Piking in Mt. Cook & why alpine watches should have VERY loud alarms
The pikers: Ollie, Andrea, Jeremy and Terra
After spending 2 days learning every possible version of 500 from Jeremy and playing a epic day long game of Monopoly with every one trying to buy Mt. Cook and Golden Bay and my dyslexic brain collapsing after 10 min the weather at last cleared enough for Ollie Jeremy and I to escape to the hills. (Really big ones! J )
The original plan was to walk into De le Beche hut, climb something, then walk back to Ball Shelter and meet Andrea a few days latter. Needless to say, as we staggered into ball shelter (Ollie in his plastics and me in my falling apart boots) decided stuff 7 hours of walking over moraine covered glacier, and go camp up Ball Glacier instead, then climb something there. A decision I was very happy with given I had never packed for anything longer than a weekend trip and my pack was about twice as heavy as the boys… So we stashed all our extra food etc at the shelter with “Please do not eat. We are coming back for it and will be really hungry!!” signs then trudged up the glacier until we found the first flat spot to camp, i.e a space of slightly rocky ice wide enough for one or 2 people to lay. Then we began the never boring sport of avalanche watching as the Caroline Face continually collapsed above us.
We set out alarms for a nice early alpine start, but woke to cloudy darkness, and fell promptly back to sleep. Ollie woke Jeremy and I with breakfast in bed, but his trick for getting us up didn’t work as it was still cloudy, so to Ollie’s disgust we went back to sleep until the lovely respectable hour of 10am.
Buy noon the weather began to clear and we decided to start a mission up to Anzac Peaks by walking up the Caroline Glacier. This was all quite interesting for me as I had never been on a glacier before and played this extreme version of follow the leader was a new experience. So the first few crevasses took some “Terra you are a long jumper. You will have no problem jumping over that meter wide crevasse. Forget you can’t see the bottom. You won’t miss. Just jump” etc. etc. By the time we got to the big crevasses and narrow ice bridges (that we didn’t realise were ice bridges until the way back…) I was quite enjoying watching the inky blue gaps fly beneath my crampons, and this was even more fun, though still a bit hair raising for a novice!
Sadly the weather came in before we made it to the top of Cinerama Coll and it started hailing, so not wanting to loose our visibility to get back over the crevasse, we went home to our rocky nests.
The next morning it was raining, so again Jeremy and I woke to the smell or Ollie’s wondrous porridge being offered through the Micro-light door. Again this did little to encourage us to leave our dry bed for the rain outside. By 10am Ollie gave up waiting for us and started walking back to Ball Shelter. We joined him soon after, actually making it to the top of the moraine wall at the same time, given we found a better route.
That afternoon I did a quick little side mission up the ridge above Ball Shelter, getting splendid views of Mt. Cook while the boys slept. Then I read them Jeremy’s romance novel aloud, (all of trying to keep straight faces during the sex scenes) to pass the time as we waited for Andrea to show up after she finished work.
The next morning we trudged over the seemingly never ending glacier to De le Beche Hut. The last 50m to the hut got a bit exciting as for some reason we decided to go up the arête of the moraine. Andrea, Ollie and I were going along, thinking “this is ok, but getting a bit dodgy…” and our worries escalated as we listened to rocks thundering down the side Jeremy had disappeared over. Then we heard the wondrous words “Would you guys like a rope?” from Jeremy who had made it to the top. We thankfully agreed! And thank goodness we had, as everything got exponentially dodgier a few more meters up! When we got to the hut we saw the posts showing the nice route up the moraine we were meant to take…
The next morning at 1am the weather was perfect for an alpine start, so by 2.15 we were on our way up De le Beche ridge towards the Minarets. We managed to miss the easy route up by about 50m and engaged in some fun rock climbing that we decided a rope was fairly necessary for. From then on it was a lovely route, with a stunning view or Mt. Cook at sunrise. We ended up having to turn back just before De le Beche as we would have had to cross either under a very dodge piece of wind-slab (which Jeremy is pretty sure fell down the next day) or where we were constantly hearing avalanches fall. So we had lunch and settled for some ice climbing out of crevasses instead, which was quite interesting for my soft-soled-day-walking-boots which were just about in 4 pieces by that stage.
The trip down was uneventful, and we all fell into our sleeping bags, with our alarms set for 7am so Jeremy and I would be able to make it back to Christchurch by a reasonable hour the next day. At around 8.30 we all woke up… Sometime before noon we began the long trudge home, and eventually made it to Christchurch by Christmas eve, and my house in Pakawau latter that day.
Terra