Break Adventures: day 5

We woke up early and packed so as to avoid getting nabbed for a camping fee or worse. We found we were right to do so as a ranger came through and checked what we were up to... We told him we were just getting ready to do a couple of day hikes and he accepted it.

Our first adventure was out to "Kea Point". It was listed as a 30 minute walk over to a spot looking out toward a glacier.

The weather was incredible. It was hailing and sleeting all morning so hard that I had to tighten down my hood to keep any from hitting my face in order to tramp without great discomfort. I became the dedicated camera man for this day because my camera is waterproof.

Friends at Kea Point:

Kea Point wasn't particularly exciting, but it was a good warm-up for the first bit of the Hooker Valley Trail. The wind picked up at times blowing packcovers off of packs and actually threatening to blow us over without some amount of bracing against it.

We came to this bridge about 30 minutes into the Hooker Valley Trail.


Crossing this bridge in the intense hail and sleet is probably one of the most epic things we did on the trip. I took a pretty poor video of us crossing it (though I quite wanted my hand to stabilise while crossing). Please excuse my profanity in this video.. I wasn't thinking about who would be seeing it at the time:



A picture of us carrying on after the bridge:


A shot of the second bridge.. Half of our party crossed it only to wave to us not to cross. They came back when the wind died down for a moment. They felt that this bridge crossing was far more dangerous and that we oughtn't cross it.
The approach to the bridge was actually stepping around on this rock face with the help of a railing:


We walked back to the shelter we had stayed in overnight and re-packed our bags so that everything would fit in the car. We went to the visitors center at Mt. Cook which was beautiful and asked about where we might go to have a decent day of tramping. We ended up calling the DOC for the Mt. Somers area and found out that they were having beautiful weather (when the weather is bad in the mountains Mt. Somers, like Christchurch, typically has good weather). We drove north to Mt. Somers and planned how we would tackle the tramp which was a straight shot with a hut about 1/3 of the way up from either end.

We decided to have the ladies drop us off at the end that looked to be a bit steeper (they were looking for an easier first day), and we sent them over to the other side to park the car. Our party (Dale and I) would stay at Pinnacles Hut on the East side of the tramp, and their Party (Matt, Nora, PT, Rachel) would stay at Woolshed Creek Hut on the West side of the tramp. Day two we would meet up near the mountain saddle between the two huts and exchange the keys for the van. Dale and I would then get down, and bring the van over to pick them up where they had dropped us off.

A shot of Dale and our gear just before starting the tramp to Pinnacles Hut. Notice the weather. Mt. Somers would be the only place on our tramping adventure that would provide decent weather.


The tramp was quite steep at places:


A shot of the sun on the creek at one of a few river crossings (stone hopping, not foot soaking).


The trail went underneath a waterfall. Excellent.


When we finally got up above most of the trees, Pinnacles Hut was in sight, and behind us we looked out towards Christchurch and the Port Hills far in the distance.


Dale and I were surprised to have company at the Hut as we hadn't had any the entire trip. The nature of our company was especially surprising. There was a party of five mothers in their 40s and 50s who were up there "training" for a sort of short triathalon and several rogaines (orienteering competitions) that they do. Three of the five women were teachers, and three of them were Brownie scout leaders with daughters. It was really fun to chat with them as I don't get to spend much time with older folks at university. These were some crazy mothers though.. They brought jaegermeister up with them and i took part on three rounds of shots with them. I wondered about whether the mothers I know back in the U.S. still took shots of hard alcohol sometimes or went tramping with their buddies at all...

Oh the best thing about these ladies was by far that they had gone out and harvested wood to keep the hut nice and toasty well into the night. We were able to fall asleep on top of our sleeping bags it was so warm!


And a night shot taken by Dale... pretty cool.