This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
— BY MICHAEL LIGHTBOURNE
There was much ambiguity about what this trip was going to do: in the Schedule it was an Alpine 1 Medium trip aiming to climb Mt Tongariro. However the plan was more ambitious on the trip sheet, it had suddenly turned into an Alpine 1 Medium Fit trip intending to take on Mt Ngaruhoe. Hmmm, don’t like the word “Fit” in there, so after some consultation with trip leader and Supertramper Andrew Chisholm, who said there were “options”, I decided to go ahead with it. I've done little in the Ruapehu area, and my last attempt to tramp in the area was met with pretty foul weather. So we met on Friday at the usual place and time, and stopped in Bulls where I had some really good quality fish’n’chips. The weather forecast was bad. All bad. When we finally got to the Mangatepopo road end, sure enough it was raining. Fortunately, we only had to walk fifteen minutes to the Hut where we stayed for the night.
On Saturday morning it was still raining. In fact it was so bad I was sort of expecting that we would stay put in the Hut for a while to try and work out what we would do, but there was none of that when Andrew announced that we were leaving the Hut in 15 minutes. The back-up plan mentioned in the trip plan was to do the Tongariro Crossing. So we left the Hut and took that track. We arrived at the turn-off to Mt Ngaruhoe, and all were agreed that we should carry on. The Tongariro Crossing is an ascent in itself, we kept climbing higher and higher until we had to stop and put more gear on. Andrew had so many pairs of gloves on (or at least a couple of really thick ones) his hands looked like those of a giant. We got our ice axes out, and we needed to. At the very top they were important for stability where it was really windy and icy underfoot. It was snowing and visibility was 20 metres. They say the Tongariro Crossing is one of the finest day walks in the world. This is the second time I've done the crossing in these conditions, one day I might get to find out what they're talking about! From the top, it's a steady descent down to Ketatahi Hut, and we arrived mid-afternoon for a late lunch. Some of us had a sleep (including Andrew!), some us of read old copies of Forest & Bird lying around, and all of us starting drying out our clothes above the pathetic gas heater. The dinner was to be a Vegetable Curry, which can be quite difficult to make successfully. It turned out to be filling, and there was nothing particularly wrong with it, but I sure was glad there were lots of salty cashew nuts sprinkled over the top of it. There was a long gap between dinner and desert, because the custard seemed to take forever to cook, but it was worth the wait. This was the second time recently where I've had a ginger loaf with a custardy sauce over the top for desert, and I hope the trend continues. Delicious! Sunday morning and it was still raining and snowing. Great. Andrew asked us if we wanted to walk out via Mt Tongariro. And I think he was serious. After a round of “no”s, a pick up time of midday was arranged by cell phone and the plan was to walk a couple of hours to the Ketatahi road-end, which we did.
At the very end of the trip, back in Wellington, an interesting comment was made to me that the trip should have been cancelled because it was quite clear from the forecasts that the weather was going to be disgusting. I replied with two points: that often weather forecasts are wrong, and that even if right, the trip can be changed to something less ambitious. I still stick to this. Yes, it’s a hell of long drive to get to Ruapehu and back, and it’s a bit gutting when the weekend weather in Wellington both before and after the trip was absolutely glorious, and there's not that many options in Ruapehu to do something less ambitious because so much of the tramping is out in the open (ie not under the cover of bush), but there’s something about getting the full tramping experience, that is, the challenge of walking in tough conditions, testing the gear you paid hundreds of dollars for, and seeing the mountains and hills in their normal state (ie mostly cloudy). Well there's something to be said for the full experience in moderation anyway. Roll on another fine sunny weekend I say!