Out on a LIMB

摘要

The eastern side of Aoraki/Mt Cook has two great faces: the 2,500-metre Caroline Face and the 1,800-metre East Face. Winding between the two is the East Ridge, an arete of ice and snow leading directly to the middle peak of the mountain. In late November 1982, two young mountaineers climbed the ridge, reaching the top around 6pm. In good conditions, they would have rested awhile on the summit, enjoying the uninterrupted view to the Tasman. But when the pair topped out conditions were atrocious. Their planned descent route to the west was exposed to the full blast of a storm roaring in off the sea; and down-climbing their ascent route was out of the question. They settled into a small crevasse just below the summit and waited. It was an uncomfortable night - their refuge was too short to lie down in properly and too low to sit up in - but they were confident the storm would soon pass, as it would normally have done, in a day or so. But the airstream proved unusually persistent and they were trapped for 13 days. Temperatures touched minus 20 degrees Celsius, and before rescuers could reach them the climbers were severely frostbitten. On Christmas Eve 1982, both of them underwent double below-the-knee amputations. Almost exactly 20 years on one of the pair, Mark Inglis, returned to the mountain. After one abortive attempt, he climbed it, using a pair of prosthetic legs designed and built by Dashfoot Ltd, which at the time was a subsidiary of the Britten Motorcycle Company of Christchurch. The story of those climbing legs is a story about an approach to engineering that is both medieval and utterly contemporary.