WORSHIP ON HIGH
Katherine Elizabeth ‘Elsie’ Morton (1885—1968) was a pioneering and popular journalist, author and photographer who worked for a time at the New Zealand Herald, where she earned “the then fabulous salary of £4 a week”. In 1937 she left her job to travel alone around Europe, the Middle East and North America, returning to New Zealand later to work as a radio personality and author. This abridged extract from her 1950 book Fun in Fiordland describes a night at the lunch hut at Mackinnon Pass on the Milford Track, where she slept on an old ambulance stretcher. The extract features in a new tramping anthology, Across the Pass, a collection of writing on one of our most treasured national pastimes.
built of sheets of rusty iron just about falling apart, most of the nails having long since been pecked out by those demon keas. There were loose sheets flapping and clanging, and a
