T he thin cold air from the swirling mist on Mt Wilhelm left an ethereal film of silver moisture on my clothes, and disconcertedly added slippage to the rocks I was scrambling up. Searchingly I looked for the next orange painted blaze that one- by-one guided me to the human-made pile of stones or ‘cairn’ on the top of this craggy peak, and where I at last threw myself down and breathed a deep exhilarating sigh of relief. I was on top of PNG – Mt Wilhelm, or in Simbu ‘Enduwa Kombugu’ – and alone. On the distant north coast was the Madang Coastwatchers’ light with the folds of the Ramu Valley radiating one way and the Markham Valley into “I put the camera down, set the self- timer to 10 seconds, scurried back on to the rocks of the cairn and tried to look cool before the lens clicked. This was Easter 1984 and the word ‘selfie’ didn’t yet exist, click, and then the cloud stole away the view”
The writer David Mitchell’s ‘selfie’ photo, taken as a Kodak slide (below), on the summit of Mt Wilhelm in 1984
another distance, where I searched for Zumim village, my location of a couple of days earlier. To the west, mountain upon mountain faded to the Irian Jaya border, now Papua Province of Indonesia. On these horizons the sun was coming up and the full moon was about to set. I put the camera down, set the self-timer to 10 seconds, scurried back on the rocks of the cairn and tried to look cool before the lens clicked. This was Easter 1984 and the word ‘selfie’ didn’t yet exist, click, and then the cloud stole away the view. I’d climbed many peaks alone before in the semi-desert of the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, topped with its rustic orange cliffs. It was my way to escape from university study and maintain a bit of humility. Climbing peaks by yourself was, well, definitely not encouraged, but I’d read somewhere that
being a rebel is what often leads to change. Many of the peaks I’d climbed had a cairn of rocks topped by a beacon. The one on Mt Wilhelm was much like what I’d seen in Australia and it got me to wondering if they were somehow connected? Often there is a small pile of rocks to show someone has been there, but these were serious cairns. I found the answer in a word I’d never heard before and still struggle
with, geodetic. It relates to doing a professional
survey to work out exactly where you
are on a dynamic and constantly changing earth – an earth that isn’t a nice sphere like you might think, but one where PNG actually pokes out. To put the maps of PNG right, it required the building of a series of beacons and cairns of rocks by a summit party, hence the one on Mt Wilhelm. This was then followed by a geodetic
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