I am poised leaning backwards out over a 60-foot drop into a roaring abyss. My harness tightens around me, the rope taught between my abseil device and the deeply rooted tree around which it has been wrapped. I take a few more steps backwards, fighting through dense undergrowth, and I am free.
Spinning slowly I descend deep into the gorge, the air around me a cool mist pummelled into being by the force of thunderous water on polished boulders. My hands are cold and wet and I struggle to feed the stiff, clumsy rope through my abseil device as I slide slowly down.
Suspended above the frothing torrent my feet now skim the surface of the river, wildly swinging me like a spider on a thread. Above, the gorge recedes it’s brilliant green moss-covered, bell-chambered walls to a narrow strip of sharp blue sky. The time has come.
With one last chunk of rope released into the abseil device, I plunge into the tumbling, icy water. My feet hit bottom as the water level reaches my chest. With the last remnant of sensation in my hands I fiddle the karabiner loose and free myself from the rope. Water tickles its way into my wetsuit sending me into a bone-rattling shiver.
I climb out of the water and up into a cave in the wall of the gorge to join my two companions. There I take one end of the rope and draw it down from above, the other end rises up accordingly, un-wraps from the tree and snakes down into the river. I coil it up and put it inside my pack. Now we are committed.
It takes about an hour and a half to pass through the gorge into the valley below. We must traverse along its walls, jump it’s waterfalls like naval divers leaping from a helicopter. We must swim in water so aerated that even with a wetsuit to help with floatation, we feel alarmingly sucked down into the limestone jaws beneath the waves.
It is my job to lead this journey, having passed this way many times before, and I must do it using hand signals to cope with the rivers roar, and in less than two hours to avoid going beyond the point of hypothermic no return.
This is the first time I have traversed the gorge in the middle of winter and the Alpine river upstream is delivering it’s highest quality mountain water – crystal clear and Baltic cold. The walls of the gorge, at water level to a foot above, are clad in glassy ice several inches thick. The water temperature must be around 5 degrees Celsius.
What am I doing here in this liquid fridge? The two people I am with are photographers from New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. They are here to photograph this unique environment to present in an appeal case to oppose developers from damming it to build a hydro-electric power scheme. We must run the gauntlet of cold because the appeal is too soon to wait until summer, the season when this gorge journey is usually undertaken.
Upstream only a few kilometres the gorge exits the Tongariro National Park, a World Heritage Area. Anything outside this human-made boundary is fair game to the economist – the paradox of our industrial attitude to wild land.
Taking photographs of this pristine, semi-aquatic environment was only one point along the campaign frontier. Many bodies, including my employer at the time, were involved in a Machiavellian game to prevent the dam being built. The department of conservation were approaching from a natural science perspective, the local outdoor centre from one of recreation and access rights. Environmentalists were asking why New Zealand, with the largest per capita consumption of electricity in the world, needed yet more of the stuff. But by far the most interesting and powerful argument came from the local Maori.
Wairua is the spirit of something. We all have it – it is the thing that leaves a living being at death. In some respects it is what many Westerners think of as “life energy”. It is present in everything though, in rocks and mountains, rivers, streams, the sea – things usually considered ‘dead’. A different energy from the type physicists know – it can’t be measured in amps and volts or pounds per square inch.
The important thing to note about Wairua is that it flows. It moves through things, things do not contain it. In some ways it is like the Tao of ancient Chinese philosophy. Like water, its flow can be stemmed, or re-directed, but doing this is to mess with the very forces of life – a foolish act, especially in the name of personal profiteering.
The Mangetepopo gorge is a sacred place, the Wairua is strong like the torrent of water that flows there. The implications of stopping this flow, or interfering with it, reach far upstream right to the stony watershed high on the North Western slope of mount Tongariro and downstream to the mighty Tasman Sea. Many of the local Maori, if you ask them about their family history, will take their lineage right back to Tongariro itself (himself). They are descendants of the mountain and the point where this ancestry jumps from human to mountain is indiscernible.
My knowledge of Maori culture is sadly lacking, but I do know that even in the relatively narrow terms of biological science they are right. They have existed for 1200 years from soil made from the eruptions of these volcanic mountains and they have ingested the earthy carbon through the food they have eaten. They have depended on the rivers that flow from the high slopes for irrigation and drinking water. Even the cool, fine air they breathe has been cycled through the rich vegetation that ranges for hundreds of miles around the mountain. They are as much a part of the landscape as the landscape is part of them. As is indeed true of us all.
We emerged from the gorge three exhausted and physiologically dying souls, our body temperature dangerously low after nearly four hours of photography. As we took ourselves off to the local hot springs to thaw out, we stopped to look back and there, filling the depth and breadth of the chasm was a vivid brilliant rainbow.
Five years ago that battle was fought on all fronts. In two months time I will once again lower myself tentatively into the depths of that pristine gorge. The appeal was successful, the river and the great Wairua of the Mangetepopo flows on.