Not quite having a Ball on a Kiwi classic
If you continue with mountaineering, my snowcraft course instructor informed us, eventually you’d be skilled enough to attempt something like Ball Pass.
I’d never heard of Ball Pass but it remained in my head long after the course finished, lingering as a one-day possibility. If I ever managed to become good enough.
Eventually, I looked it up, knowing enough to deduce that the route went up the Hooker Glacier, over the pass on the Kirikiritata/Mt Cook Range and down the Tasman Glacier (or vice versa). The lack of any marked track on the map put it into a category of its own: serious stuff.
Years later, while staying at Mt Cook Village, I learned that erosion was increasingly a problem around the local glaciers and the Ball Pass route risked becoming cut off. I’d been to Ball Hut on the Tasman side of the route both before and after the massive washouts
