Challenge to Climbers: Mountains of Tahiti

Challenge To

CLIMBERS Mountains of Tahiti From Our Own Correspondent PAPEETE, Dec. 15.

THE mountains of Tahiti present some interesting problems for the aspirant for climbing honours.

The 6,000 foot mountain overshadowing Papeete—Mount Aorai —is not very difficult to ascend and its summit has been repeatedly visited.

But Tahiti's highest mountain —the twin-peaked Mount Orohena —has defied all attempts to conquer it.

Mr. James Norman Hall (the coauthor of the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy) has made two well organised attempts to gain the summit. The only practicable approach to the main peaks is by way of a knife edge spur, offering a narrow foothold between chasms, a couple of thousand feet deep, on either side.

On one expedition an earthquake came along just as the party was half way across this narrow spur. The tremor was not severe in the coastal levels; but the ridge rocked and tossed like a ship in a storm, compejling the climbers to lie down and hold on by their fingers and toes and teeth, to prevent being hurled down one or the other of the awesome precipices.

Both attempts to reach the summit failed on account of the friable nature of the rock structure of the higher cliffs.

Native tradition alleges that a race of mountain-dwellers, called Pii Mato, had ascended and descended with ease the many fearsome precipices of Tahiti, including Orohena, and that from them had been learned the existence of a lake, between the summits, on the shores of which was a Mnrae (temple).

The third highest mountain—Tetufera