Conquest Of The Carstensz Pyramid Described

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29772, 15 March 1962, Page 9

Conquest Of The Carstensz Pyramid Described

[By RUSSELL KIPPAXI

The first to do so, we stood on the summit of the Carstensz Peak in thick mist and driving snowflakes.

It had been a magnificent climb of a beautiful mountain.

It was 2 p.m. on February 13. The weather was bad. But we were all in high spirits. We had enjoyed the climb. r j Harrer and Phillip Temple embraced. We all laughed and posed for photographs, and with numbed feet and hands wrote the summit note of the first ascent. It had taken seven hours.

The Harrer Carstensz expedition had succeeded in its prime aim, the first ascent of the mysterious and previously little-known Carstensz Pyramid. Mysterious, because few photographs appear to exist of this mountain; little known, because descriptions of it are few and incomplete. But Carstensz is the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes. Built Cairn

We did not stay long on the summit, for with an enforced bivouac on the summit ridge probable we hurried to take our photographs, build the traditional cairn, and return the way we had come. Our expedition had reached base camp at the foot of the Carstensz, about a fortnight earlier. This had been established by Temple, who had gone on ahead to prepare for our arrival.

Harrer, Patrol Officer Albert Huizenga, and myself plus 115 carriers, surprised Temple on his solitary vigil on January 29 after a fiveday march from the Haga Valley. The carriers were loaded with our personal equipment, food for ourselves for six days, and food for themselves. A New World

Actually only one-third of the carriers were needed for our food and equipment. The other two-thirds were carrying the carriers’ own rations of heavy sweet potatoes. We spent the first three days of our march climbing along the native trails through dense moss forest. It was a jungle of tall trees and fems, almost impenetrable, tangled with vines and all overlaid with a dripping tapestry of thick moss. It was silent, except for the sound of water, cool and green.

The camps were placed in clearings carved from the jungles, in which the carriers built bark-roofed huts for themselves to keep out the cold nightly rain. On the third day we entered a new world—a high alpine marshland of tussock grass and alpine plants, 12,000 ft above sea level For two days we crossed the rolling hills and strange limestone formations, with the ever-approaching rock and ice of the North Wall of Carstensz to spur us on. Dugundugu

Plodding along on perpetually wet feet we found compensation in the myriads of brightly coloured alpine flowers, and in the sight of our goal, the Carstensz Mountains, or ‘‘Dugundugu’’ to the Dani carriers.

On January 29 we set up the base camp—marvellous words to us, for it meant the end of the first phase of the expedition. We had arrived.

The next phase, the establishment of the high camps,

On February 13, the four-man expedition led by Heinrieh Harrer, the famous Austrian author and mountaineer, successfully scaled the 16,700 ft peak of the mysterious ice-capped Carstensz Pynunide, the highest peak between the Himalayas and the Andes, tn wild central Dutch New Guinea.

Included in the party were the Christchurch mountaineer, Phillip Temple, Albert puizenga, of the Netherlands, and the writer of this article, Russell Kippax. aged 30, a Sydney medical student, who describes how the final assault was made on the previously nnconquered mountain.