EXPANDED PERSPECTIVES
The silence was deafening until an avalanche overhead startled me out of an emotionally-repressed stupor. I barely bothered looking up. The sun was out and the mountains had been crumbling around us all day, but the valley we were in was relatively safe. The slide paths that reached down to us made for better walking than the near-infinite “baby-head” boulders which comprised the rest of the route and threatened to break our ankles. I hated that valley and loathed every step, but moving forward was our only way out.
We were a day shy of finishing our expedition; there was no going back the way we’d come. Despite how desperately we wanted to be done, the end couldn’t have felt further away. Crushed by the weight of our gargantuan packs, and tested by every movement forward, we crawled along for the 15km between the Rudolf and Tasman Glaciers at one-kilometre per hour—the most abysmal pace I’d ever recorded on my GPS in five years of doing this professionally. The planes and helicopters flying directly overhead spat salt in our wounds. It was a stretch that put into question my very sanity; the only thing that got me through our self-inflicted abuse was subterfuge: it would all be over soon.
WHEN I’D PITCHED THE TRIP to Jacob Moon and Leigh McClurg two months earlier, I branded it as ‘fun’. “Come down to New Zealand,” I said. “You can hike and climb and paddle and ski—all in one trip.” What I failed to mention was how tough it’d be to haul around all that crap. I’d only done it once before; it was so hard that I almost quit. The only redeeming factor of my maiden, experimental Southern Alps multi-sport voyage was packrafting class-fun whitewater at the end. But is it really sandbagging if you’re not yet friends? Jacob and Leigh were perfect strangers to me when my girlfriend Priya and I picked them up from the airport in Queenstown.
My plan for the expedition had been simple enough. We’d cross the Southern Alps’ main divide using every sport at our disposal. We’d walk in from the West Coast via the Fox Glacier valley, skin up the Fox Neve,
