In the cold air

the crack and deep rubble was unmistakable.

It was 2am at the White Horse Department of Conservation Campsite at the end of the Mount Cook Road. Penetrating cold leaked in around the neck of my two season sleeping bag as the bellows effect of rolling over expelled my hard won body heat. I lay still, tuque cinched down, as an icy breeze from the Mueller Glacier 2km above wafted in through the fine mesh of our beach and barbie Australian-made tent and stripped away the last veneer of warmth. Beside me, Karen slumbered effortlessly, snug in her superior down bag

Then I heard it again. A sharp but distant crack followed by the throaty rumble. The sound of huge, possibly building-size, seracs peeling off the face of a hanging glacier on Mount Sefton and falling a thousand metres or more onto the Mueller Glacier with the rumble of a carpet bombing sortie.

It's an awesome spectacle and one that I had the good fortune to witness in early July 1996 while climbing in a short-roped team on Vantage Peak in British Columbia 25 km north of Whistler. A huge crack had our team swivelling heads to witness a house-sized serac detach itself from adjacent Mount Joffre, tumble gracefully end-over-end through the early morning air, and then explode in a shower of blue ice shrapnel on the surface of the Twin One Glacier half a kilometre below.

Here again at Mount Cook the sound induced the strangely compatible urge to go up high into the alpine danger-zone coupled with the slow churning in the gut around a hard knot of fear induced by objective dangers of a scale that only towering mountains and the deep sea can produce.

It's a feeling to contemplate, fear, perhaps even savour. It's certainly one to warm you to life in a cold tent below an unforgiving peak.

Slamming on the brakes

as we came around the curve, the end was nigh.

We were about 80km south of Queenstown, NZ bombing towards Te Anau in Fiordland on State Highway 6 enroute to a four day tramp on the Kepler Track. The sun dripped behind the western mountains and the inland ranges behind were blanketed in a soft golden light. We hadn't seen a car in 20 minutes until a reddish van with tinted windows slowly stalked us from behind, eventually settling in a wee bit too close on our tail on this empty road.

The highway here is narrow and shoulderless and as we rounded a curve to the right I caught a familiar glimpse of roadkill, probably possum, on the centre line. And yet there was something else on the road. Something entirely out of place.

Standing, happy-as-hell over the flattened roadkill, tail in the air, was a Jack Russell terrier. I slammed the brake pedal through the floor and wrenched the wheel towards the long grass on the left, screaming by, two wheels off the road. In the rearview mirror I saw the panicked dog bolt behind us towards the grass and then it was too late. Smoke billowed from the van's tyres as the driver braked and I saw the dog go under the passenger side wheels, come out the back end and spin off into the grass in slow motion, brown patches rotating on white fur, its head pirouetting perfectly, like a spit roasted hog. One, maybe two seconds and it was over.

As the van stopped we briefly debated going back but the thought of the flattened dog was too much so I floored it, and slightly stunned, we turned right on SH 97 and accelerated towards the reddened sky.

A tale of two volcanoes

The North Island of NZ is a volcanic powder keg. But one that begs to be be tampered with.

A few weeks ago, after three days of waiting on the rain, we threaded a weather needle and made a dash for the summit of Mount Taranaki in the southwestern north island. Taranaki is an achingly perfect volcano with rich green native bush skirting the flanks of a deeply erroded summit dome capped by a snow-filled crater. At about 1500m elevation we came through the cloud layer into the rarified world above where the sky is cobalt blue and the skin comes off your nose in 15 minutes.

Up another 1000 metres of scoria and slabs and we stepped into the icy windtunnel coming off the permanent snowfield in the crater. It was blowing a hooly when we topped out two metres below the summit, touching the top rather than standing on it out of respect for its sacred place in Maori culture. The views were tremendous. All the way to the South Island and to Mount Ruapehu, Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe in the east.

Forty-eight hours later, after driving half way across NZ delerious with summit fever, we topped out on Mount Ngauruhoe [really a giant vent of Mount Tongariro and probably known to some of you better as the stand in for 'Mount Doom' in Peter Jackson's cinematic Lord of the Rings trilogy].

Ngauruhoe is a perfect volcanic cone of pumice and scoria devoid of vegetation. Looking into the crater is an eerie exercise in human insignificance as vents spew steam along the crater rim. To the west, the massif of Taranaki dominates the skyline halfway across the country.

When the sail blew out

Captain Shay was so nimble on the helm I hadn't even realized the sail was loose until we'd come through the wind onto the starboard tack. The monumental multi-ton load on the sails of a 13 metre catamaran in 15-20 knot winds wiped away the easy, breezy confidence accumulated over five days of ghosting along in light winds. No harm done though.

The culprit was a dodgy bowline knot I'd used to fasten the sheet to the foresail. The bowline had a tail that was too short and under the immense loads and constant whipping in the gusts as we crested 10 knots of true velocity - the fastest I've ever experienced under sail - the knot came undone and the sail blew out. Loud, momentarily brick-shittingly-unsettling but ultimately there was no damage and nobody was worse for it. Perhaps the opposite.

It was the fianl day of a 6-days odyssey in the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland on a yacht often discussed over pints or a late night single malt in London when we lived with Shay in Shepherds Bush.

How to describe a better week in life?

Take a heady dose of good mates: a couple of renewable energy engineers building their own sustainable house, a former marketeer-turned-author dissecting the role of marketing in manufacturing wants masquerading as needs, an environmental policymaker, a hard man from BP, a mechanical engineer who designs operating room equipment, a money man who buys corporations, a couple of unemployed bums [you can guess who they are] and a woman working on a Swedish-Kiwi fusion cookbook. Add a gracefully-lined, ice-breaker strong sailboat, plenty of sun and swimming, a dash of fishing, a dusting of seabirds and a big slug of eating, drinking and launching water ballons from a catapult at neighbouring superyachts.

Shake it up and what you get is about the most sublime cocktail imaginable to enjoy the sunset over the volcano of Rangitoto.

Sign me up for a life of this.