growing wild

This is a deceptively simple book. It starts at Bainham right up in the northwestern corner of Golden Bay and makes straight for the Dragons Teeth, barely letting up until reaching the coast at Precipice Cove in Fiordland, by which time handfuls of sandflies are trapped between the tent outer and inner.

I pointed to the only place that seemed to afford a perch, and insisted that we should stop on that spot whatever it was. As we neared it we found that our perch was a big tree jutting out from the precipice, on which we managed to find room, on its base. There was just enough room to lie down on the damp leaves, one ice-axe on each side, and the rope coiled under us.

This is the first photograph of rock climbing in the Darrans I remember seeing.

On a single day last Easter, 3,300 people walked the Tongariro Crossing. My Facebook feed shows photographs of tourists shitting in the grass at the White Horse Hill campground at Mt Cook. Are there too many people on the mountains, or just not enough toilets?

There are the big walls you know about. Routes you've walked under or looked across at and thought, Yes, I have to climb that. The classics. Some are close to home: Sabre's blunt grey North Buttress. Others are farther away: the stern exfoliations of the Cassin Route on the Piz Badile.