It was an old German-made Braun camera, housed in a leather case. When Alpine Search and Rescue finally recovered the bodies, they also found something else. What Brown didn’t know was that he was looking at ghosts, lost in the mountain’s ice and rock for almost 40 years. Scratched into the plastic was a name: ‘Cousins’. He bent over and inspected the crushed helmet. But, in the years before its slopes and ridges had been conquered, there were failures, too.īrown thought of the bodies that lay before him in the Hooker Glacier as morbid reminders of the consequences of screwing up. On the other side was the Caroline Face, the site of some of the most daring attempts to summit Mt Cook. Glaciers move quickly-always changing, progressing or retreating. From Brown’s limited knowledge of school geography he thought that the pair would not have died where they lay. They had stumbled upon two bodies, huddled together. Four climbers lost their lives in the 1960s while attempting to scale the 2000-metre wall of ice.
A solo climber nears the top of the Caroline Face, approaching the summit ridge of Aoraki/Mt Cook. So they turned around and started making their way back down the slope. He was sore and for some reason increasingly uneasy about continuing. “I’m not feeling it today,” Brown said to his climbing partner.
Soon after, a piece of debris came whizzing down the slope, narrowly missing them. But early on, Brown told Needham that something didn’t seem right. The pair had set off early in the morning, trudging a slow path up the mountain. As humans born into a certain age, he felt there was something within us-a primal instinct that was hard to satisfy in the modern world. For Brown, it had grown out of the love for tramping he had discovered during high school. The peak of Aoraki loomed over them, with its 2000-metre face of bulging glacial ice. It was a warm day in Mt Cook National Park. Brown knew from the appearance of the axe that whatever they were looking at was at least 20 years old.
It still had some hair on it.īrown and his climbing companion, Kent Needham, leaned down. That flash of orange-it was a helmet, crushed and worn. As he came closer, he noticed an axe, wooden and weather-beaten. At first, all Mike Brown saw was a flash of orange.
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