NZ MOUNTAINEERING
Lydia showed me that a person’s reasons for seeking
adventure in the mountains will evolve throughout their life.
The career alpinist, whose achievements are scrutinised,
whose motivations are questioned, must be thick-skinned and
- by my reckoning – negotiate a delicate line between climbing
for personal and professional reasons. But just like me, Lydia
once climbed her first mountain, when none of those factors
were at play, and there was something in it that got her hooked.
Prakash had a similarly impressive Himalayan resume. Less
than two weeks earlier, he’d been standing on the summit of
Ama Dablam and he still wore the goggle tan to prove it. He
explained his personal goal of climbing all 14 8,000-metre
peaks without bottled oxygen, a few of which he’d already
ticked off, before Lydia added that he’d achieved much of this
while fixing ropes for paying customers. Prakash embodied a
new generation of mountaineer, the kind who’ve yet to record
their lifetimes of progression. His outlook was one of
possibilities and what-ifs. There aren’t books about young
contemporary – to me, enigmatic – climbers like him. Or
perhaps I was confusing his jetlag for stoicism.
NEXT LESSON
The next lesson for the trip was that mountains work on their
own time. For a couple of days, we were subject to poor
weather, which meant we hung around Wanaka as we waited
for a change, giving us plenty of time to get to know each other.
I was a little surprised to learn that both Brad and Dan had
militaryexperience.BradspentyearsinNewZealand’s
infantry,wasdeployedto Afghanistananddespiteambitionsof
steppingupto theSAS,leftthearmydueto a shoulderinjury.
DanhadbeenintheAustralianarmylongenoughto workup
to theofficerranks,hadcontinuedparttimeasa reservistin
morerecentyearsandasa registerednurse-paramedicand
wasprivyto theinnerworkingof militaryhealthcare.
Man, these guys had some stories! As far as I could tell, they
were the kind of hardmen that thrived on adversity (Brad’s
stated reason for attending the course was that life outside the
army didn’t offer enough “suffering”) and would chew up and
spit out New Zealand’s mountains. Much of the patriotic era of
high-altitude was fuelled by national sentiment left over from
the First and Second World Wars, and many of those legendary
climbers had hardened their nerves through military service
(George Mallory and Edmund Hillary are two that spring to
m ind).
Dan’s main motivation for being there was to gain useful
skills to score a job with a commercial mine in Antarctica. He
was a hunter, a knife-maker and speculated on his own
tendency toward narcissism – he was entirely not the kind of
left-leaning outdoorsy person I associate with climbing. Yet
Dan was one of the realest people I’d met in a long time. He
was first on his feet to do jobs around the hut and had a real
live-and-let-live mentality, even if our views on reusable coffee
cups differed.62 / Outdoor