This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
“ et’s eat all the food now... “
Itwas adark and stormy night on the Desert Road. Seven hardy souls were unceremoniously dumped into the freezing night air and left to stagger blindly to the campsite while the Easy trip punters smiled and waved goodbye from the pandering comfort of their mobile hut, The Duchess.
Saturday moming and Jon P’s chattering teeth awoke us all. Arising, we stormed off into the sunrise. We were fortunate that there were seven of us, as we had to stand on top of each other as we made our way through the snow drifts.
As we had no rope, we tied our boot laces together in order to belay each other up the icy slope to Red Crater. Having adjusted to the altitude, we swam across Emerald Lake and traversed the crater, narrowly avoiding a lava flow, and stopping for a brew (lava boils a billy quicker thananMSR). We thenrisked life and limb as we crossed the avalanche prone slopes of Mt Tongariro. We were able to swim the last descent to the hut, thanks to a welltimed avalanche, stopping just before the hut. As we attempted to enter the hut, we were accosted by the same large group of pandered Easy punters. We cooked up our Curried Chilli Con Vege and powerful aromas kept the Easys at bay.
The next day dawned miserable with 20ft snow drifts (it was even deeper inside the hut as some smart Easy ‘punter left the window open). We left early, leaving the pandemonium of the hut to the pandered, pampered Easy punters, as we cleared the way heroically down the mountain for the Easys. As we descended past the treacherous ice slopes, one of our party gallantly retumed with ice axes for the floundering Easys. Soon after, we reached the roadend and relaxed for the next few hours while we waited for the Easy party to arrive.
Punters: Allan “Sir Ed” MacLachlan, Graham “Tenzing” Morley, Kate “Messner” Taylor, Peter “Ranulph” Batholomew, Jon “Dingle” Parker, Jonathan “Amundsen” Exley, Dave “Shackleton” McDowell.
Scribe: Hans Christian Allanson.