The Mountains We Inherit

Susannah Crawford 

In the dining room of my family home in Christchurch, a black‑and‑white photograph hangs on the wall. Four men stand on an icy Himalayan ridge, their tents pitched on what looks like a forty‑five‑degree slope. 

The ridge is on Thamserku—a steep, fluted giant rising 6608 metres above the Khumbu in Nepal. Every Everest Base Camp trekker sees its dramatic profile from Namche Bazaar, but almost none will ever stand on its summit. Only six confirmed ascents have been made.

On 4 November 1964, New Zealanders Pete Farrell, John McKinnon,  Richard Stewart and 27-year-old Lynn  Crawford made the first of these ascents, as part of Sir Edmund Hillary’s Himalayan Schoolhouse Expedition. The summit team described the climbing as exceptionally difficult. To this day, the 1964 route has never  been repeated in its entirety. 

This photograph hangs in our dining room as a reminder of my paternal grandfather, Lynn. I never got the chance to meet him, but, like most grandparents, he was still a significant presence in my childhood. Photos just like the 

Thamserku image are scattered across the house. Since I was born, my family has spent most holidays at a little green bach that Lynn and his father built in the late 1950s at Arthur's Pass, a township in the Southern Alps. 

I knew of him as a great mountain climber, someone who had done expeditions with Hillary, and travelled in some of the world’s harshest conditions. What I understood less well was how someone I had never met could still shape the lives of the people around him. 

“He was quite adventurous,” my dad said when I brought him up on the phone that week. 

That was an understatement. At twenty‑two, Lynn was invited to travel to Peru with five other New Zealanders to attempt the unclimbed Nevado Cayesh in the Andes, an 18,770-foot peak in the Cordillera Blanca. 

Although this seemed to be his first international foray into mountain climbing, Lynn had already built an impressive climbing résumé across the Rakaia, Arrowsmith, and Darran ranges by his early 20s. 

Lynn and his close friend Peter Farrell climbed year‑round. In winter, they would forge their own ice pitons from mild steel and weld homemade front points onto crampons. According to his friend Anton Coberger, “Lynn and his contemporaries were to seek direct routes on the great faces and go on to make their mark further afield in the highest ranges of the world.” 

The Nevado Cayesh expedition was just that. But it was far from straightforward. The team battled deteriorating weather, avalanches, injuries, and difficult snow and ice conditions. During the ascent, Lynn became seriously ill with altitude sickness. He would have died on the mountain had it not been for an oxygen tank retrieved from a welder set in a nearby mine workshop. 

Despite this setback, he returned two weeks later and, alongside Don Stewart and Dal Ryan, reached the summit on 21 July after a long, technically demanding ascent. The three spent the night in an ice cave on the descent before making it back to base camp. It was a remarkable display of determination from someone who had every reason to leave the mountain behind. 

As the years went on, Lynn became a guiding presence in the Mount Cook scene. He was not only part of the first expedition to complete the Eastern Face of Mt Cook, but also one of a small group of Christchurch climbers who recognised that New Zealand needed a more professional approach to mountain instruction. 

Australian climbers were arriving in increasing numbers in the Southern Alps, often strong on rock but inexperienced on snow and ice, while the informal courses run by local clubs were no longer enough. In 1966, Lynn, Peter Farrell and Don Mackay founded Alpine Instruction Ltd., refurbishing the old Ball Hut on the Tasman Glacier and turning it into the country’s first dedicated base for guiding and instruction. What began with basic courses soon expanded into intermediate and advanced high-climbing programmes, and the company became the nucleus of modern guiding in Aoraki Mt Cook National Park. 

In 1975, Lynn joined Limbo Thompson’s expedition to Jannu’s North Face in Nepal, led by Peter Farrell. It was one of the more serious climbs of Lynn’s career. The face was dominated by unstable ice formations known as dablams, one of which hung directly above the team’s intended route.

The climbers fought their way up a partition of ice known as the Wall of Shadows. Although they established camp in a crevasse above the wall, frostbitten toes, failed stoves, and nights without water forced them to eventually retreat without reaching the summit. 

