Aoraki / Mount Cook stands at 3,724 metres, the highest point in New Zealand, but that number has not been constant. The Southern Alps are still rising, pushed upward by the collision of the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates at a rate of roughly 7 millimetres per year. Erosion fights back. On 14 December 1991, between 12 and 14 million cubic metres of rock and ice sheared off the northern peak, reducing the summit by 10 metres in a single catastrophic event. Two decades of further erosion of the exposed ice cap shaved off additional height. The mountain sits astride the Alpine Fault, which is believed to rupture every 100 to 300 years. Its last major movement was in 1717. The Roaring Forties, the powerful westerly winds that circle the Southern Hemisphere near 45 degrees south, slam into the Southern Alps after crossing the entire Southern Ocean uninterrupted from South America, and the weather they deliver is extreme: over 10,000 millimetres of annual precipitation on the western slopes.

For Ngai Tahu, the principal iwi of the southern South Island, Aoraki is not simply a mountain. He is the most sacred of the ancestors from whom the iwi descends, and the peak is his physical form, the link between the supernatural world and the natural one. The name's components, ao and raki, have been popularly translated as "Cloud Piercer," though the words carry broader meanings: ao encompasses world, daytime, and cloud, while raki (or rangi) reaches toward day, sky, and weather. An early Maori name for the entire South Island was Te Waka o Aoraki, Aoraki's Canoe. The English name came much later. In 1851, Captain John Lort Stokes named the mountain after Captain James Cook, who had surveyed New Zealand in 1770 but never actually saw the peak. Under the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act of 1998, the Crown returned title of Aoraki to Ngai Tahu, who formally gifted it back to the nation. It is the only peak in the settlement where the Maori name precedes the English.

The first attempt on the summit came in 1882, when the Irish Reverend William S. Green and Swiss companions Emil Boss and guide Ulrich Kaufmann reached within a few feet of the top via the Tasman and Linda Glaciers. After the 1894 first ascent, the mountain went unclimbed for years. The first woman to summit was Australian Freda Du Faur on 3 December 1910. In 1912, George Bannister, a nephew of guide Butler Te Koeti of Ngai Tahu, became the first Maori to reach the peak. Du Faur returned in 1913 to complete the first traverse of all three summits with guides Alec and Peter Graham. That grand traverse was repeated in 1916 by Conrad Kain guiding the 57-year-old Jane Thomson, a feat described at the time as "unequalled for daring in the annals of the Southern Alps." Edmund Hillary, who would later summit Everest, made his first ascent in January 1948.

Aoraki / Mount Cook is New Zealand's deadliest peak. The mountain's difficulty is routinely underestimated, and conditions can shift with terrifying speed. Climbers cross large crevasses on routes exposed to ice falls, rock falls, and avalanches. In 1914, three men died in the first recorded fatal accident, caught by an avalanche on Linda Glacier. In 1975, four Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel were buried alive by an avalanche during a mountain survival training exercise near Ball Pass. In 1982, mountaineer Mark Inglis was trapped in a snow cave, and an RNZAF helicopter crashed on the mountain during his rescue. The climbing season runs from November to February, and hardly a year passes without at least one death. From the village, the three summits form a blocky, almost flat-topped ridge that looks deceptively solid and climbable. On calm days, the mountain reflects perfectly in Lake Matheson on the West Coast, a scene famous enough to be called the "view of views." The reflection does not show the crevasses.