XXIV

It all began with Caroline. Once one of last great mountaineering challenges in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, the 2,500m Caroline Face of Aoraki/Mount Cook had haunted me for a decade. I spent years upskilling and forging new partnerships, all towards a goal I could barely admit out loud. Then, on October 21st, 2021, William Rowntree, Joe Collinson, and I climbed Aoraki’s East Ridge and completed the second ever ski descent of the Caroline Face. In 12 pulsing hours it was all over, yet it sent a tremor through my life.

Secure snow had turned to hard ice, so Will led up the steepening ridge, placing ice screws for security, and Joe climbing a few metres in front of me. Nearing the summit, the upper seracs on the Caroline fired a brutal warning shot: a 300m-wide broom that swept a section of the face clean while we watched from the relative safety of the East Ridge.

We made our way along the ridge to our intended drop-in. I peered off the edge of the world, past a glittering wall of scalloped blue ice, to the solemn serac debris laid out far below. The collapse appeared to be from a serac system below our intended line. ‘Given our line’s constant exposure to other seracs,’ I asked the others, ‘have the odds of another collapse actually changed?’ After much discussion we decided to rappel in.

Once in the firing line, all we could control were our movement and pace. Two eerie 60m rappels into the breach.

With short, secure turns across humbling exposure, we were on the Eye and through to the Nose. Skiing simultaneously but offset, speed our ally, we let the skis run, ripping big turns, bemused to be skiing perfect powder in such an outrageous position. Reaching the crux serac, which cut the face in half, the scale of our route was impossible to ignore. We’re only halfway home, I thought.

Will built a V-thread anchor at the top of the serac and rappelled out of sight, Joe swiftly following. Lowering myself to the edge, the abyss clawed my insides as I lurched into the air and spun through the free-hanging rappel, the ice wall a menacing lattice of cracks.

Down. Three unsuccessful yanks. The rope was stuck. Knife out, I sliced the remainder free. Run it out to the spine, flee from this slaughterhouse, back to the boys, move move move. Now skiing under the lethal apron of the beast, I swapped to the lead and picked an intricate way through the cliffs from memory.

After two long hours of descent, as the boys hooted and hollered, quiet tears slid down my cheeks. I was relieved it was over – a knee-trembling relief to simply be alive. The day had gone well, yet our vulnerability to death from above gnawed at me. This sharp contrast to the joyous climbing and skiing increased my confusion. This mythic line I had worked towards for years had been skied, and skied well, so why was I crying?

***

I hung up my skis for the year and fled to the coast, burying myself in renovating a house. Skiing anything else seemed redundant. Recently, however, while reworking this article, I discovered that my ski descent of the Stevenson-Dick Couloir on Horokoau/Mount Tasman was actually 10 days after Aoraki. I had inverted the timeline of my own narrative – a surreptitious flaw in my recollections – but to what purpose?

High doses of adrenaline and intense focus selectively blur my memories. Some moments stand crystalline while others vanish. These distortions seem to spin the memory into its own entity – a process amplified as the story is retold. Once-vivid moments recede as others grow in stature.

The creation of stories or imagery around such events distorts them even further. They assume aspects of these recreations as gospel, and your now omniscient overview includes unseen angles of yourself in action. The song remains the same, but the notes have changed.

I guiltily picked holes in my decision-making and the obvious effect it was having on my family. We had mitigated the risks as best we could, but perhaps our assumed level of control was a mirage.

Despite the fermenting disquiet, a threshold had been crossed, and with it a shift in how I viewed the mountains. My eyes now focused solely on the highest peaks and the boldest lines. I no longer wanted to repeat what had been done; I wanted to discover what I was truly capable of in that blurry arena between skiing and alpinism, but to do so with a renewed focus on safety and control.

‘Two Kiwi mountaineers [Alastair McDowell and Hamish Fleming] have cracked what they had thought was impossible and climbed New Zealand’s 24 highest peaks in a month.’ —The New Zealand Herald, December 15th, 2021

This achievement lit a fire within me and the XXIV project was born. Skiing the 24, however, would certainly take longer than a month.

I already had seven descents out of the 24. I’d decided not to include Aoraki’s High Peak East Face/Zurbriggen’s Ridge descent. That day, with incoming cloud, we had skipped the last easy metres to the summit, so it couldn’t be counted. But who exactly was setting the rules here? And what value, if any, did I see in them?

Looking for answers, I reread a previous article of mine – ‘Save the Last Dance for Caroline’. An unsettling sense of hypocrisy crawled in on the back of the story’s last line: ‘Progression doesn’t have to be linear’.

Would there be a point of longer-lasting satisfaction? Or would this cycle of continually resetting my standards carry me away?

September 25th, 2023

Jasper, Jim, and I set out for Malaspina (3,042m) through the diesel-blue pre-dawn and onto the Linda Glacier. I’d first met Idahoan photographer Jasper Gibson in 2019 on a summer shoot for The North Face. In August 2023, on his return to New Zealand, we set out on a training run up the South-West Ridge of Tititea/Mount Aspiring. My home hill seemed the perfect place to figure each other out.

Back in April, I’d spent 12 delightful days stuck in an Alaskan tent with Jackson Hole skier Jim Ryan. Jim’s cheerful resilience and well-rounded abilities made inviting him to New Zealand easy.

A speed skin under a cathedral-sized serac, then a short punch up pink-lit flutes, left a rock chimney of mixed climbing to gain the pyramidal summit. A quick piece of thrash and dangle had me on top, pulling in the boys on the line while I stared out to sea. Wide-eyed chatter flowed as we perched united on the divide between east and west.

