MOUNTAINEERING IN NEW ZEALAND
July, 2025
New Zealanders and its visitors have always been attracted to our mountains - climbing, hiking, or just viewing, - culminating in Edmund Hillary stepping out onto the top of Mt Everest with Tensing Norgay in 1953.
Climbing in the European alpine tradition really started in New Zealand around 1882, with climbers such as William Green and Edward Fitzgerald. The latter stimulated New Zealand climbers to be the first to conquer Mt Cook, on Christmas Day, 1894, when they heard that Fitzgerald was coming out to England to do just that.
Some fine mountaineering books appeared from these and subsequent climbers and we have for sale copies of Green’s The High Alps of New Zealand, Fitzgerald’s Climbs in the New Zealand Alps. Two of New Zealand’s finest early mountaineers and conservationists also wrote books of their exploits, and we have Arthur Harper’s Pioneer Work in the Alps of New Zealand, George Mannering’s With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps, and later work by Malcolm Ross A Climber in New Zealand.
It wasn’t just a man’s world in the Southern Alps. Freda du Faur was the first woman to scale Mt Cook, in 1910, and her book The Conquest of Mt Cook and Other Climbs has rightly become a classic.
The six volumes would make an impressive set, and could be purchased as a collection on enquiry.