Skiers invited to slow down, look around

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 21

Skiers invited to slow down, look around

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

Mt Hutt is a dominant landmark above the Canterbury Plains and — by virtue of its being the largest ski-field — is “climbed” by many more people in the course of a year than any other Canterbury peak. But how many of those people really see the mountain? A small minority, I should think. Ski-fields, to my mind, are good places to stay away from in winter; I can’t think of any mountain that isn’t more interesting to go to in summer. With this, of course, goes the feeling that country roads are good places not to be on when ? V

ski traffic is about. But don’t imagine that summer travel to the ski-fields is without its curious little incidents. Last year I had the experience, when a group asked me to accompany them on a trip to see the mountain flowers, of actually having to direct a bus driver to Mt Hutt. He was just down from the North Island, so he had some excuse. All he’d been told, he said, was that he was taking a group out for the day. He had to ask his passengers where they were going. On the way home the bus got a flat tyre, and proved to have no wheel brace in its tool kit — but that’s another story.

Let’s just say that little Minties moments like that can be very useful. Once you finish being hot under the collar about them you can take time out to enjoy the landmarks.

If you’re going ski-ing this week-end, I invite you to do that. Knock a few kilometres off your speed and give yourself time to

see some of the following: • Aylesbury Hills (proof that someone in the Ministry of Works and Development does have a sense of humour).

® Bealey ford on the Selwyn: closed this week, as it has been many times this winter, but always worth a few historic ponderings. During the Great Flood of 1868 (when the Waimakariri got into the Avon and flooded central Christchurch) a party of settlers heading inland camped on the east bank of the Selwyn, waiting for the water to drop. Three weeks later they gave up and went back to Christchurch. ® The Rockwood Range: Mt Somers volcanics resurface here to create spectacular ryolite outcrops — which in spite of more than a century of grazing still harbour a unique assemblage of native plants.

• Rakaia Gorge: spectacular scenery, a pleasant walkway — and the only bridge gazetted as an historical place.

Mt Hutt itself has a name going back to the days of early surveyors who explored and mapped the province before the Four Ships arrived. Captain Joseph Thomas was the man engaged by the Canterbury Association in 1848 to survey for settlement the plains and foothills area between the Waipara and Ashburton Rivers which it had secured from the New Zealand Company. He arrived in December of that year and, during his subsequent explorations, named several prominent Mid-Canterbury landmarks for members of the association. The Ashburton River, then known by its Maori name “Hakatere,” was named after Lord Ashburton (the town came later), and Mt Alford after Viscount Alford. Mt Hutt he named for John Hutt, a former Governor of Western Australia who was prominent in the early affairs of the Canterbury Association. Hutt was, at the time of Thomas’s survey, chair-

man of the committee set up to arrange land sales to prospective settlers in the putative province.

It would be nice, in view of the dominance that this mountain exerts over the climate and vistas of the central plains, to record a happy ending to the story. Alas, it didn’t happen that way. Under the agreement with the New Zealand Company the Canterbury Association had to sell a certain percentage of the land by 1849 to retain its rights to the province. Hutt, near the end of his career, possibly lacked the necessary vigour and salesmanship and, with the deadline close and only half the necessary sales made, a meeting of the members sacked him from the chair and replaced him with Lord Lyttelton. Subsequently the agreement with the New Zealand Company was renegotiated. Thomas himself, incidentally, is commemorated in North Canterbury by Mt Thomas. On the

1848 expedition his second-in-command was Charles Torlesse, whose name also is affixed to a prominent Canterbury landmark, Mt Torlesse. Torlesse was a nephew of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the “father of Canterbury,” and later became a successful farmer. But as an explorer he had his problems. In February, 1849, Thomas despatched Torlesse to South Canterbury to look for coal. With him the explorer had a Maori guide, a German-born assistant, and a donkey as pack animal. The latter proved to be a liability. Torlesse had bought it for £ll at Akaroa from a man named Bourland; in the words of the horse trader, “he done his dough.”

The party’s provisions consisted of 901 b of ship’s biscuits, 161 b cheese, 61b of tea, 201 b of sugar, some muttonbirds, and an unspecified quantity of spuds. All this proved too much for the beast of burden. Torlesse, in

masterly understatement, noted in his log: “Donkey kicked load off and lay down.” They had to shed part of the cargo to persuade the donkey to continue, and as a consequence ran out of provisions when held up for 11 days by a flood in the Rangitata on their return journey. By the time they got to the Rakaia — also flooded — they were subsisting largely on a diet of fern root. They should have eaten the donkey!

Torlesse later became a landholder and one of Canterbury’s first stud sheepfarmers, on choice land that he took up in the Fernside run, near what is now Rangiora. He also had Birch Hill, a 7000-acre run between Tui Creek and. the Garry River, but sold both runs in the early 1860 s and moved to Christchurch to enter partnership with Henry Matson in a stock and station agency. A few years later his

health failed, and he died in 1866 at the age of 41. Torlesse was, incidentally, the first European to climb the mountain which, with the range that separates the plains from the Waimakariri basin, now bears his name. Tawera, the Maori name for the mountain, was for some time retained in the district (Tawera County) but disappeared when the county merged with Malvern. That 1849 trip, which could have ended tragically, was not notably successful for Torlesse. He missed the large Mt Somers coal seam (discovered in 1856 and now the oldest continually worked coalmine in New Zealand) and other significant mineral deposits in the area — silica sand (for glassmaking), pottery clay, and limestone. Large quantities of all these commodities have been mined from Mt Somers over the years. Limestone blocks from Mt Somers were used in the construction of Christchurch Cathedral.