N.Z. Rhodes Scholar To Join Expedition To Nepal Himalayas

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23207, 20 March 1950, Page 2

N.Z. Rhodes Scholar To Join Expedition To Nepal Himalayas

(P.A.) CHRISTCHURCH, March 20. Mr. W. P. Packard, one of the New Zealand Rhodes Scholars of 1948, will accompany Mr. H. W. Tilman, the famous climber, on his next expedition into the Nepal Himalayas. For the last two years Mr. Packard has been at Oxford engaged on research for a doctorate in philosophy and he has now been invited to join the scientific party as geographer and mountaineer. News that the Rhodes Trust had given leave for Mr. Packard to join the expedition was received during the weekend by his father, Mr. A. W. Packard, of Christchurch. As a student and lecturer in geography at Canterbury University College. Mr. W. P. Packard made extensive investigations into land use and plant cover in alpine Canterbury and South Westland. He is a member of the New Zealand Alpine Club and in the last 18 months he has clone much climbing in Switzerland. He will be the third New Zealander to take part in a Himalayan expedition.

April to September

Mr. Tilman’s party will leave London on Good Friday for Nepal, via Bombay and will be away from April to September. The party will do gcogranhical field work in entirely undescribed territory of mountain regions which are only occasionally inhabited and whose geology is unknown. Mapping will also be done near the Tibetan frontier.

Mr. Tilman, one .of the world’s leading mountaineers, has been climbing and exploring in the Himalayas since 1930. He was the leader of the last Everest expedition and will lead the next whenever the Dalai Lama of Tibet gives permission. The Nepal Government has granted permission for Mr. Tilman to take a scientific climbing expedition into its territory this summer. It is considered more difficult to get into Nepal than Tibet.