A Quest for Edoras; or, The Night I Almost Died

There comes a time in every person's life when they really truly know that they are alive.

Usually this sensation follows the time in their life when they really truly think they are going to die.

I feel very alive right now.



It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, in an isolated and lonely valley somewhere in the middle of New Zealand. The sun shone down upon the snowy peaks that surrounded us, and somewhere across the unknown distance lay enough reason to risk our lives that day: the chance to stand atop Edoras. Little did we know that the adventure would end with a helicopter ride back to safety and civilization.

Our New Zealand Lord of the Rings tour had started out innocently enough. We visited the river gorge where they filmed the Fellowship boating down the river towards the Pillars of the Kings, and that was beautiful and extremely rugged. Then we visited the lake where the people of the city of Edoras fled across Rohan to safety at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, and that was breathtaking and massive. Then we went to the spot where Aragorn was pulled off the cliff and falls into the river, also in the Two Towers, and I had spasms of glee and rolled all across the rock where they filmed it, and Claus got a picture of me licking the rock (this is definitely developing into a very bad habit). While falling asleep that night, I was convinced that the trip could get no more exciting. Just shows how much I know.

The next day had more signs foreboding disaster than any day I've yet experienced. We left Queenstown, realized we were going the wrong way, turned around and went back into Queenstown, left it again on the second wrong road, went back into Queenstown, took the last of the three roads leaving the town, realized that we had not actually checked out of our hostel, turned around, went back, then finally left by the third road again. Forty-five minutes later we realized that Edoras was not at all where we had thought it was, and that we were again going the wrong way, so we had to backtrack once again to finally get ourselves onto the right road. At this point I stopped navigating. After that was pretty much smooth sailing for several hours, over mountain passes and through three distinct climactic zones, and then we made our final and fatal last wrong turn, and followed a dirt road for an hour. Again, at the forty-five minute mark, we realized our error, but seeing as it was almost three, and the sun was fast going behind the massive mountains to the northwest, we decided to continue on anyway.

The GPS told us that there were six kilometres between us and Edoras, and all of it was private property, and none of it was known terrain. We had three hours until dark, no water, no real food, no head lamps, no map, and no way to call anybody if we got into trouble. "Great!" we thought, "let's go!"

So off we went.

The bramble bushes were not a problem, at first; the rivers were only little streams, at first. But then the bramble bushes became more of bramble trees than bushes, and the streams became larger and swifter and more treacherous. All the rivers actually composed one large braided glacial river that meandered its way across the valley floor in twenty or thirty smaller bits. Just as the night fell, we finally made it to the top of Edoras.

It was one of the most gorgeous sights I have ever seen - a knoll in the middle of a massive valley, with snow-covered mountains all around, thousands of feet high, not a sign of civilization in sight. Or, it would have been the most beautiful sight, if it had not been almost pitch black by the time we got there. Nighttime had fallen, and so had the temperature; my feet were very wet and very cold, and we had a long, long way to walk back. No flashlights, no headlamps, and twenty rivers to cross in pitch black. Not a good situation.

So we re-evaluated. “ABOUT TIME,” you could say, and you would be very very right. There was no way that we were going to be able to make it back the same way that we had come, not in the night, and not in that cold. Hypothermia would be a serious consideration, as would the chance of being swept away in rivers where you can't see the conditions or your footing. But we saw a light on from a house on our side of the valley, and only two kilometres and three rivers separated us from it.

So we decided to take a chance and count on their pity. I mean, how cold-hearted would someone have to be to turn away two miserable, bedraggled, pitiful travellers such as ourselves? Very, I tell you, very.

By the time we got to the bottom of the knoll that was Edoras, night had fallen completely. The moon at that time was shining somewhere in Zanzibar, so a fat lot of good it did us. We stumbled our way down the mountain, and hit the first obstacle to our progress - a stream larger and faster than any we had yet crossed. In the dark, we could see only the starlight glinting off the turbulence of the water; the rest was black. We could get no indication of its depth, and could hardly tell where the best place to cross was. We knew that calm water was deep and rough water was shallow; where the river was narrow it was swift and where it was wide it was safer. We chose a spot with all of this in mind, but it might as well have been at random for all the good it did us. The icy water bit at our feet as we struggled across holding onto each other's hands. The current was very powerful, and the rocks on the riverbed were extremely slippery. To fall in at this point would have dire consequences. As we struggled across, the water kept climbing up our legs, getting deeper and deeper until our pants, which we had rolled up as high as they would go, were completely drenched. At the deepest point, Claus lost his footing and would have been swept away were it not for me holding him steady. Just after he regained his balance, the same happened to me. We were safe and relatively unscathed when we reached the far bank of the river, but the sharp drop in temperature could be felt vividly through our sopping wet pants.

