The line of their lives — the first ski descent of Aoraki/Mount Cook
By: Joe Harrison
Tags: Mountaineering, Ski, New Zealand, Skitouring, Mt Cook National Park

By Joe Harrison

A version of this story was originally published in the 2011 edition of New Zealand Skier.

Under a clear cool spring night on the 15th of November in 1982, Geoff Wayatt and John Belennerhassett left the confines of their warm sleeping bags inside Plateau Hut, clicked into their bindings and starting skinning across the Grand Plateau by torchlight. It was 3.30am, conditions were perfect and John and Geoff had been lucky enough to score the only three clear weather days in the last two months. By 6.30am the sun was already rising above the East Coast and working its way up the Tasman Glacier. Skis were replaced with crampons at the bottom of the Linda Shelf; the touring had finished for now and the technical climbing was about to begin.

Aoraki/Mount Cook is a mountaineer’s kind of mountain, you won’t find a chair lift or rental shop here, just getting to the base of the peak itself requires a full day of hiking or a short helicopter ride. At 3,754 metres, its huge and intimidating faces are filled with glaciers, seracs and ice cliffs. Normal skiers would not dream of carving turns into such a formidable giant, but then men like Geoff Wayatt and John Belennerhassett are not what you would call normal skiers.

As early as 1893 climbers were using skis and skins to access the mountains surrounding New Zealand’s highest peak. Before global warming gave the glaciers a good thaw and made access much more difficult, guests at the Hermitage Hotel would even go on ski day trips on the Tasman Glacier. The 1930s saw skiers armed with skins starting to cross the Southern Alps on ten-day trips. As the years progressed, skiers started moving into the higher mountains, testing their skills on their wooden skis and leather boots. By the time the 1980s rolled around, Aoraki/Mount Cook still remand unskied but its time as a virgin peak was running out.

Climbing Mount Cook was nothing new for Geoff who, as a qualified mountain guide, had climbed the peak a number of times. John was in unfamiliar territory. Not only had John never climbed Mount Cook, he had very limited mountaineering experience. Unlike Geoff who was by definition a true mountaineer, John was more a skier who could climb when he had to.

While the rest of the world spent the 1970s undergoing the social revolution, a different kind of change was happening in the mountains of France, called “l’extreme du ski” or extreme skiing. Skiers like Patrick Vallencant and Jean-Maric Boivin were doing the unthinkable, making turns on 50 degree slopes that were regarded as climbing routes not ski lines. While l’extreme du ski may have started in France, it soon arrived in New Zealand as Kiwi mountain guides who had witnessed this ski revolution first hand in Chamonix started skiing steep lines in the Southern Alps after returning home.

After five hours of solid climbing in excellent conditions, John and Geoff finally reached the summit of Mount Cook at 11.30am. The weather had continued to hold and they enjoyed a crystal clear view of the Main Divide from the highest point in Aotearoa. “My overriding thought at the summit was ‘don’t drop a ski’”, recounts Geoff twenty-nine years later from his home in Wanaka. After cutting a small ledge in the summit slope to work in, the pair swapped crampons for skis. The rope with which they had climbed to the summit stayed attached to their harnesses. While the green ice on the summit had gone with the warm weather, the snow remained hard and icy and a fall here would be fatal. Geoff had led the climb up the mountain, but it was John, the skier, who made the first ‘on belay’ turns on the summit off Mount Cook. Geoff recalls: “I can remember the horrible chattering sound John’s skis made on the ice at the summit, the first pitch was very committing but we were motivated, confident and happy with it.”

Backcountry skiing has been growing in popularity in recent years to the point that you can now see touring bindings in most lift lines in New Zealand. The back bowls of our ski resorts have turned into popular destinations for Kiwi skiers willing to earn their turns away from the crowds. While most outdoor shops today stock lightweight skis, sticky skins and comfortable touring boots, these modern tools simply did not exist in 1982. Geoff’s skis for the Mount Cook mission were 200cm long Dynamic VR 27 racing skis (skis which now sit in the DOC office at Mt Cook) — they were made to win medals at the Olympics but Geoff was claiming first descents with them — and a normal pair of Scott ski boots.

With the first 100m of steep ice “skating” over, John and Geoff were happy to see the snow improve as they moved onto the middle icecap. The rope connecting them was packed away and at last they were able to enjoy the skiing. “It was one of the few times that the whole flow thing was going and its was just incredible,” Geoff remembers.

While the ski-movie stars may jump out of helicopters and blitz a steep powdery Alaskan line in minutes if not seconds, ski mountaineers take their time; often they are skiing exposed hard icy lines that require precision turns. Many lines involve an abseil (or three) over ice cliffs that can’t be skied, so skiing lines on mountains like Mount Cook doesn’t take minutes, it takes hours.

After navigating a gully above the exposed summit rocks, Geoff and John continued left of the rocks and made smooth creamy turns down the lower section of the mountain until they reached the flatter Linda Glacier. By 4pm the pair were back where they started at Plateau Hut, with a summit and first descent in the bag. But the day was not over yet. Geoff and John had not only set their sights on the first descent but also on claiming the longest ski run in New Zealand. They still had to get over to Glacier Dome, ski to the edge of Tasman Glacier and walk out to Ball Hut road. In total it took the pair a monster 19 hours to ski from the summit of Mount Cook to the lakes of the Tasman Glacier and set a new record of 2545m skied in a single day.

Since Geoff and John’s first descent of the North Face in 1982, Mount Cook has been skied numerous times by a number of Kiwi characters. Before his death on K2 in 1995, Bruce Grant not only skied the peak by a similar route to the first descent but then went back to paraglide off the summit.

In recent years skiers have been keeping the alpinist spirit alive with new routes. Kiwi freeskier Todd Windle teamed up with Axel Naglich (Austria) and Baptiste Blanc (France) in 2004 to ski a first descent down the West Ridge into the North West Couloir of Mt Cook after waiting for two weeks at Empress Hut for perfect conditions. In 2008 skier John Mletschnig and snowboarder Alwin Heller came close to bagging the first descent via the East Ridge but were unable to ski the top 100m due to thick ice on the summit.

Today the last true unskied line on Mount Cook is to be found on the infamous southeast Caroline Face. First climbed in 1970 by John Glasgow and Peter Gough, whipping local media into a frenzy, this 6000ft monster is a maze of broken glaciers and hanging snow fields that seem to be constantly roaring with avalanches. Some of the world’s best ski mountaineers have been turning up in the last ten years hoping they will be the first to claim one of the last great ski descents in the Southern Hemisphere, but so far the mountain has sent them all home empty-handed.

Nothing really changed for Geoff Wayatt and John Belennerhassett after their epic mission. Geoff kept working as a mountain guide (he is still guiding today at the age of 65) and went on to bag another first descent on Mount Tutoko in Fiordland with his son Chris. John now works as a manager of an IT company. While their names are written in the history books of Aoraki/Mount Cook, many Kiwis have never heard of these two skiers. But then they never did it for the TV cameras. They simply wanted to see if it could be done and ended up bagging the line of their lives.

2020 UPDATE: Since this article was written in early 2011, a number of notable ski and snowboard descends have been made on Aoraki/Mount Cook, these include but are not limited to: the first complete ski descent of the East Face in 2013 by Tyrone Low, Niki Begg, Magnus Kastengren and Andreas Fransson and the first ski descent of the Caroline Face in 2017 by Enrico Mosetti, Ben Briggs and Tom Grant.