Best known mountain guide

Press, 7 May 1983, Page 20

Best known mountain guide

Harry Ayres: Mountain Guide. By Michael Mahoney. Whitcoulls, 1982. 160 pp. Illustrations. $17.95. \, (Reviewed by Colin Monteath) Harry Ayres, the man who taught Sir Edmund Hillary his trade, is perhaps New Zealand’s best known mountain guide. Biographical detail of our professional mountaineers who were active in the first half of the century is sparse so it is both timely and fitting that Michael Mahoney has focused on the most prominent guide of the 1940 s and 19505. Mahoney is both a Catholic priest and an experienced climber. He has been a guide himself at Mt Cook, has reached the South Col of Everest, and for four years was the president of the New Zealand Mountain Guides Association. Such a background has enabled Mahoney to write with passion and sensitivity on Ayres’s long career based in the central Southern Alps. Mahoney has. done well to capture such a profound image of a man who is notoriously reticent and modest about his ability as a mountaineer and his exploits as a guide. Harry Ayres was an apprentice guide on the West Coast glaciers during the 1930 s and there are some delightful anecdotes from this period while he was working on farms, crossing swollen rivers, and even an attempt to take a canvas canoe up the awesome Callery Gorge in search of gold. Across the Main Divide at The Hermitage, Ayres soon found his niche. Mahoney beautifully recreates some of Ayres’s guiding greats on our high peaks, fitting them well into the politics and ethics of the time. It is pleasing to read interesting diversions about other Mt Cook

personalities of the day — the guides Frank Milne and Vic Williams about whom relatively little has ever been recorded, and of course some of Ayres’s well known clients — Junee Ashurst, Oscar Coberger, and Ed Hillary. This blending together of a lot of otherwise scattered climbing history is one of the most important and appreciated aspects of the book. Fate precluded Ayres ever going to the Himalaya in the early 1950 s to show his mettle on Everest with his old friend Hillary. He was selected, though, to go to the Antarctic to learn about dog driving from the Australians, he trained teams on the

Tasman Glacier and then, with Hillary during the 1957 establishment of Scott Base, took part in the famous TransAntarctic Expedition. By his leadership in the Antarctic, Ayres set in motion a professionalism that New Zealand is still noted for today. Ayres returned from the Antarctic to take up the position of the first Chief Ranger of the newly gazetted Mt Cook National Park. Although he resigned from this position only three years later, Mahoney gives an interesting insight into Ayres’s philosophy on aspects of park management. Some of these conflicts are still graunching along today. The book is affected by some minor, though annoying errors. A few are merely typographical, I’m sure, such as mentioning Kangchenjunga as a 7000-metre peak instead of 8000-metre. Others are historically a little more serious. Mahoney confuses the Anna Glacier with a peak called Annan; Graeme, son of Harry, is shown at Franz Josef in 1951, though he was not born for another three years; and it was the guide Charles Hilgendorf who discovered the five bodies on Jhe Tasman Glacier during an electrical storm in 1930, not the guide Mick Bowie. After a fall into the chilling Antarctic sea Mahoney maintains that Ayres eventually heaved himself out. In reality, if it had not been for the efforts of Murray Ellis, Ayres would have almost certainly perished. None of these errors significantly detract from the value of the statement Mahoney has built up, both about Harry Ayres as a person and about the enigmatic and poorly recorded climbing scene of which he was the centre.