Queens Birthday Caving 2015
This year I was excited to attend my first Queens Birthday cavers gathering over at Charleston. There would be almost 100 people from all over the South Island in attendance, cavers and their families of all ages, shapes and sizes. While the forecast wasn't fantastic, it certainly wasn't as bad as it does get on occasion over on the West Coast, and the caves on my agenda weren't prone to flooding anyway.
On Saturday morning, 6 of us headed to Hollywood, a gated cave that requires a permit from DOC due to the many delicate formations and bones within. After a quite tight and prolonged section of dry rift passage we opened up into Streamway One, and traveled the most often taken route out to Elvis the Pelvis, Streamway Two, through the Sacrilege Passage back to the entrance passage. At one point you are required to delicately pass a floor to ceiling straw only 1cm or so in diameter - how it has survived this long I have no idea - I certainly felt like a clumsy elephant and was nervous just being next to it. Although it was saddening to see all the damage to formations in the Sacrilege Passage, it was nice to be able to at least have the privilege to have access to view the remaining formations.
The view from Hollyood entrance
Tara Tama Traverse
For the third time in a month I found myself wandering the hills with the same group of hardy souls - this time headed for Tara Tama. I had been fairly busy with other stuff so I hadn't really done any research into the route, but I new it was proper West Coast country and was probably going to be quite the challenge...
We departed for Rocky Creek Hut at 8.30ish on Friday night. There was some mention of 'it should only take a couple of hours'. I thought we might make it there sometime around midnight - even that turned out to be optimistic! It started off rather well (except the little bit where the group split in two and the back half got temporarily misplaced), with good track and fast travel. However upon reaching Rocky Creek the track vanished. We spent about 40 minutes hunting around for it, reluctant to get into the creek itself, as it was quite high from recent rainfall. With no track forthcoming, we had no other choice to carefully pick our way up the creek, and after a while we did find the track again. The next 4 hours or so were spent carefully negotiating our way up Rocky Creek, sometimes on small sections of track, other times in the creek itself which wasn't so full further up. One of us was briefly assaulted by a blue duck which was not surprisingly quite startled to see us. With a tired group and constant navigation checking, progress was limited to about 500m an hour, but eventually we got to the hut and finally made it into sleeping bags around 3am.
Needless to say we were operating to Gentleman's Hours on Saturday morning, leaving at 8.30am. I had been out in my bivvy bag while the other four squeezed into the two man hut. The way up to the tops looked pretty grim from Rocky Creek, but the beta said it was a goer so go we did. Everything was going well until we had a slight lapse in judgement and decided to take an inviting looking debris chute up to to a spur instead of staying in the upper creek, which had to be sidled in places to avoid small waterfalls.
Ascending a debris chute above Rocky Creek
Sunset Saddle
I had a couple of days to kill up in the Nelson Lakes area, and so I decided to take myself on a little journey across Angelus Peak and Sunset Saddle. I headed for Speargrass hut just after 10pm, and it was raining heavily. Nevertheless spirits were high, and I wandered about merrily in the darkness for three and a half hours and arrived at the hut just before 1am. The hut seemed quite busy, so rather than wake everyone up I just set up on the deck and settled in for what remained of the night. Unfortunately the rain intensified during the night, and the dry patch of deck that I was sleeping on got progressively smaller as the wind pushed the rain underneath the veranda, however I just managed to stay dry (if not a bit cold!)
I woke early just before it got light as I was quite cold, and cooked up some noodles for breakfast then scampered off before the hut woke up. I was up to Angelus hut for second breakfast, and got the low down on route conditions from the resident hut warden. There was an unseasonable amount of snow on the ground, and I was not really equipped for snow with just my approach shoes and no ice axe, but a couple of others mentioned the route was manageable, so I continued on towards the Sunset saddle. It seemed rude not to nip up Angelus Peak while I was going past, however this took much longer than anticipated as the snow/scree combination was rather loose and slippery. After a quick survey of the surrounds, I was off down the other side into Hopeless Creek.
Hinapouri Tarn and Lake Angelus
The Shower Fart
The shower fart is a curious thing
a little rumble, your butt starts to sing
at first is seems that all has gone well
but seconds later, along comes the smell.