Yet the expedition still left something behind. The following year, a Japanese climbing team completed the route on Jannu using the fixed ropes left by the New Zealanders. 

These stories of Lynn’s are documented in the diligent records of the New Zealand Alpine Journal. In August, I had been going down a research rabbit hole for an environmental law essay on the Antarctic toothfish when I drifted off track and stumbled across an Otago Daily Times article about a group of climbers who had planned to climb mountains in Antarctica, only for their seats on an American transport to be taken by the New Zealand Government. One of those climbers was Lynn, which sent me down a different rabbit hole. 

It felt strange to be getting to know my grandfather backwards: not through memories of my own, but through expedition reports, yellowing photographs, and the stories other people had chosen to preserve about him. As I followed these traces through old journals and family anecdotes, I found myself thinking less about the mountains he conquered and more about the legacy he had left to those who came after him. 

The picture forming of the man I never knew became a lot clearer. At the same time, there was still plenty the Alpine Club journals did not document. 

In his later years, Lynn’s life shifted from high, cold faces to quieter work.  After years of guiding, he moved into the travel business, first with Guthrey’s Travel and Stars Travel, and later running his own small firm in Christchurch that catered to climbers and skiers who knew him from the mountains. 

He still went to the mountains, but in a more relaxed capacity—whether for easy “day walks” or to watch his two teenage sons “crash spectacularly" in their ski-racing events, according to his friend Anton Coberger.  

In the final part of his life, he lived in a rest home. His outdoor days were over. It was a stark contrast with the decades he had spent on ridges, glaciers and summits. 

Lynn died just under a year before I was born. I am twenty-one now, soon I will be the same age my grandfather was when he was traversing the Andes. 

It is difficult not to compare sometimes. His adventures seem much larger than the life I am living now: stressing about grad jobs, worrying about whether I am doing enough, and trying to finish an essay about Antarctic toothfish. But the more I have read about him, the clearer it became to me that his legacy was never really measured by the mountains he climbed. 

His legacy is in the little green bach by the creek that Lynn built with his father all those years ago. It is still owned by my family and acts as a physical point of connection, drawing new people in and encouraging them to fall in love with the hills. 

Just as Lynn spent years introducing strangers to the mountains through guiding, the little bach continues to do the same in its own way. Friends arrive for a weekend and leave planning their next tramp. A few years ago, Dad hired a tradie to do some much-needed roof work on the place. He enjoyed being there so much that he bought a bach down the road with his wife and young children. New people are folded into old traditions. Long after Lynn's climbing days ended, the house he built decades ago is still bringing people into the mountains and into our family’s orbit. 

His legacy does not only survive in places. It survives in unfinished things too. Jannu was one of the mountains Lynn never summited. Yet his efforts still helped make the eventual ascent possible for someone else. 

And perhaps most of all, I see his legacy in my Dad. He never inherited Lynn’s love of excursions that require bringing your own oxygen tank, but he did inherit a love of the mountains. He became an avid tramper, spending his weekends exploring New Zealand’s ranges on foot. 

It was through a tramping club that he met my mum. Together, they have been the best mountain guides my sister and I could have had. 

All this to say, I never met Lynn. There are still sides of him that I will never get to know. In a moving 2004 obituary, his late friend Anton Coberger remembered him less for his prominence as a New Zealand mountaineer than as a great companion: “reliable, competent, uncomplaining, cheerful, and the very best sort to have on the other end of the rope.”

That description stuck with me most of all.

My challenges will look very different from his. My mountains might be a difficult piece of uni work, a career I am yet to begin, or simply the next thing that scares me a little. Amongst all the stories of Lynn’s expeditions and achievements, he represents to me the beauty of being passionate about something, of challenging yourself and finding ways to pass that passion on to other people. He represents continuing when things do not go to plan, whether that means retreating from a mountain, recovering from illness, or simply getting through a difficult period of life. 

The mountains we inherit aren’t always icy ridges or towering faces. I hope that whatever mountains I choose to climb, I can do it with the same curiosity, determination, and passion Lynn had—and that, one day, I might be remembered less for how high I climbed than for who I brought with me.