Glacier Country My Years at Franz Joseph By Ralph Warburton.

Published by Longacre Press, 2004, first edition.

Excellent near new hardback with jacket, gift inscription to ffep. Dust jacket shelf/edge wear. 196 pages, colour & b & w photos.

In the 1940s, and while in his 30s, Ralph Warburton fell in love with the mountains. He gave up his job of watchmaker and trained as a glacier guide, later becoming official photographer for glacier parties at Franz Josef. His family formed and grew up in the tiny South Westland village, a remote spot before the Haast highway was put through years later. In lucid, laconic prose, Ralph tells of adventurous crossings of the Main Divide, of mountain ascents, tragedies, miraculous rescues. He offers vignettes of village and family life, stories of the big weather affecting their lives and livelihoods and of colourful local personalities. It is also a story of love, between a man and his dog. Scott, the four-footed mountaineer learned to climb so he need never be parted from his master. He crossed mountain passes and weathered accidents that would have killed a lesser dog. Scott won the hearts of visitors to the glacier with his skills and his determination to be in party photos, always in one position: centre front.

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Pick up from Phoenixbooksnz.com Waimate, South Canterbury.

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