First recorded crossing of Copland Pass by women
1858–1944
Mountaineering
Photography
In the Ben Ohau Range near Aoraki stands a 2,379-metre mountain named Mount Edgar Thomson. The name holds part of Jane Thomson’s story. Jane and Austrian-born guide Conrad Kain made the recorded first ascent of the peak in April 1915. Jane named it for her only son, Edgar, who had died after a football injury in 1904. More than a century later, the name remains on maps of the South Canterbury alpine landscape.
Jane did not live permanently in Timaru or South Canterbury. Her connection was created through repeated climbing seasons based at the Hermitage, significant ascents around Aoraki, the mountain she named in the Ben Ohau Range, and the photographs and writing through which she helped record the region.
Her impact on Timaru and South Canterbury is therefore cultural and historical rather than residential. Jane helped ensure that women were visible not simply as visitors to the mountains, but as skilled participants in the early mountaineering history for which the Aoraki region became internationally known.
Learning to climb in the Southern Alps
Jane Coutts was born at Kaiapoi on 18 May 1858. She was the daughter of Donald Coutts, a farmer, and Anne Mackay.
On 26 December 1879 she married civil engineer John Thomson at Pātea. They had one son, Edgar.
Jane and John lived in Taranaki, Poverty Bay and Otago before settling at Greymouth in 1893. John worked for the Public Works Department and the Greymouth Harbour Board. It was during the family’s years on the West Coast that Jane began mountaineering.
This was not simply a matter of walking through attractive scenery. Alpine travel required fitness, experience, careful route-finding and confidence on snow, rock and ice. Equipment was heavy, weather forecasting was limited and communication with the outside world was difficult once a party entered the mountains.
Women faced an additional obstacle. Their ability was often assessed through assumptions about gender rather than through their actual experience.
The first recorded crossing of Copland Pass by women
In 1903 Jane joined journalist and traveller Constance Barnicoat and Ada Perkins on a journey across Copland Pass.
The pass connected the Aoraki side of the Southern Alps with South Westland. It was a rough, largely trackless route involving snow, steep country, forest and difficult river travel.
The women were guided by Jack Clarke, an experienced New Zealand mountaineer who had been one of the first three people to reach the summit of Aoraki in 1894.
Clarke reportedly needed persuading to take women across the pass. Jane wore knickerbockers and puttees beneath a long, fitted jacket, clothing that gave her greater freedom of movement while retaining some of the respectability expected of women at the time.
The party completed the journey successfully. Constance Barnicoat’s contemporary account was published under the heading “The First Crossing of the Pass by Ladies”. Despite their success, Clarke reportedly continued to describe the route as “unfit for ladies”.
The comment reveals the barrier Jane and her companions faced. Completing the route did not immediately remove the belief that women did not belong there.
What changed was the evidence. Jane, Constance and Ada had crossed the pass. Their achievement could be reported, remembered and used to challenge later assumptions about women’s ability in the mountains.
Jane continued climbing in the Arthur’s Pass district during the following twelve years. By the time she arrived at the Hermitage for the 1915 climbing season, she was not a beginner. She had accumulated years of practical alpine experience.
A serious climbing partnership at the Hermitage
In 1915 Jane began a two-season climbing partnership with Conrad Kain.
Kain had developed his mountaineering experience in the European Alps and Canada before joining the guiding staff in New Zealand. His international reputation can sometimes make it appear that Jane’s place in the story was simply to be guided by an exceptional man.
The evidence gives a more balanced picture.
Kain described Jane as a competent rope partner. After their most demanding climb together, he wrote that she was “a skilful climber” who knew how to handle the rope in critical moments.
During their climbing seasons Jane and Kain ascended Maunga Ma, Mount Jeannette, Malte Brun and two previously unnamed peaks. One of those peaks became Mount Edgar Thomson.
Jane also climbed without Kain. Her other recorded ascents included Mount Kinsey, Mount Blackburn, The Footstool and Lendenfeld Peak.
These climbs show that she was part of a wider alpine network. Mountaineering depended on guides, hut staff, companions, route information and the growing visitor infrastructure centred on the Hermitage. Jane worked within that network, but she brought her own experience, judgement and physical ability to it.
Carrying Edgar’s name into the landscape
Jane and John’s son Edgar died in Wellington in June 1904 after suffering a head injury during a football match. He was 23.
In April 1915 Jane and Kain climbed the northernmost peak of the Ben Ohau Range. The New Zealand Alpine Club’s ClimbNZ record identifies theirs as the claimed first ascent by the east ridge.
Jane named the mountain Mount Edgar Thomson for her son.
We cannot know everything the naming meant to her, and it would be wrong to invent her thoughts. What is visible is the decision itself. Jane connected Edgar’s name with a South Canterbury mountain she had climbed.
This is one of her most tangible marks on the region. Jane’s presence remains embedded in its geography, not through a mountain named for her directly, but through the name she chose to preserve.
Crossing the three summits of Aoraki
Jane’s best-known achievement came on 31 January 1916, when she and Kain completed the grand traverse of Aoraki, known in historical climbing accounts as Mount Cook.
They had already made several unsuccessful attempts as changing weather prevented a safe ascent. On their successful expedition they left the Hermitage on 29 January, travelled to Hooker Hut and continued to the high bivouac below the mountain.
The grand traverse required them to cross Aoraki’s low, middle and high summits before descending by another route. It was one of the most demanding journeys in New Zealand mountaineering.
Jane was 57, but her age should not be treated as the reason the climb matters. By 1916 she had more than a decade of recorded alpine experience. The traverse demonstrated the ability she had built during those years.
