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.
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