Five years ago, I stood at the end of a knife-edge ridge, a tangle of blue rope at my feet, my 25-year-old daughter Lilidh by my side. I knew we were beaten – we hadn’t made it anywhere near the top. I had pulled back from the brink, no longer able to feign competence. Despite my best efforts I realised I simply did not have the technical skills needed to proceed. Lilidh felt crushed by our defeat that day.
It had begun casually enough. Lilidh lived and worked near Queenstown, New Zealand, as a trekking guide on multi-day hikes. When I visited her, we would head into the surrounding valleys and mountains for adventures. Back in 2018, two months before one of these trips, Lilidh had suggested we try Mitre Peak.
“Oh yeah?” I replied. “Let me have a Google.” Wow! Mitre is a rarely climbed famous 1,700m spire in Milford Sound, jewel of New Zealand’s Fiordland. Thick, super-steep forest cloaks it to the shoulders. Mitre is no stroll. There is no overland track into it. You have to approach from the sea, before bush-bashing the vague rainforest route to camp for the night at 1,000 metres. Then comes the exciting bit: a rock climb.
“Can’t you climb?” she asked.
“You know I can’t climb,” I blurted.
“But you could learn?” she countered.
I stopped a moment, screwed my eyes up.
“Dammit, I could learn!”
So I set about trying to learn to rock climb. Two instructors and a handful of uncertain short climbs later, I find my rookie self in New Zealand. For days I conceal my true feelings about the project – that my confidence had become shrouded in a cold, viscous dread.
There is no water on the mountain, so we have to carry eight litres – enough to last two to three days. The packs are enormous with all the food, ropes, rack, tent and water.
Soon after a red-eyed four-hour drive to Milford Sound we hop ashore from a water taxi, and straight into the rainforest. It is a sweaty, relentless, dirty business, following the whisper of a trail up the densely forested ridge. Then 600m up we stop for a breather. My water is in large plastic bottles, Lilidh’s in a CamelBak-style bladder inside her pack – on which she’s been sitting. Unfortunately the mouthpiece has not been turned off and perhaps two litres has run out into the soil. A miracle is now required. In half an hour we emerge into a small clearing. Sitting there is a large, immaculate stainless steel saucepan containing more than two litres of clean rainwater. Hallelujah!
From our treeline campsite, the view down Milford Sound is beyond breathtaking. Gravity-defying forested slopes (they have tree avalanches here), and the twinkling lights of the small settlement appear as darkness falls. Soon, a pin-pricked universe pours a giddy sea of starlight on us from above.
But that was the extent of the success. Climbers use the word “crux” to mean the hardest part of the route. The crux in this case is a 30m drop leading to the foot of a 40m roped rock climb, which then continues steeply for another 60m. I instantly recognised that I did not have enough technical climbing experience for the task that now confronted me. Up ahead, a pair of climbers photographed us as specks on the ridge and emailed it to us – dejectedly frozen like bugs in amber at our 1,300m high point.
Lilidh grew up in Edinburgh and had always been an adventurous spirit – . On an outing along the River Esk when she was five, she plucked a bunch of berries from a tree and asked if they were all right to eat. I bit off a mouthful.
“Yes, they are fine,” I said, after munching for a while. She chewed contentedly. We arrived home to find a visiting winemaker friend seated at the kitchen table. Lilidh said she felt sick; the winemaker looked at the remaining berries. Elderberries, it turns out, are fine when cooked but poisonous raw. Projectile vomiting ensued. The remaining berries were pressed into a picture frame – a tiny etching of a toxic tree that hangs on our wall to this day.
Eventually, Lilidh studied zoology at Glasgow University, where she joined the expeditions society and, aged 22, co-lead a trip to Bolivia. It was a formidable research adventure amid wandering gauchos, wildfires and deadly snakes. After graduating she moved to New Zealand, guiding on the Milford and Routeburn tracks.
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Our 2018 Mitre Peak foray should have been the end of me and climbing but somehow I stuck at it with modest success. Then Covid struck and Lilidh and I were separated by a whole planet.
In early 2023, I was about to make my first post-Covid trip to NZ. By then I had accrued several hundred climbs in my logbook. Reflecting on the Mitre Peak route I was sure I could now manage it easily. I mentioned this to Lilidh. “Let’s do it,” she said.
I began to prepare. I phoned up the water taxi company. They explained that due to “past tourism tragedies” they no longer offer that service.
I phoned Lilidh.
“There’s no boat,” I told her.
“We could packraft?” she replied.
“Lilidh, you know I can’t packraft!”
So, on the 18 April, I find myself in a borrowed wetsuit standing on the Milford shore being shown by Lilidh how to inflate something that looks like a toddler’s paddling pool. It will be 4km to Sinbad Gully, slouched behind a swollen backpack of drinking water and climbing gear. We are off, paddling our inflatable armchairs, gasping at the grandeur of the fiord as we crawl across.
In Sinbad Gully, we lift the featherweight boats ashore and lash them to a tree. Lilidh is the stronger and faster and carries the heavier pack. I focus on keeping up. She can see a trail where I can only see forest floor. We arrive at our campsite as darkness falls.
Now my speciality is required: the scrambling and rope work. As I suspected, the roped climbing section is easy but hugely exposed, which means that slipping, stumbling or tripping is not an option. Focus and concentration are required. After one 40m rock pitch we put the rope away. I gloat about how what was insurmountable is now a breeze. We are still a long way from the top but I am expecting to find the rock easy and our progress quick. That’s not what we find. Much of the scrambling is on steep, slick snow grass, tussock and soil with a 1km-long drop to the sea or the gully below.
It’s so unrelenting, I find it hard to remain focused – to control the awful images of Lilidh falling to her death that flash through my mind. I ask her how she feels. “Nauseous with the adrenaline,” she replies. The sense of anxious responsibility eats me from the inside.
Yet somehow, despite all my fears, we make it to the summit and bask in the splendour – a clear blue sky pierced by jagged peaks, glaciers and an impenetrable wallpaper of deep green bush that is home to a chorus of fluting birds singing their hearts out. The soaring sense of space and altitude is awesome now that we are safely on this pedestal.
A lot has changed since we first attempted this climb. Lilidh was living the dream back then – no fixed abode, working as a trekking guide, crashing at a friend’s flat. Covid put a brake on all that. New Zealand avoided the high death toll but not the lockdowns. Now, she has a house, a garden, a partner and a bearded collie dog. She’s beginning to look beyond her current job, gaining experience with the local ambulance service with an eye to the future. Her partner works as a part-time firefighter.
So here we are standing on the summit of Mitre Peak together. Not so much a conclusion to anything, more a meeting at another surreal crossroads before fresh chapters and new journeys begin.
It is autumn here and the days are short. What challenged us coming up is going to be even harder going down. We plummet through ferns, creepers and scrub. I follow Lilidh, trying to keep her in sight. There are many false trails. We are led astray a few times but she can quickly tell perilous creek bottoms from the correct faint tracks; to me they look the same.
Painful hours pass but late afternoon finds us at the far end of the rock ridge. I spread my arms and hug my daughter. New Zealand’s “bird of the year”, the rare pīwauwau rock wren, appears from the rubble and hops by Lilidh’s feet. It feels so good as Lilidh, back on familiar tussock terrain, shoulders her pack and takes the lead once again.