After a short rappel back to our skis, I tore into the first section, sluff billowing either side of me. I was stunned. Promises to the Yanks of 50° ice had been made and broken; yet here we were, ripping Alaskan-style powder spines. Jim dropped in, his quiet, compact style glorious against the cinematic glacial background.

The next morning, we slunk back out, shuffling along in our own worlds towards 3,184m Mount Graham. We swapped leads while Jasper happily snapped away, the haze of high cloud drawing dense blues from deep in the ice stacks. A pitch of leisurely ice led to a simple but careful summit ridge tightrope stroll. On our return, two heinous ice-patch skids blotted an otherwise bloody fun ski.

We’d skied two brilliant peaks in two days, but equally gratifying was witnessing Jim and Jasper’s appreciation for this stadium of steep skiing.

***

Ski mountaineering is neither climbing nor skiing but contains both. While pondering the sport’s amorphous definition, I attempted to formulate a standard for myself and the project, but further complex situations arose in my mind. Is it even skiing if you use multiple rappels? What if you have to downclimb ice/rock sections? Further reflection stripped it right back: what was the point of this entire ridiculous enterprise?

These thoughts occupied my mind over the spring of 2022, when some answers finally began to crystallise. With Janina Kuzma, I skied Mount Dixon and then hunkered down solo through a three-day storm to await the next window. Eventually the clouds cleared, and Will Rowntree joined me on beautiful, complex descents of Silberhorn’s East Face and the Syme Ridge of Horokoau/Mount Tasman. Our experiences and discussions began to clarify what I was beginning to understand.

If Aoraki were the centre of my universe, then XXIV would become my homage to it – to the relationships made there and their combined effects on my life. An authentic exploration of ski mountaineering and the peaks themselves through connection-based experiences with high-value people.

I feel a need to document these experiences in a style beyond a self-aggrandising summit photo, to explore these experiences and their effects in my mind. To try and discover who I am becoming outside of the mountains. Memory is – distortions and mythologised moments all – the cornerstone of who we are and where we are going.

Now when I look at Silberhorn’s East Face, I no longer just see a beautiful peak. Instead, it hums with vibrant colour, imbued with all the dynamic emotion and viscerally remembered interactions between Silberhorn, me, and Will. We three are joined even when separated.

October 18th, 2023

Out of the nylon cocoon I crept. With Will and Jim, I was heading towards the darkened south face of Malte Brun. We slapped our way over the awkward bergschrund and went to work. Axes bit ice as we kicked higher into the Zig-Zag route, the only previous ski descent. But we were there to push past the known.

Cold-bonded powder and good light on our planned descent meant high hopes as we stepped through the sky along the crown of Malte Brun, happy and humbled.

On skis, we traversed left across the east face, the first turn outrageous on a hanging panel above the serac-guarded couloir that we would dogleg into lower down. I led down the opening spine, flow-state movements through exquisite exposure, and pull up on an eyrie above the Rock Door crux. Ski tips hanging over thousands of feet of air, we rehashed the plan – and, axe in hand, Will carefully sneaked through the door and waved us down.

Jim gave us one last look before the drop. ‘Jim Ryan, pride of the west, opening up the Spine Panel… three, two, one… Jesus!’

‘Easy tiger, easy tiger!’ Will called.

Jim stylishly pounced down the spine, powder pouring off his skis, and shut it down just as the snow transformed to 55° ice. ‘Well, that was terrifying,’ I remarked. ‘You wanna go?’ he shouted back to me.

I crept across the traverse to the final thin flute of snow, breathing hard and praying the flute was stuck on. A couple of supremely focused hop turns and I gratefully skittered into the couloir. Then, clean through the two main cruxes, we skidded helter-skelter over the last ice sheet into a catcher’s mitt pow spine and laced turns diagonally across the exit spine wall.

‘We’re actually going to do this!’

‘Oh daddy, that’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever done!’

Confidence coursing through me, I slid spine after spine, Malte Brun keeping the pressure on right to the end. Racing my sluff, speed building and legs beginning to fail, I pointed it over the bergschrund and exploded with joy as I fired onto Baker Glacier.

No tears this time. There was a tight, three-man embrace. A more technical ski than the Caroline, the clean style and control of our descent meant more to me than merely ticking a first descent of another crux line. And all with minimal exposure to uncontrollable seracs.

Over five weeks, I summited and skied six 3,000m peaks: Malaspina, Mount Graham, Mount Sefton, Mount Hamilton, and Malte Brun with a mix of Jasper, Jim, and Will. I also enjoyed the second descent of Elie De Beaumont with my mother Ellen, the lifelong skier and climber who, along with my father, first led me into these mountains decades ago. It was truly special to share the last trip of the season with the person whose adventures and attitudes have been so influential to me.

As of December 2025, the project total now stands at 21 peaks summited, with three peaks pegged for a second, improved ski attempt. Any concerns with outside opinions have melted away; quality is intrinsically woven through these cherished memories and does not need to be quantified.

Those shining hours together, through chosen discomforts and hard-won triumphs, stripped all pretence away. High on the crest of my homeland, in the swirling confluence of fluid and solid states, I can walk the line between earth and sky. And it’s right where that border blurs most that I find single-minded clarity, a fulfilling of purpose in something so inherently pointless, and a fleeting truth that, upon returning to earth, I have struggled to explain to those unfamiliar. But between those who know, there can be an almost instantaneous bond.

First published in Sidetracked Volume 33