This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
Ring — ring! Ring - ring! Ring — ring! Click. “Gidday, Rob here.” “Rob, it’s Claire from the tramping club newsletter here.” “Ah. He’s not here at the moment, he’s just popped out, could be a while...” “Come on Rob, I know it’s you. You remember ages ago you promised to do a couple of articles?” “Err... yeah...” “We're kind of short, do you think you could finish them?”
“Umm, OK...”
“Thanks Rob.”
“He’s not here at the moment...”
elson Lakes is renowned even amongst nontrampers for its accessible beauty and glorious open skies. We didn’t see all that much of these. The idea was to go into the Sabine Hut, then out over Mt Hopeless — one of many similarly named mountains in the area, including river at about 2pm and were joined by the Fit party about half an hour later.
Party members were: Larry Cameron (scribe), Greg Crow, Ferrida Curwood (leader), Nick Gyde, Brent Hoy, Billy Naylor, Ruth Parnell.
Rob Hoskings
the evil day. The rain came a-callin’ a day early, bringing us a cold moist front from Saturday afternoon. In fact, she bucketed down constantly on the Saturday night. Fortunately we ‘d opted for the relative warmth of the Sabine Hut (except for Wayne and Jeanine who have hut-phobia and pitched the fly). Unfortunately (and this is going to be one of those “fortunately/ unfortunately” stories) we weren’t alone. Fortunately the four blokes in the hut were generous to a fault, offering us fresh crayfish, beer, and something in a carton which we'll give the benefit of the doubt and call wine. Unfortunately they were pissed. They ‘d boated out to the other end of the lake and gone up the road to the pub to watch the Super 12 final. The Canterbury Crusaders (who these guys were backing) won. They were particularly proud of the fact that they ‘d sung “Drop the ball, Joeli”, to the tune of the song in the ad, and Joeli Videri had indeed dropped the ball at that moment. They sang the song to us many times that evening, and every time it sounded new and exciting. The next day the weather was no better; in fact, it was colder if anything, and after a full and frank exchange of views we backtracked to the Speargrass Hut, which we ‘d passed coming in. Halfway there it “Mt Miserable, Mt Despair, Mt Leonard Cohen, Mt Smiths, and Mt It’s-Two-in-the-Morning-I-Can’t- Sleep-and-I-Hate-My-Life. Funny stuff, weather. You never know what its going to do, or when it’s going to do it — unless of course you’re blessed with a particularly accurate bunion. We knew it was supposed to pack in at some point over the weekend, but Sunday was supposed to be started snowing — gentle, fairytale-like snow, and you half expected a White Witch to draw up in a sleigh and demand to know where the Lion Aslan was hiding out. We got to the Speargrass in goo time and huddled in there. Trip leader Lindsay judged it too iffy to go up the valley to Angelus, so we stayed put. Walked out the following day. That was it, really. There’s no more.