This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
NO. 4 IN A VERY IRREGULAR SERIES THE MOST FOREIGN AND IRREGULAR OF THEM ALL: HOME
it was Christmas Day and the phone rang. I dragged myself from my repast of porridge and picked up the phone. “Do you have a rope?” What a question. Did I bring a rope 8,000 miles across the world just in case I needed a spare Christmas present. It was my old and somewhat disorganised tramping mate, Craig. His only job was to bring the rope and he had now discovered he had lent it to someone, identity and whereabouts unknown. “Merry Christmas”, I said and rejoined my family for the traditional Christmas dinner of porridge. I was making a brief retum to Godzone. After learning that porridge was about it for the Christmas goodies, I had arranged to spend a few days crossing the Copland Pass near Mt Cook. This explains why a party of six of us stood the next day at Mt Cook with packs that made us look suitably professional. Three of the party had quite a bit of experience, but the other three (farmers all) had never tramped in the snow before. “Is that your ice axe back there?” I enquired as I strolled past Craig and up the Hooker Valley.
The Hooker tourist trail is underrated. I once got lost here. No-one believes me, but it’s true. That’s why I wasn't surprised to find a desperate tourist who had lost her husband for an hour and a half. She explained that he walked around the other side of a rock and then just vanished. We found him soon, cursing and swearing, grovelling in the scrub. We lay that night on the tussock outside Hooker Hut, admiring Mt Cook above us. We had pitched a fly which had blown away. We aimed to get an early start on the Pass, particularly for those of us whose diet revolves around Dunkin Donuts. I soon leamed an
“And this is anice axe...” This was making me nervous, since Craig’s search on Christmas Day had uncovered two old wrist watches, a motorcycle carburettor, but no rope. But anyone who has served on the Clinton Gouth Otago) First Fifteen and entered the All-Perendale Sheep Shearing Trials (all three of our guests) are tough folks. Straight up we climbed, with not a word of complaint except to try and get me to climb faster because the steelcap boots were making their toes cold. Reaching Copland shelter, they stopped for a breather and I stopped for a cardiac arrest. There we met two people coming back down the Pass who informed us that eleven people had already been over the Pass that day. I guess I had forgotten what leaving early means. The advantage was that we now had a glorious set of footprints up through the softening snow. Soon we reached the top and paused only to take a few suitably heroic photos. “Contract Fencer of the Year 1978 Conquers Pass” etc. You can also do a great shot that makes it look like you are on the Low Peak of Mt Cook looking up to the High Peak. The western side is steep at the top and often requires a rope. We were lucky. A short grovel and forty feet down an ice gully and we were into a series of snow basins. Here for the first time our agricultural colleagues got some decent snowcraft instruction - in bumsliding. I wore out the back of my shorts. Craig had told us that on the flats at the head of the Copland River is a large rock bivvy. But upon arriving (surprise), he discovered that he had lost it. Lost about 2,000 tonnes of rock. Yeah, right. After most of an hour of searching, we found it. This thing would make the interesting thing:-the route that used to-go-from-outside--- average medieval_dungeon.a.cheery.place - it is right the hut is no longer there. I mean, no longer there. Now itis a gaping abyss. The route now grovels over a couple of pinnacles and down a fixed wire, then climbs hundreds of feet up to cross the gully and then descends so that you can climb the ridge. We chose instead to travel direct up the snow gully above us. Within seconds our novices were being introduced to crampons. “Put the spikes downward”, I counselled. )
underground, you have a couple of inches above your face, and it drips water even when it is not raining. We camped down by the river, but for reasons I never worked out, I was sentenced to sleep in the biv. Mercifully, it rained so we all got wet. Next day it was a scamper down to those famous hot pools and to practise your German on the fifty-odd backpackers who came to NZ for peace and quiet. We WT&MC. FEBRUARY 1995 retired to the rock biv to discover that one such traveller had pitched his tent inside the bivvy. So we slept there, just to spite him. But, ahhhhh, those pools. We were told they were too hot to bathe in, but we didn’t bring an engineer and three beefy farm boys for nothing. Soon, we were lying blissfully in the pools with a cup of tea alone.
The final day was going to be tricky. We had arranged for acar to be dropped at the carpark on the West Coast side. But it couldn't fit all of us and we still had a vehicle at Mt Cook. The plan was for two of us to fly back to Mt Cook from Fox Glacier, Craig to hitchhike home (to Dunedin, Cultural Mecca), and a fourth to retum the car to pick up the others at the carpark. A good plan, but one rather unsuitable to the climatic conditions of the West Coast. By the time we got to Fox there were no longer any flights going. Two of us were marooned at the Fox pub with only $500 plane charter money to get us by. Oh dear.
But it turns out there is a hippy bus heading down the Coast, so my compatriot and I chill out, make peace signs, and head for Wanaka. We look for Craig en route, but predictably he is lost. It is too hard to explain what happened next - but this was my resulting travel for the day. Fox to Hawea (5pm). HaweatoMt Cook (930 pm). Mt Cook to Hawea, under a tree (late). And I was trying to get to the family pub in St Bathans (Central Otago, you ignorant North Island twit. I got a lift to the Vulcan Hotel the next day and then strolled down the road to be reunited with my parents. They eyed me from the veranda. “Welcome back. Your porridge is getting cold”, my father said. Ah, it was great to be home.