Mellow at first, then really quite strong
and finally its hits you: an almighty pong
While normally quite mild, this fart is wild
Gasping for air, you race out of there.
Or maybe you stick around and wallow in your magnificent creation.
Mt Garfield - A failed trip to Lake Man
With a broken rib one of the things that one can still do is go tramping. No reaching up to grab hand holds, no squeezing through tight holes, and (hopefully) no falling over. So tramping I went, with six others to the Lewis Pass in an attempt to reach Lake Man via the Doubtful Range. It is not a short way, about 19kms I think, and I knew it would take all the daylight we had to get there. So in hindsight I don't think that setting off from the car at 10am was a wise move. Anyhow we headed off down the track, walked pass the bridge we were supposed to cross, walked back to the bridge, over the river, walked off the track we were supposed to be on, found the track again and tried to figure out how we were going to get up on to the tops. We followed a fence for a while, then decided to go back to the track. So we followed the track for a while, then left the track and headed through some bush, then a swamp, then bumped into another track that just joined up with the first track. Not helping things were the fact that my map showed tracks in different places than the maps that others had brought with them, so we were unsure which tracks existed and which ones did not. Anyway we started up the hill, which was muddy and covered in bracken and all other manner of spikey plants that took considerable time to climb through.
Heading up through the bracken fields
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Te Tahi, Wriggly Snake, Te Ana Puta
Three of us set off to Charleston once again for another fun weekend of caving. We had the clubs newest member with us going on his first proper caving trip, bringing with him bucket loads of enthusiasm. On Saturday morning we left the CCB and headed for the abseil entrance to Te Tahi. Before we went down we did a quick trip to the walk in entrance to the Iron Room with all its spectacular stals, which was a great warm up.
The Iron Room
Cedar Flats - Yeates - Crystal Loop
For Waitangi weekend our group of three headed over to Cedar Flats to do a loop up to Yeats Hut and Crystal Biv. We had intended to come in over the Pinnacle Tops but the night before a front came through dumping snow down to 1400m which we weren't prepared for. The walk up to Cedar flats follows the Toaroha River for the most part, with deviations into the bush every now and then.
Cedar Flats
East Hawdon and the Savannah Range
With only a week left of my summer holidays, I was both keen to get out and about yet struggling to find companions to join me. I decided on the East Hawdon as a destination, and was left with myself as company...
Getting to East Hawdon biv is a fairly straightforward affair - you simply stroll up the Hawdon valley, hang a right after ~5kms, stroll up through the gorge via the path of least resistance (another ~5kms) and you arrive some three hours after you set off. I was pleased to see that there was plenty of trapping going on in this area and it seems to be paying off - I observed several orange fronted parakeets in the lower Hawdon Valley, although they were quite shy and I was disappointed not to be able to photograph them. With plenty of time to spare, I set about reading a book in the sunshine for the rest of the day.
East Hawdon Biv
Stormy Pot & Nettlebed
Only a day after returning from Nelson, I received a phone call from a friend - an invitation to join a through trip of Stormy Pot - Nettlebed! One of the other members of the group was injured and was unable to make it - this was too good an oppourtunity to pass up! I had less than 24 hours to prepare for the three day trip so I scurried about finding all the things I would need, and next thing I new we were in the car heading back to Kahurangi. We had chosen to fly up to the entrance by helicopter (fine by me!) and were given a grand tour of the area around the entrance by our leader (who was one of the members of the team that made the connection with Nettlebed).
Our last contact with civilisation for three days about to disappear
After everyone had gone poop we headed down the entrance series of abseils (about ~400m in total). This didn't take nearly as long as I thought it might, and before I knew it we were into nice open passage. The only real challenge of the day was negotiating the Gates of Troy which thankfully was dry - after seeing footage of people trying to keep their head above water through this squeeze this was definitely the outcome I was gunning for.
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Harwoods Hole & Hobbit Hole
Anxious to make the most of my shiny new 200m rope, I called round a few friends to see if I could get a team together for a trip down Harwoods Hole. I got a couple of takers, and the three of us met at the carpark early on Saturday, woke up all of the tourists that were camping there with our excitable banter and headed off towards the hole. None of us had been through Harwoods before, but we had a map and lots of advice from others so we felt pretty confident.
Harwoods Rigging