A National Recreation Ground

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7865, 29 July 1911, Page 11

A National Recreation Ground

L attractions' of Mount Cook am t S becoming more and more known to tourists from the outside worldLast season large numbers of visitotrs I {from Great Britain, Europe, America, •and Australia spent a delightful holiday in the Southern Alps. New Zealanders i too, are beginning to realise that the ; .beauties of their native country are worth wring, and so, instead of being lured away to other climes in vacation, time, are "doing” the wonders of Ncv^ I Zealand. Many last season visited , Mount Cook, where "amidst the snows’* I they get an admirable nerve cure. The foundations of the new Hermitage are ! completed,. and with the approach of the warmer w.eather, the Tourist De-» i partment hopes to make good progress with the / provision of adequate accomImodatiou for the increasing number of tourists. Climber's Paradise. tr A magnificent playground for the Alpinist,” is how Mr James Cowan describes the Southern Alps in his book "Now Zealand,” published by the Tourist Department. This colossal snowy 'lajige, stretching like a great white f saw-edge north-east and south-west for over three hundred miles, and rising in many places into superb icy peaks more than 10,000 feet high, furnishes! "probably the grandest national recreation ground the Dominion possesses—a free, indomitable wilderness, where the; tremendous forces of Nature aroi jsupreme, and where man must exert his utmost powers of skill and courage, leisource and perseverance, if ho is to scale tho great backbone cf the laud with its snowy spires. The Alpine Sierras with their towering white peaks, their - glaciers «nd ice-falls, and •their enormous snowfields, present to the traveller some of tho wildest and [most beautiful pictures tho eye of [mountain-lover has over gazed . upon. Here are huger glaciers than those in tho European Alps—larger, in fact, than, jany outside the * circum-polar regions, : except tho ice-streams of the Himalayas. At the feet of the- mountains are numerous ice-fed lakes, and from the terminals ‘ of: the glaciers issue many large rivers.” * Mount Cook Hermitage, the Govern- 1 ment Tourist Department’s hostel in tho 1 ♦heart of this Alpine land, stands with- : the portals of some of the most ; [glorious of ail ice and mountain-scapes. 1 ■All around lift tho Alps, their lower • slopes white and yellow with vast beds ;of mountain-fiowex*s# their dazzling isummits flashing back tho sun. East and south tho valley is walled in by the ,’Scaicy range, rising almost sheer from the x>iain for 3000 feet and culminating fin tho cone of Mount Sealey, 8631 feet. North-west the vision is bounded by 1 tho ice-hung crags of Mount - Sefton, rising cliff on cliff for more than 10,000 1 foot. Further away, but towering over

The Majestic Grandeur of the Southern Alps ,

» all tho Alpine chain, is magnificent ' ,Aorangi (Mount Cook), a gabled giant • pf black rock and blazing ice-fiolds. Tho ! {extraordinary glaciation is perhaps the most wonderful feature of this moUntainland. The largest of the many great glaciers close to the Hermitage is the Tasman, eighteen miles long and two miles wide, and perhaps 1000 feet deep—a truly enormous icc river. ’lce-Gripped Cataract. . Imagine .a colossal cascade of ice, 4000 feet high and a mile wide —a thousand Niagaras frc|z*m into one—plunging steeply down tho dark and rugged side of a /mountain more than 12.000 feet in height, heaving in great waves of milky whiteness, and again .broken into enormops * spires and pin tnacles; rolling downwards in a dazzle pf many-coloured light, its hollows glinting a wondrous ethereal blue, and' its splintered bergs and minarets glittering like countless points of fire. In its midst lies a n great black rock, a sombre island, buttressed against the enormous pressure of the down-flowing serao ice. which ‘very now and hen forces immense blocks over its polished head, andV drops them with a crash of thunder on to tho broken ke below. At tho foot, whore the , great cataract swings with loud groanings and crackings into the mighty mass of *he Tasman, there are ice grottos and caverns, blue-hazed and gleaming with the strange lustre of refracted light, their floors gemmed with the loveliest of little purple pools—baths-, fit for some fairy Titama of Ice Band, This is the great Hochstetter Ice-falL Below the fall we come to the blue ice, • All around tho surface of , the glacier is wonderfully cut and fractured and crevassed. Tho moulins and crevasses quiver with an exquisite blue —a tenderer, more entrancing hue than was ever seen in sea or sky. Into some of tho deep moulins large suiface-strcams disapper. ‘With the aid of rope and iceaxe one may descend into the upper.and wider portions of these wonderful cavepipes leading to > tho subglacial rivers and see through the hazy blue the corkscrew course of tho water-cut well. At other places, if one pause to listen, he may hear far below the dull roar of the imprisoned river blindly seeking its way • downward and out beneath unknown hundreds of feet of ice.