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Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Hard Way
Split Decisions
When the weather turns ugly and conditions get rough, every mountaineer must make the ultimate choice: storm the summit, or call it quits.

By Mark Jenkins

PERHAPS I'M ALIVE ONLY BECAUSE WE TURNED BACK.

This realization so startles me that I turn the key and the windshield wipers halt in mid-slap. I'm sitting behind a line of cars waiting for a road crew to clear away a mud slide blocking the coast highway. I sit listening to the pounding rain, a downpour so copious the car feels submerged, as if I were inside a one-man submarine.

Perhaps I'm alive merely because I was denied the opportunity to make the wrong decision.

IT'S BEEN POURING NONSTOP since I arrived in New Zealand. I'd been forewarned.

"We have a rather wet weather pattern at the moment," e-mailed Allan Uren, a sardonic Kiwi ice climber with whom I had hoped to do an enchainment of the three highest peaks in New Zealand—Mounts Tasman, Dampier, and Cook. "Over 250 mm. of rain in the last week. This may sound quite grim, and it is, but things over here can change quickly."

But they didn't. When I arrived in Fox Glacier, the tourist hamlet on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island where Allan lives, the gutters were running like rivers. I half expected to see trout jumping. The West Coast is a rainforest to rival the Olympic Peninsula—sphagnum practically hangs in the air. Fox Glacier, like Talkeetna or Grindelwald, is the starting point for many mountaineering expeditions; it's only a dozen miles from Mount Cook. But the clerk at the backpacker's hostel told me it had now been raining for six weeks straight. "All the climbers have skedaddled," he said, "and the rest of us are starting to go a wee bit mad." Allan had booked a helicopter to fly us into the mountains, but it wasn't to be. We considered walking in, but reports from climbers up in the alpine huts were dismal: No one had been able to move for two weeks; the glacier had dropped six feet.

After a few days of waiting, I abandoned Allan and Fox Glacier in search of sunshine. I drove down the coast, curled up over Haast Pass, and dropped into Wanaka, the Interlaken of New Zealand's Southern Alps.

New Zealand has made the most of its stunningly diverse geography. Canyoneering, mountaineering, trekking, sea kayaking, parapenting, skydiving—the place is a South Pacific Adventureland. (Bungee jumping was invented in NZ.) And the Kiwis have done such a bang-up job of marketing these attractions around the world that you can hear a dozen languages just while strolling the streets of Wanaka. Disregard the cottonball sheep dotting the verdant hillside—they're picturesque, but that's all. Mutton and wool mean nothing: Tourism is what makes New Zealand tick.

I arrived in Wanaka (population 3,000) in the evening, ate dinner at a Turkish café where dreadlocked Lonely Planet travelers were humming along with a guitarist mangling Dylan, had dessert in an Indian restaurant crowded with noisy Spaniards, and drank beer in an Irish pub full of ornery British climbers.

To end up driving around in the rain after flying around the world to climb glaciated, blue-sky peaks is depressing.

In the morning the sun was shining. Like everybody else, I'd come to New Zealand for an adventure. I frantically called Allan. He claimed the sun was trying to sneak out in Fox Glacier, too, and if I drove directly back we'd fly in and start climbing.

"The sun vanished right after you hung up!" Allan shouted from his porch as I drove up. Water gushed off the tin roof like a spillway. He pulled on his gum boots and we tramped over to the Department of Conservation office to check the satellite weather reports for the umpteenth time. Climbers in New Zealand live, day to day, on these weather reports. They have become meteorological masters at interpreting the concentric squiggles out over the Tasman Sea. Studying isobars is as much a part of a Kiwi mountaineer's morning as coffee.

Allan divined that there was some chance of a momentary clearing early the next morning. For the third, maybe fourth time, we organized our gear, sorted our food, reloaded our packs, and went to bed with idiotically high hopes.

The next day it was raining especially hard. It seemed almost spiteful. I hung around in Fox Glacier for two more days—still hoping, watching the trout spawn in the streets—and then left again.

To end up simply driving around in the rain after flying halfway around the world with the grand intention of climbing glaciated, blue-sky peaks is plain depressing.

Perhaps if I were from Seattle or Portland. They're used to rain. Some even claim they like it, although I suspect that had any outdoor veteran from the Northwest been advised between the isolines not to come over, as I had been, he or she would have wisely stayed home, knowing what interminable precipitation can do to a trip.

One thing I will admit: Rain does make one contemplative. You start thinking about things. In my case, if you're in New Zealand and have failed over and over to even get close to the mountains of your desire, you begin mulling over the other mountains you've failed on.

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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.

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