This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
Or: my personal struggle with leatherwood...
Trip members: Allen & Sue Higgins, Yibai He, Eva Lottermoser (scribe)
led by Allen Higgins, but then — maybe I’m a sucker for punishment! Firstly, Allen’s trips usually involve getting up at some ungodly hour. I remember when, towards the end of last year on a Thunderbolt fit trip in the Kaimanawas, I was woken at 5:30 in the morning by the sound of Allen lighting the cooker. We were walking by 6:40 am which may not sound too bad to some of you (eh, Trish!), but during the week, that’s the time my alarm goes off for me to go to work! By 8 am, we had climbed Urchin... that’s considerably more than I have usually achieved on most days by that time... Secondly, Allen and Sue at times go to great lengths to be able to mark a red line on their map — this involves exploring ‘uncharted territory’, going places they haven't been to before (and it seems that there aren’t many of those left!). This trip was to be no exception: the aim of the trip was to get to Maropea Forks Hut in the Ruahines. Allen took his van and the four of us set off on Friday night. We got to the roadend on the eastern side of the Ruahines in good time and walked to Craig’s Hut where we slept the night. After about an hour, we were rudely awoken by the Easies who also made it to the hut for the night — we got our revenge the next morning, though, when we got up and left before the Easies had even got out of their pits! The first part of the trip up along a fairly gentle ridge and down to Gold Creek Hut, which Allen thought would take about 3 ~ 4 hours, took us only a couple of hours. We had a wee morning tea break before setting off on the second part of the trip, which Allen thought would take a couple of hours. It probably was the red lining bit of the trip! The bush-bash up the spur, located not far from the hut and taking us to just below the summit of Maropea, in fact took us 3 - 4 hours! It was hell right from the bottom of the spur: the ground was covered in at times chest-high pig fern which I fairly quickly decided should really be called pig shit fern! It was difficult to push through and slowed us right down. After an hour, judging by the ridge on the other side of the valley, we had climbed a mere 250 metres and (my) morale was sinking... Instead of having lunch up on Maropea with views of the surrounds, we had lunch at one of the most miserable spots I’ve come across: in a tiny clearing in the bush, in the drizzle, with nothing much to sit on. It was so bad, that I ate my lunch standing up! After lunch came the best bit: bashing through leatherwood so thick that we had to get down on our hands and knees to crawl underneath it a couple of times. I think it was at that point that I questioned my sanity as I had turned down a ticket to a corporate box to watch a one-day cricket test at the Stadium to come on this trip... Yibai was a little perturbed, too, as he had bought a new pack only two weeks before the trip. By the end of the bush bash it looked as though it had been through World War II!! All good things must come to an end, and so did this bush bash (yeeha!). Much to my dismay, by the time we got to the ridge and the top of Maropea, the weather was misty so that we could hardly see a thing. We walked along the ridge past Sparrowhawk (which, incidentally, is where a perfectly good track leads down to the road end we had come from) and then dropped off the ridge down a big slip into a very picturesque little creek. The sun even came out for a bit as we walked down the creek to Maropea Forks Hut. At the hut, Yibai emptied his pack and gave it a wash in the creek to try and restore it to its former glory — however, remnants of the bush bash dirt is still visible even now, weeks after the tramp... We had the hut to ourselves and spent a relaxing evening there before setting off again early on Sunday _morning for the walk out over the ridge {in the mist with no views yet again!), down Colenso Spur and along the. river out to the road end. It’s amazing, but Sue’s words pretty much held true: she reckoned I would forget the ‘pain’ of the bush bash before the trip was even over. Well, not quite, but I guess the bad memories have already receded in my mind (and most of the scratches have healed...) so that I’ll probably be lining up for another fit trip with the Higgenses before too long!
PSUR Ae emo eemierem EMRE Te EE
[Photo captions and page text that interrupted the story:]
I should have known better than to go on a fit trip