter-bury-was made recently by Messrs E. R, Williams (Christchurch), Bernard Teague (Wairoa). and Angus Russell (Napier). The party left the Coast by following the Karangarua river into the fastnesses of South Westland and crossing into Canterbury by Broderick's Pass. The first township they entered on the eastern side of the ranges was Omarama. This trip is the more remarkable because the average age of the three men is considerably more than 30 years. Heavily laden to insure against enforced camps by flooded rivers, the men tramped for two days up the Karangarua river until they reached Carsell's flat, where the Twain and Regina join the main stream. They followed the Regina, crossing the pass at its head into the Twain. Giant boulders in the Regina gorge forced the party to work its way along the steep and heavily wooded mountain sides, so that for a time no more than a mile was regarded as a fair day’s march. Deer had apparently not entered this valley, which the party regarded as a botanical sanctuary. They measured celmesias five and a half inches in diameter.

From the pass at the head of the Regina the party descended to the Horace Walker glacier. This glacier had receded considerably since the last men had walked on it. and. like the Franz Josef, had gouged out a lake at its terminal face. Following the grassy flats of the Twain, they scrambled on to the Douglas glacier, which had also retreated and formed a. small lake at its snout. Enormous boulders delicately poised on the rocks of the moraine made the going hard. As a full moon rose above the icefields. a comfortable bivouac was established on a patch of rock. The next two days, during which rain fell, were spent in resting. On the morning of the third day in the Twain, the Douglas Pass was crossed in bright sunshine. A steep glissade down hardened snow' slopes brought them out on to the McKerrow' glacier from which the Landsborough river rises. For the next several days, deer tracks W'ere followed'along grassy flats, around high spurs dropping from the Main Divide, w'hich runs parallel wuth the river for some 40 miles, and in fording tributary glacier streams. Striking up from a deer cullers’ camp on a Landsborough flat, the party crossed into Canterbury over Broderick’s Pass (about 5500 feet), and followed first the Huxley, then the Hopkins rivers out to Lake Ohau, They follow'ed the lake’s shore and main road to Omarama.