Gottlieb Braun-Elwert: death of a mountain guide
Posted 15 August 2008 // Ross Somerville
The Tasman Glacier, by Gottfried Braun-Elwert
We are very sorry to hear of the sudden death of alpine guide Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, who passed away yesterday while on a back-country expedition with Prime Minister Helen Clark and her party.
Gottfried Braun-Elwert was a former nuclear physicist who had been guiding for over 30 years. He was also a talented photographer and was very generous to Te Ara, kindly allowing us to use three of his photographs on our website. His impressive image of the Tasman Glacier is in the South Canterbury places entry, and photos of climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook and the prime minister skiing are both in The Bush theme.
Mountain guiding has had a long and notable history in New Zealand since the 1890s, when the government employed professional guides to aid climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook. The advent of new technologies and equipment encouraged more amateurs to try mountaineering, but guiding re-emerged in the 1960s, and Gottfried Braun-Elwert was one of the new generation of experts who succeeded the pioneering guides Peter and Alec Graham, Joe Fluerty, Harry Ayres and other notable characters.
Here’s a historical footnote: Gottfried Braun-Elwert was not the first German-born guide to accompany a New Zealand prime minister in the mountains. That honour may well have belonged to Harry Peters (born Peter Hinrik Peters), who in 1890 assisted the ageing ex-premier Sir William Fox on a marathon 18-hour ascent of Mt Taranaki. Fox had intended to demonstrate that a man of 78 who had been a teetotaller all his life would be ‘as active and enduring as a man of 45′. The contention was apparently not borne out.
