Alpine Panorama – Book Review

Alpine Panorama: A View To A Climb, by Andy Buchanan.

Review by Christina Rivett  

If one was to create a bachelor’s degree for the Canterbury mountain ranges, Alpine Panorama could be the textbook laying the foundation. With richly illustrated sections on everything from historic, ecological and geological context to mapping, charts, planning and access, no area is left unmentioned.

The book describes a post-retirement project of climbing all the peaks marked on a hand drawn 1967 panoramic illustration by I.D. Pugh. An illustration the author has grown up with and compared to the view from his home and local wanderings on Port Hills. 

I have been fortunate to live with a similar view for over 18 years and while my direct engagement with these mountains is limited to the skiing, walking and bouldering they offer, I was kept fully engaged all through reading it—which mostly took place in a house in Castle Hill village, with a different view to some of the same peaks. I found myself assisted into a new curiosity of identifying and making puzzle connections to how that landscape fits together. 

The amount of research and information author Andy Buchanan serves the reader makes for a fantastic deeper understanding of the area. and The factual descriptions, mix of raw snapshots of individual trips to the peaks and high-end photography give a wonderful insight—not as a guide book—but as a taster and descriptor of the different and changing aspects of climbing peaks, depending on technical difficulty, logistics, weather and season, in an approachable and non-dramatic manner. This can encourage anyone to make a start at climbing a small peak, if not all 133 like the author, which impressively does include Aoraki, the tallest in New Zealand.  

A beautifully poetic side of the work and a good thread back to the illustration, the source of the project, is the author’s own artistic engagement with the landscape as a painter. Dotted perhaps a bit too modestly throughout the book, amongst photographs and charts, are his own painted impressions. My personal favorite is Uwerau From Manakau, on p136. The painting is perhaps now hanging on a wall in a home of a young future explorer and serves as inspiration in return.

With an engineer's precision, depth and vast amounts of patience and passion Andy Buchanan has written a compendium to the mountains in view from the Port Hills and describes an inspiring undertaking of connecting  with a visual cue from his entire life. It is sure to fascinate a much larger audience than alpine climbers.

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Alpine Panorama can be purchased from the NZAC webshop here. 

Visit the author's website here.