James Kay: Window of Opportunity
From James Kay's photo, you'd think it was a fine, clear day on the Tasman Glacier down in New Zealand—just perfect for the kind of photographs he'd been hired to make for a guide company to use to promote their services and perfect also for the out-takes that would add to his stock images.
But what you're looking at is the result of a four-hour break in what Jim calls "a rampaging blizzard" that pinned him and a crew of climbers down for most of their eight-day stay on the glacier.
"The Tasman Glacier is about 20 miles long," Jim says, and it sweeps down from Mount Cook,the highest peak in New Zealand. "It's a favorite place for mountaineering and climbing." To aid climbers, the glacier is dotted with 20 x 30-foot metal huts, bolted into the rock. Jim was standing near one of them when he took this picture, but the group spent most of its time on the glacier inside such huts, seeking shelter from the storm.
"We got dropped off by a ski plane," Jim says. "The goal of the trip was to climb Mount Green, which you see in the background. But this incredible blizzard came in, blowing 80 to 90 miles an hour. It was so bad that not even the huts were safe.
"We never got a break long enough to climb the peak. We needed one full day and never got it. We'd have an hour here, a couple hours there. I think the biggest break was for this shot. When the sky cleared, we put on our gear and hustled out on the glacier. I found this beautiful ice block area, with the peak of Mount Green visible in the background. The climber got into position and I started shooting."
After a while, getting off the glacier became a concern. The group had radio communication, but no plane could get through the storm to drop supplies or get them out. "Eventually, we tried to walk out during one of the lulls," Jim says. "It was foggy, but it wasn't snowing, and the wind had died down. We put on snowshoes and skis and started walking down. We went through passes, over boulders and ice—it was a horrific walk. We got about a third of the way down when the weather cleared. We called in the plane, it grabbed us up, and we got out of there just as the next wave of weather hit. On the way back to the village the plane was bounced all over the sky like the ball on one of those paddle toys."
This picture was taken with an N90s and a 105mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor. There was no polarizing filter on the lens. "The sky really looked like that," Jim says, "when the storm stopped long enough for us to see it."
