Mt Aurum Gold
words by Sam smoothy
images by Mickey Ross & Neil Kerr
News filtered under the door about a lucky man who made the grade. “Nugget the size of your palm,” they said. “Kicked it off the bottom of the gorge while trying to take a piss. Blown clean off his horse by a landslide on his way to the bank.”
A crowd had gathered in the river below, four thousand holes punched into the debris, hunting for what was now lost.
John H. Smoothy creaked upright, dragged a comb across his head, and found his way outside. He had to laugh. It died quickly in the cold, dry air. He had joined in like all the rest, his ruined hands clutching for that fortune that seemed to swirl away in the eddies of the Shotover River. Behind him, light crept through the gaps in the stacked rock walls, a fine dust swirled into tiny dancing flicks of gold—the closest he’d come to finding the elusive metal. His one spare shirt, hung from a cross on the wall, was ragged at every seam and white as a harlot’s virtue. The valley echoed with metal on rock: coarse, bellowing men endlessly beating themselves against the hillside. It wasn’t just God who had forsaken this land; the Devil had left too, thrown out by the great crashing violence of these mountains. And yet here they were. Scuttling around under these teetering peaks like rats: seeking, searching, wanting and not finding. He softly thumbed his battered wedding ring. His credit and supplies were gone. It had to be done. Just not today. He eased himself back inside and sank to the dirt floor, crooked back against the largest of the gaps to hold the draft at bay. The hourly explosion shook another round of dust from the tin roof as light spilled through the ceiling holes like bullets through water. John barely registered as he blankly stared down at his one curled photograph, his fingers slowly packing his last pipe for the week.
Sunday 5th August, 6:37pm
The phone drags me from a face-down living room floor coma. Having spent the previous days ski touring and sleeping outside at 2000 metres, the whispered sweet nothings under the stars to Fraser McDougall had left my voice saltier than a sea captain’s sock.
“Samuel David Smoothy, Seventh Earl of Wineberry, purveyor of mid-range accoutrements, at your service?” I sputter into the phone.
“The Air Raid is on.”
Monday 6th August, 8:01am
Nostrils flaring, the colt stamps across the frozen turf, furiously tracking up and down the line of barbed wire matted with dirty wool dangling like bleached moss. The Squirrel B3 tears itself loose from the end of the road, blasts the fence clean and shudders through the veil of shifting river fog. Ripping the skids low over ridges, Lieutenant Colonel Erik Scott, Glenorchy Air Cavalry Commander, blindsides the predawn calm of Mt Aurum with a low, strafing approach straight out of the sun.
“Don’t you just love the smell of avgas in the morning? Smells like…. victory.”
Our mechanical Valkyrie screams from the summit, rotor wash shattering the snow into billowing red mist. We, the self-sacrificial lambs, step out into the haze, clutching our skis like good ol’ boys handling their .270s. Doors pinned back, Press Secretary Hancox and his three-camera rig have us in their sights as the B3 circles with intent. That ten-second line reconnaissance better have been accurate or this will all go to hell in a hand basket. This descent has been caressed by P-Tex before, but then I’ve always thought it’s not who rides her first or last, but who leaves the most lasting impression. And boy, were we planning to go to town.
As I’ve barely linked more than four turns since leaving Europe three months earlier, I graciously decide it’s in my best interest to let Fraser ski the massive, mandatory cliff-riddled sinister beauty below first. Like the square-jawed Disney prince he is, Fraser awakens the face suitably with a series of savage left and right cuts, tearing down the face, airing out each cliff band while fending off sluff with leather clad fists. The media hounds circle back up to me.
It’s quite the act to follow so I point them fall line.
The once-powerful helicopter is left for dead in my wake, desperately throwing gas on its own internal fire, but it cannot rein me in. Off line and barely in control, I desperately turn back right to avoid an unacceptable air, barrelling a shoulder straight into head-high sluff, barely holding my feet as I skitter across the edge of disaster and breathlessly onto the runout apron.
8:29am
Back on the ground at a local cafe, we immediately run into strife. With sentences, and our inability to form them.
“Beers. Two cheese scones. Three coffees. Two custard tarts. A chocolate brownie. How good? So good. Oh-so good. Oh, beers!”
“Four more, please.”
“Welcome. I mean, thank you. And please. It’s eight in the morning, is it? Yes, yes, yes. Wait, what? Ah, money. I suppose you want some.”
A brutalist air cavalry assault on Aurum has baffled locals and left us uncertain how to continue. Where do you go from the end of the road? Back to whence you came? Surely not. We must go back.
Monday 17th August, 8:29am
The last few flakes drift out of the cloud. Weighted tussock grass softly casts off its burden, sprouting honey tufts in its white blanket. Barely below the cloud layer, the trucks roll to a stop at the crest of the saddle, the Skippers Canyon twisting away out of sight below.
Ben Johns, laconic Alpine Heliski guide leans out the window.
“Hell of a day for a swim, boys.”
“Much obliged for the call the other day, Ben. Quite the strike mission. Didn’t know what to do with myself afterwards.”
“Does anyone know what to do with themselves beforehand?”
“Rarely ever.”
Can goats be trained to carry skis? How many potentially gold-bearing rocks could you carry if you abandoned your skis? Does eating half of your three-day food supply on day one actually decrease pack weight or just redistribute the load site? Does it really matter if it’s raining on the walk in when the trail is actually a river?
