raggles.kiwi

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.

Once at the bush line things got a little better, but our travel was still very slow and we only gained 4km in 4 hours (plus almost 1000m of height). Four of us were stung my wasps (including myself) and at this stage I knew we would never make it to Lake Man. Once on Mt Garfield (around 4pm) we agreed to camp down at some tarns nearby rather than persevere any longer. The front was beginning to come through at this stage and the temperature was dropping and winds rising rapidly. We set up camp, had a quick meal and retreated for the night.

The wind picked up as got dark, to the point where I was having to sit up and support my tent to prevent it from collapsing in on itself. It seemed I had chosen the most exposed spot to pitch my tent, and things weren't going well.  Around midnight I decided I was never going to get any sleep like this, and made the executive decision to take the tent down and bivvy instead.  Luckily I had already prepared for this earlier, and all of my stuff was packed away or already buckled to my pack to prevent if from blowing away.  I carefully collapsed the tent, packed it away and curled up in my sleeping bag on the ground.  Luckily for me I have a somewhat waterproof bag that is good for -9 degrees, so I stayed mostly dry and warm until around 5am when the persistent rain and occasional snow started to seep in a few places.  After what seemed like hours after it got light the others emerged from their tents (some of which only just managed to stay upright during the night), and we headed off down the hill.

We had another good round of bush bashing to get down the hill, a couple of navigational mishaps not making things easy for ourselves.  I could see that some of our party were getting pretty fed up with the state of things.  We finally regained the track, only to find it taking it back up the hill.  After pointing out that perhaps we might be better walking along the river (there was a track marked there on the map) we decided to continue on anyway, then we turned off the DOC track onto some freshly cut track marked with plastic bags.  When that seemed to stop in the middle of nowhere, and people heading off in all directions I had had enough, jumped the deer fence and bailed down to the farmers 4WD road which took us back in no time.  Despite only getting a quarter of the way to Lake Man I think everyone had kind of an okay time?