Conrad Kain’s account records the long approach, the exposed route and the unstable weather for which Aoraki was already well known. At one point during their descent, the pair sheltered behind ice while snow and debris passed across their route.
Jane became the second woman known to complete the traverse. Freda du Faur had completed the first grand traverse in 1913 with guides Peter Graham and Darby Thomson.
Some accounts focused on Kain’s decision to take a woman across Aoraki without another guide. That framing reduces Jane to a risk that he chose to accept.
A rope team depended on each climber. Jane had to move safely, follow and respond to instructions, manage the rope, maintain her stamina and make sound decisions in changing conditions.
She was not simply transported across the mountain by a famous guide. She was an experienced member of the climbing partnership.
Recording the mountains as well as climbing them
Jane was also a photographer.
Kain’s account indicates that photography formed part of their time on Aoraki. Carrying a camera into the mountains during this period required additional weight, care and patience. Glass plates or early film, exposure settings and bulky equipment all had to be managed in cold and difficult conditions.
The Alexander Turnbull Library identifies Jane among the photographers represented in a collection of Southern Alps photographs taken between about 1914 and the 1940s. The collection also contains work by other identified and unidentified photographers, so individual images need to be checked before they are credited to Jane.
This distinction matters. It is safe to say that Jane practised alpine photography and that her work is represented in the wider collection. It is not yet safe to assume that every image associated with the collection was taken by her.
Her photography expanded her contribution beyond the climbs themselves. It helped record the landscape, conditions and mountaineering culture of the period.
Placing her own voice in the record
In 1921 Jane joined the New Zealand Alpine Club.
That year the New Zealand Alpine Journal published her account, “The Traverse of Mount Cook”. This is important because women’s achievements were often recorded through the observations of male guides, journalists and club officials.
By writing her own account, Jane placed her experience within the formal mountaineering record under her own name.
Her writing, photography and climbing worked together. She did not simply take part in alpine history. She helped document it.
Climbing alongside family responsibility
Jane’s climbing seasons were only one part of her life.
In 1909 she and John moved from Greymouth to Brooklyn, Wellington. John’s health had deteriorated, and Jane cared for him until his death on 11 January 1923.
Her visits to Aoraki therefore took place alongside substantial responsibilities at home.
This should not be used to turn Jane into a sentimental story of sacrifice. It does, however, help us see the practical structure of her life. Her mountaineering required time, travel, money, planning and arrangements that allowed her to leave Wellington for climbing seasons in the South Island.
The surviving alpine record tends to show us the dramatic days on snow and ice. It rarely records the domestic work, preparation or support that made those days possible.
Her experience continued to grow
Jane continued climbing after her Aoraki traverse.
In 1927 she made the first ascent of the low peak of Mount Rolleston in the Arthur’s Pass district. She was then 68. This was the lower summit associated with Mount Rolleston, not the first ascent of the mountain’s main summit.
Jane moved to Christchurch about 1930. At around 80 she travelled to Kashmir to see Nanga Parbat, one of the highest mountains in the world. The available source says that she visited the mountain, not that she attempted to climb it.
She died in Christchurch on 17 July 1944, aged 86.
What changed because Jane climbed in South Canterbury?
While she didn't work or live in Timaru by what I could research, her direct connection is to the wider South Canterbury and Mackenzie alpine landscape.
Jane repeatedly based herself at the Hermitage. She climbed Aoraki and neighbouring peaks. She made the recorded first ascent of a mountain in the Ben Ohau Range and gave it a name that remains in use. She photographed the Southern Alps and published her experience.
Through these actions, Jane helped shape the evidence available to people who tell the history of Aoraki today.
Her impact lies in making women’s skill visible within a story that was often written around male guides, first ascents and ideas of heroic conquest. She helped show that women were not standing at the edge of early mountaineering history. They were crossing passes, managing ropes, choosing routes, making photographs, naming peaks and contributing their own written accounts.
For Timaru and South Canterbury, this matters because Aoraki is part of the region’s identity, history and sense of place. Jane’s story adds greater depth to that history. It allows local people, students and visitors to see that women were active participants in the development of the region’s alpine culture.
It also reminds us that Aoraki is not simply a sporting arena or dramatic backdrop. To Ngāi Tahu, Aoraki is the most sacred of ancestors. Historical mountaineering accounts need to be read within that much longer relationship between people and place.
Mount Edgar Thomson remains in the Ben Ohau Range. Jane’s account remains in the alpine journal. Photographs connected with her remain in a national collection.
Together they preserve the presence of a woman whose knowledge, judgement and practical skill helped shape the recorded mountaineering history of South Canterbury.
Impact: Jane Thomson helped make women’s technical ability in New Zealand mountaineering more visible. Through her South Canterbury climbing seasons, the ascent and naming of Mount Edgar Thomson, her traverse of Aoraki, her photography and her published account, she contributed lasting evidence to the region’s alpine history.
Related WuHoo story More Than Petticoats on the Peaks: Women and the Sacred Slopes of Aoraki
Sources
Trish McCormack, “Thomson, Jane”, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara
Constance Barnicoat, “Over the Copland Pass”, Press, 25 April 1903, Papers Past
Conrad Kain, “Long Ago on Mount Cook”, American Alpine Journal, 1932
Jane Thomson, “The Traverse of Mount Cook”, New Zealand Alpine Journal, volume 3, number 10, March 1921, pages 14–19
New Zealand Alpine Club, “Mt Edgar Thomson”, ClimbNZ
National Library of New Zealand, “Thomson, Jane, 1858–1944”
Department of Conservation, “History of Aoraki/Mount Cook”
WuHoo Timaru, “More Than Petticoats on the Peaks”