One of the benefits of spending many hours walking up a valley are the peculiar tangential ponderings your mind conjures up to keep you entertained. Also no one has ever submerged a camera in gold-bearing waters while heliskiing before. We were definitely on country. The surprising thing was that it had sat here my whole life and not said a thing. What treachery.
Hiding in plain sight of Queenstown, Mt Aurum had been on our radar for years while we waited for conditions to present themselves. Despite having spent our entire lives in the area, the difficult access and conditions in New Zealand mean there are so many exciting zones we haven’t skied. We knew just how insane the terrain was from our dawn raid and figured it didn’t seem right to leave it at that. We had to walk the walk, take the long road in and really discover what it meant to pass through these hills. To earn those ridiculously exposed turns and discover the true temper of the mountain that had given birth to a raging goldrush and, through those hard-won riches, created the community we’d been raised by.
The rain had started coming down, taken a brief swing from north through to the south, and then even started bouncing back up off the river that grew smaller as we grew soggier. I think it was as confused as we were. It seemed huts up here hadn’t evolved since the 1800s, with the one we staggered inside of seeming straight out of the Gold Rush—hessian sacks slung in tatters from the ceiling, the wind rocking the door in its frame. It did however manage to keep most of the rain outside, giving us a night to dry out while we finished the whisky supplies.
Pro climber Conrad Anker once told me and Fraser, “If you didn’t run out of food, you didn’t really have an adventure.” So far, we’d never run out of food. But we have become quite talented at running out of cooking gas. Trail mix, transubstantiationalist dinner it is, yet again. Hissing.
“Is it weird that I’ve probably spent more time alone with you than any other man?”
“It wasn’t until just now.”
“Well, happy birthday Fraser.”
“Night night.”
The night languidly strolls by until 4am when our departure time rudely arrives all too soon. I warm my boot shells by the fire in my loins as the stars bashfully close their eyes.
In the dark, we skin up until we can’t anymore, and switch to bootpacking—until that also proves utterly pointless. We have run out of mountain. After expecting extended episodes of thrashing and dangling, intermittently spruced with obtusely referenced cursing, we have pleasantly wandered our way onto the summit. Which is immensely unsettling. Something’s fucked, for sure.
My hands have ceased to articulate their feelings, and no amount of counselling seems to stave off our imminent divorce. Which leaves me trying to operate the drone joysticks with all the accuracy of teenage fingers on a 1930s bra strap.
Into the breech Fraser dives once more, a sole gladiator with a colosseum of three all focused intently on digitally capturing the carnage. Each casually adroit turn peels great sheets of decapitating sluff, less than ideal in such a technical line. Penned in by layered rock bands, shark’s teeth tear Fraser’s legs out from under him and the horror begins. Hip checking a cliff edge, rolling, bouncing off rocks like a broken doll, diving, going over again. The endless blitz of loops are indecipherable on my drone screen but the severity of the situation easily breaks through my tundra mind. The pink light eerily echoes the bloodbath. Fraser eventually carts himself off the face, one ski wilfully remaining behind to cover his retreat. He’s noticeably staggered from multiple blunt force impacts but the man can take one hell of a hit and keep moving.
The current question is: Am I narcissistic enough to request a small delay on the heli evacuation to get in position and film my line? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Silly question. Ever the gracious triage patient, Fraser says he can wait, and I disappear off the top into the alone. Skirting around whale sized cornices solo while your ski partner’s arse is expanding faster than the Kardashians’ list of plasticised body parts is a peculiar way to prepare for a big line. Gingerly locking out my touring toe pieces, I try to calm my tits as Fraser quickly gets the drone into position. Even injured, he’s the superior drone pilot. What a bastard. A day’s walk from anywhere and a diagonal ramp to nowhere below.
Dropping in, my foot’s to the floor but the sluff torrent still blasts past me and off a series of cliffs as I belt left through the first narrow choke, clipping shark tags with every drawn out right footer. Flying into a narrow couloir, I run it straight and scream out the exit. Staring back up at the sluff still pouring, I’m heaving for air and audibly shaking all over. I pole up to an ominously quiet Fraser and give him a huge hug before pulling his pants down to assess the damage to his arse.
A day walking down a river canyon is no treatment for a pelvis this battered, so we begin the heli evacuation process. Fraser slides down to the snowline while I skin back up to our tent to break down camp and ramshackle my way down to the group, haphazardly attached gear flapping wildly. Back together it’s hard to look up at the lines we just skied; just how close to disaster we came is deeply disturbing and leaves us quietly contemplative. Mickey and Neil nervously relate the baleful roar of our sluff, distinct from their camera position a kilometre away. Waiting for our extraction, I think it might be time to flee to the coast. This is all starting to feel a little out of hand.
The road is barely wide enough for the truck, but any complaints are silenced by the obvious struggles this passage would have held a hundred odd years ago. We slow to a crawl to pass the remains of the original Mt Aurum homestead, burnt to the ground just months before. The sadly ironic stone of the fireplace and chimney, heavily blackened and stark against the haunting grey pines, is all that’s left of the civilization that was no longer. Rattling back through the canyon, Rubber Mudder tyres placed carefully, we crawl our way back to 2018.
Ron breaks the silence as he shuffles to the bookcase and pulls out a faded yellow copy of Let There Be Light, a history of the Bullendale mine.
“I think your grandfather’s Uncle John worked that mine.”
“First I’ve heard of him. He find anything worthwhile?”
“Buggered if I know. Your grandfather blew up a boulder in the Queenstown Botanical Gardens to clad the Post Office in stone though.”
“Oh, I slept on its balcony once.”
“What? Were you lost?”
“Who’s to say?”