Joske's Thumb
| Joske's Thumb | |
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Panorama showing Joske's Thumb: June 2013
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| Highest point | |
| Elevation | 1,450 ft (440 m) |
| Coordinates | 18°5′17.84″S 178°18′10.04″E / 18.0882889°S 178.3027889°ECoordinates: 18°5′17.84″S 178°18′10.04″E / 18.0882889°S 178.3027889°E |
| Geography | |
 Joske's Thumb
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Joske's Thumb is a precipitous volcanic plug that rises in the skyline to the west of Suva, Fiji. It is located 15 kilometers west of Suva and its base is accessible from Naikorokoro Road, which connects Naikorokoro Village to Queens Road. Other sources note that Naikorokoro Road, the road toward Joske's Thumb, intersects on the north side of Queens Road, 0.8 kilometres (0.50 miles) west of the Lami Bay Hotel outside Lami.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer made famous for being the first climber (with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay) confirmed as having reached the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal, was defeated in his first attempts to reach the peak of Fiji's Joske's Thumb. Sir Hillary was conscripted into the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II. He served as a navigator aboard Catalina flying boats in New Zealand's No. 5 Squadron based at the flying boat base in the Suva Point neighborhood, currently the location of the University of the South Pacific's Lower Campus. He made two attempts to climb Joske's Thumb, the first of which ended before reaching the base of the mountain, due to heavy undergrowth. In his autobiography, Sir Hillary wrote about his second attempt to climb Joske's Thumb while stationed in Suva: "We had come up the wrong side — underneath the ball of The Thumb.... Bitterly disappointed at being rebuffed I was much too conscious of the 400-foot (120-metre) drop below me to take any more risks — and I hadn't much confidence in our length of clothes line. The Thumb had beaten us again." In 1983, 30 years after his successful Everest expedition, he reached the summit of Joske's Thumb along with several members of the Fiji Rucksack Club.
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Wikipedia