By Tony Orman
I’m not a particularly spiritual person but I reckon the mountains of the Central North Island have spirits living inside them. –Hazel Phillips
Vistas and memories
When I drive across the Desert Road on State Highway One, I’m always intrigued by the mountain landscapes:
- to the east with the Kaimanawa Ranges and dark green beech forested slopes rising to tawny tussock tops
- to the west, the majestic volcanic peaks of Mounts Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro.
Early in my working career as a Lands and Survey cadet studying for a land surveying degree, I worked on Mounts Ruapehu and Tongariro. Once in a weekend when camped near Ohakune, three or four of us clambered up the southern slopes of Ruapehu to peer down into the Crater Lake.
I enjoyed my experiences on Ruapehu and Mt Tongariro and I can still picture the Crater Lake and memories from other places such as at the hot Ketatahi Springs, and seeing a neat red deer spiker stag which I encountered on the Tukino side, and the volcanic landscape vistas.
An off-putting first chapter, but press on
So I turned the first pages of “Fire and Ice” and got to reading.
At first I struggled to get into this book for the first chapter detailed an ascent with some local character called “Henry” who climbing in an angry mood, went up Mt Ruapehu’s “Little Matterhorn” and smashed a plaque that had been placed there in 1922 in memory of an early Mt Ruapehu surveyor and explorer Hubert Girdlestone. (There is a peak on Ruapehu named after him and another one in the Tararuas.)
For me, it was an off-putting introduction to the book and I wondered what sort of nutter “Henry” was.
Surveyor and war hero Hubert Girdlestone
On 28 August 1918, Hubert Girdlestone was killed in World War One in France serving his country. I concluded Girdlestone was many times the man, quality-wise that “Henry” is. Henry’s act of disrespect and vandalism was to me, tantamount to grave desecration.
Perhaps my annoyance was generated by relating to Hubert Girdlestone because my personal career surveying experience and working on Mounts Ruapehu and Tongariro and the Tukino eastern side of the mountain. I was a budding surveyor then while Hubert Girdlestone had been a fully-fledged surveyor.
Therefore a small criticism. That chapter, if it had to be included, would have been better further into the book – or dare I suggest, perhaps not at all.
Well worth reading on
Delving further into the book, I overcame my initial irritation, thanks to the author’s engaging style.
The author is a self-confessed “Ruapehu addict” and a fine writer who has woven intriguing chapters around Mt Ruapehu’s ghost stories, fires, avalanches, aeroplane wrecks, sly grogging, World War dodgers, missing climbers over the years and other happenings. She also doesn’t ignore Ruapehu’s twin volcano neighbours Tongariro and Ngauruhoe either.
“I’m not a particularly spiritual person but I reckon the mountains of the Central North Island have spirits living inside them,” said Hazel Phillips in a written interview. “The landscape here is alive in a way it simply isn’t in the rest of the country.”
Thorough research and great presentation
In researching the book by field climbs, she stumbled across things she’d never dreamed of. It took a year to get 95 percent of the material for the book, then another six months to assemble the information.
Diligently researched, excellently presented by the publishers, with a competently compiled index, with more than 200 historic and present day photographs and over 25 interesting maps, the 400 page book is a fine publication.
Consequently it gets a well-deserved high recommendation.
Fire and Ice by Hazel Phillips is published by Massey University Press, Recommended Retail Price $49.99