This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
by Harry smith _ When word leaked out that Harry and Struan were going on a tramp together in the Tararuas on the weekend of the 26th to the 28th of July a mass panic immediately broke out. People pulled off the club trips that weekend in droves, Eric and a large group of others fled to the. safety of the.South Island for a week, the Wairarapa Civil Defence authorities cast anxious: eyes on the river level gauges and-began to fill sandbags, and the Mountain Safety Council issued an unprecedented general warning for all trampers and climbers to stay out of the hills that weekend. But all this activity was in vain because, unbelievable as it may seem, the weather was fine. Arriving at. the railway station at 7 o’clock on Friday, Harry promptly unrolled: his pit in the back of the truck and crawled inside, proclaiming that. was the last movement he was: making for the next 12 hours. Also in the truck were the remains of Andrew’s medium trip those who hadn’t heard of Struan’s and Harry’s rain-attracting powers or were foolish enough to take the risk. These included Clare Kempster and her rather cold and bewildered looking sister who, having arrived in Wellington a mere twenty minutes ago, more or less direct
from downtown London, now found herself in the dark of night ina truck full of strangers heading for the Tararuas in mid winter. Life can be so incredibly cruel sometimes. At Walls Whare road-end Harry and Howard looked on in disbelief from the comfort of their pits as the rest of the punters scrambled eagerly out into the cold and dark in order to set-up flies in the damp undergrowth and sleep in the mud. Eventually, sanity returned to a few of them and they came back to spend the night in comfort in the back of the truck.
Next morning Struan and I were away at 8.30, and three hours later we arrived on the open top of Mt Cone, in knee-deep snow. Lunch was had at Neil Saddle and after the steep climb onto Neil we headed off down the ridge towards Neil Forks. The ridge proved to be easy going, except for one point, half way down when we both suddenly felt something was wrong. A check of the map revealed that we were starting down a false spur off the right into Neil Creek and a short sidle to the left brought us back onto the ridge again. From reading the log book later at Neil Forks hut, it seems that just about everybody who comes down this ridge goes wrong at this point and most seem to end up floundering around down in Neil Creek. We arrived at the hut at 2.30 pm and the afternoon was spent lounging in our pits on the hut mattresses outside the hut in the sun, reading. This is on of my favourite Tararua huts - a neat and cosy six-bunk DOC hut, in a great location with a real sense of reitoteness about it. The evening’s entertainment was provided by Struan recounting some of his epic tramping disaster stories from the past such as "Ten Days in Northern Fiordland Without a Primus, Matches or Food". Next morning we made good time up onto Cone Ridge and along in steadily deepening snow to the top of Cone. There we arrived out into the open in perfect sunny weather to be greeted with brilliant views in all directions: the Ta.arua Peaks and the main range to the west, the Southern Crossing to the South, the Wairarapa plains out to the east and Mt Holdsworth to the north with the peaks of the northern Tararuas fading into the distance beyond. It was one of those views that seem to make all that grovelling through Tararua mud, rain, mist and slush in the past suddenly seem worthwhile. With Tararua weather being what it is, it was also a view we will probably never see again. After lunch in the sun on the. top of Cone, it was back out to Walls Whare and the waiting truck. But since the weather had been perfect, we knew that something had to go wrong and so it did. On the way up the road to Kaitoke car=park to pick up the Mediums, Geoff steered the Duchess just one millimetre too far to the left in order to get past an oncoming car, and with a sudden lurch, we found ourselves sliding into a ditch. Getting out forward: proved impossible, so too reverse. With the rear axle now resting on the ground, the side of the truck leaning against the bank and the left wing mirror obliterated, the Duchess was indeed stuck. The Mediums arrived down the hill at this point, but even with all hands pushing we still could not budge the Duchess. The eventual solution conveniently happened by in the form of hunter with a Landrover and winch. Despite this it was a great weekend in the hills. But there’s no point in anybody going back into the Tararuas in the near future, because we must have used up its quota of good weather until the end of the century.