Trekking on, we crossed two or three more rivers, but none were as treacherous as the first one. After hopping another fence, we finally happened upon a dirt road, and our spirits lifted. Following the road in the dark with wet pants and tired legs was something I could do; had it been bramble bushes all the way, I could have been in trouble. Claus kept my spirits up, and when my legs went numb, he made us run. We finally reached what looked like could be a driveway in the near pitch-black, and followed it up the hill, coming to a house that blazed with wonderful, comforting, warm, life-saving light. But after pounding on the door and windows and calling into the house for ten minutes, we realized that nobody was home, and we would have to start again, looking for the next house. This was the lowest point for me, because warmth and safety were so close, and it was much more painful to have that promised to us and then taken away than it would have been to have never seen those lights. Starting walking again was so hard - my pants had cooled down again, and my legs were very tired and cold. After a certain point it became obvious that my wet pants were doing far more harm than good, and so I took them off. Claus gave me his zip-up sweatshirt to wear as pants, because his pants, being Quick-Dry MagicPants, had already dried, even though it was only a few degrees above zero. With my new, dry, makeshift pants that were warmer even though there was a cold breeze 'round my parts, we continued on. Soon we realized that there had been more than one set of lights up the driveway that we had just come down, so back up it we went again, hoping, hoping that there would be kind-hearted people at home. When we looked in the house and saw a person walking towards us, relief and happiness flooded through me, and I finally felt safe. They brought us in, stood us by the fire, made us tea, gave us soup, and asked us what in god's name we thought we were doing wandering through private property at night with no gear and no map and no flashlights over landscape that has glacial rivers and quicksand. We didn't really have a good answer for them, so we kind of muttered incoherent things about "edoras" and "viggo mortensen" and "wanted to lick the ground" into our soup.

That night, lying in my bed in a heated room, having just taken a hot shower and eaten a hot meal, after having tramped across ten kilometres of rough terrain (the last two done with wet pants in near-zero temperatures), I felt more exuberantly alive than I have yet, and felt safe in the knowledge that we would come up with a solution to our problem when the day arrived.

The sunrise was amazing. The breakfast was delicious. The landscape was fantastic. The air was fresh and unbreathed. The sky was brilliantly blue, and I was alive.

Then we started to make plans to get back to our car, and the situation became even more complicated. Walking back would have been the obvious and best solution, but it was out of the question. Because Claus had tried to keep his shoes dry the previous day, he had cut his feet up on the rocks on the riverbed, and had scraped away the skin on the back of his ankle by walking without socks in semi-wet shoes - really bad friction situation. For me, my legs were shot, having had to run to keep warm, long after the point where the lactic acid felt like it was eating through my leg muscles. We considered hitchhiking: there were folks there who were on their way out of the valley, who could take us to a town nearby where we could see if anyone was headed back up to the very end of the other side of the same valley, to a town where five or six people lived - this was a drive of two and a half hours. Upon thinking that through, we realized how unlikely it sounded and how foolish it was to try. At this point, it is prudent to let the reader know that in our blind walking during the night, we had not stumbled upon a mere farm residence, but upon the base camp for New Zealand's finest heli skiing - Mt Potts Resort. So when walking and driving were out of the question, it was then necessary to come up with a more drastic solution. We needed to break free from our slavery to gravity: we needed to fly.

A four-minute airplane ride across the valley was our first choice; however, the pilot was supposed to call the lodge that morning, and the phones had all gone out. We were left with no other option than to fly by helicopter to our car, over Edoras and the rivers that almost killed us, in a valley of unimaginable beauty, with all of the grace and elegance imagined by Leonardo DaVinci.

I will no longer travel by any other method.

To feel the power of the rotor lifting you straight up from the ground, to feel the complete control of movement, to finally feel the absolute freedom from gravity; that was bliss after which I find it hard to return to my landlubbing ways.

But as with all things that you want to never end, it ended only too soon, and suddenly we were back in our car on a highway, with Shell stations and advertisements against speeding lining the road.

Sitting warm in my bed writing this, it is hard to imagine that the two universes can exist simultaneously - one with untouched glacial streams, snow-covered, unreachable peaks, limitless beauty, a nature that neither sees nor cares about you, the desire to conquer and a struggle against failing will - and one with essays to write, insurance companies to call, and ovens to clean. How can these both be a part of one life? How can they be separated by just forty dollars worth of petrol?

But the world that I have returned to is not entirely unchanged - I am not unchanged - for I have learned one very important thing. If you haven't almost died, then you haven't ever lived.