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In 1909, a British major and two local guides finally cracked the 'Matterhorn of the South.'
Mount Aspiring dominates the skyline west of Wānaka long before anyone gets close enough to climb it — a near-perfect pyramid of rock and ice that's earned it the nickname 'the Matterhorn of the South.' Māori called it Tititea, 'glistening peak.' The English name came from Otago's chief surveyor, John Turnbull Thomson, who spotted it from around 40 miles away near Lake Hāwea in 1857 and named it for exactly what it looked like from that distance: something worth aspiring to.
Head's party climbed a route up the West Face so difficult it wasn't repeated by anyone else for 56 years.
It took over half a century after Thomson named the mountain for anyone to actually stand on top of it. In November 1909, English climber Major Bernard Head, alongside veteran alpine guides Jack Clarke and Alec Graham, made an attempt up the East Matukituki Valley and found no viable route. Rather than give up, the party shifted to the West Branch, crossed the Bonar Glacier, and found a line up the mountain's West Face that no one had considered.
On 23 November 1909, the three men reached the 3,033-metre summit — but didn't get to enjoy it for long. Heavy cloud, rising wind, and an advancing storm cut their time on top short. Head wrote afterwards of seeing 'a wonderful array of unclimbed peaks and unexplored country' stretching out below him, enough to draw him back the following year to complete the first crossing from the West Matukituki to the Dart River via Cascade Saddle. Their original West Face route proved so difficult that it wasn't climbed again until 1965; most modern parties instead use the gentler Northwest Ridge, first climbed in 1913.
Bernard Head didn't get to enjoy his mountaineering legacy for long either. He was killed in action at Gallipoli in 1915, serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers — just six years after standing on the summit of the peak that, along with a nearby mountain named in his honour, still overlooks the Matukituki Valley today.
Get a full view of Mount Aspiring / Tititea from the water on the lake.
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