
It's a country that doesn't half know how to rain, but that rain is quite sharply distributed, both in time and geographically. For instance Wanaka is only 50 miles from Haast Pass, but the former gets around 30 inches a year (comparable to Edinburgh) while the latter is drenched by 173 inches, more than the wettest year recorded anywhere in Britain. Equally the rain tends to come in bursts. New Zealand has far fewer of the days of continuous drizzle common in the British hills, but the wet days you do get can put down huge amounts of water. My visit to Wanaka happened to coincide with an extreme version of this, and included the biggest storm for 40 years. The Aspiring weather station recorded over ten inches of rain in 24 hours and the rivers became huge. There were twenty landslides across the Haast Pass road and five bridges were washed away, while Wanaka itself was completely cut off for three days. In the South Island as a whole over a thousand people had to be evacuated, including the whole town of Milford and the New Zealand Prime Minister, who happened to be doing the Milford Track at the time.
I arrived in Wanaka just in time to get cut off and spend considerable amounts of time drinking tea and nervously watching the lake rise to swallow the lower parts of the campsite. By day three the rain had stopped and the weather was glorious – you just couldn't get any further than a few miles out of town. I climbed a grassy Munro-sized hill called Roy's Peak, with a nice sharp ridge and a wide view.

Glendhu Bay and the flooding, from Roy's Peak
By the next day the lake had receded a bit and you could get as far as a landslip only seven miles from the Matukituki road end, so five of us squeezed into a taxi and headed out. The landslip was easily clambered over, but a few miles after the road end the track was blocked by a sizeable stream flowing across it. Here I got my first lesson in local attitudes to water. After some searching I managed to find a place where I could hop across on boulders with some difficulty. Stu and Janine just walked straight through it as it was "only" knee deep, not even bothering to keep clothes dry. Their method was much quicker, probably safer and in a New Zealand summer it's warm enough to dry things in no time (you can't rely on that in sub-Boreal Alba!).

Mt Liverpool and the Matukituki
The Matukituki was stunning, still one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Grassy meadows were backed by hanging woods of Southern Beech with 1000 foot waterfalls plunging down through them. Above these were glimpses of glaciers and dramatic rock peaks, culminating in the gigantic wedge of Mt Aspiring. I was absolutely blown away. My original target had been Aspiring, but a huge slot had recently opened up to block the normal route and the alternative involved crossing a highly crevassed glacier, not a safe solo.

Mt Tyndall east ridge
I did the traverse of Mt Tyndall instead (after a bivvy in which I discovered the delights of sandflies). The summit ridge was an easy fun scramble with spectacular views across to Aspiring. On the descent I had another lesson. I tried to take a short cut from the "recommended route" marked on my map, but the slope was covered in a local speciality called Snow Grass, whose downward-pointing dead strands are incredibly slippery. I duly ended up on my backside, rapidly picking up speed and falling over a 20 foot drop into a pool. I was actually very lucky that the pool was there as the cliff continued below for another 2000 feet! Somewhat chastened I managed to scrabble back up and take the sensible line.

Liverpool Bivvy and Mt Tyndall
An attempt on Mt Liverpool ground to a halt low down in a tangle of deadfalls and unstable rubble slopes in the well named Rough Creek, so I headed up to the tiny Liverpool Bivvy hut for a look at Mount Barff. The foot of this is guarded by steep slabs and just as steep vegetation, which has to be climbed in the dark, so I had an investigative wander first (and was glad I did), plus a trip up to Arawhata Saddle to check out a safe descent route. The Arawhata is an impressively wild place – apparently fewer than ten people a year go there.

Upper Arawhata
Mt Barff itself was one of those days that went like clockwork. Off at 5am and up through the slabs to open snowfields, then across a minor bergschrund onto the glacial mantle that covers the upper part of the peak. It was much colder than the previous few days, with a few snow showers, and the snow was in excellent condition. Any crevasses were easily avoidable and after 2000 feet or so of happy cramponning I arrived at the south-east ridge, which gradually steepens and narrows but is easy. It culminates in a pointed rock summit, where my arrival coincided with one of the snow showers so I didn't get the view, which I gather is spectacular. A narrow arete leads to another summit, lower I suspect, but much more dramatic, a very sharp rock spike.

Mt Barff
I descended the south-west ridge on a mixture of rock slabs and snow runnels to reach a minor top and the easy descent that I'd reconnoitred the day before. I was back down at the bivvy hut for 9.30, to find that I had company, a 20-something couple. I suspect I interrupted them 😁. They were friendly, but obviously wanted privacy so after a brew and a blether I carried on down to the main Aspiring Hut. Here I found my previous acquaintances Stu and Janine in residence and we walked back out to the road end the next day to catch a bus to Wanaka (and a good night in the pub).

West Matukituki
I still had another week before I was due to meet friends at Mount Cook, and the obvious objective was Mount Brewster, the highest of the peaks around Haast Pass. All I knew about it was that it was "mountaineering, but not very hard", plus what I could gather from the map. Brewster Bivvy was marked, with a track up to it, so that's where I went. Getting to the track from the Haast Pass road involved a wade, but it was only calf deep so no problem (I was getting the idea by now). The track consisted of 3000 feet of steep pulling using tree roots for handholds, but it was a lot easier going than if it hadn't been there! At the top it was cold, windy and raining, so I settled down in the comfortable hut with a library of mountaineering journals for entertainment, full of useful information and good stories.
The next day was wet too, but I had an afternoon foray up Mount Armstrong, a 2174m peak close to the hut. I gather there's a waymarked trail up it now, but there wasn't in 1994. I just followed my nose up easy broken rock until I arrived at the summit, then descended the north-west ridge. I came out of the clouds close to the beautiful Glacier Lake, enabling me to check out the route to the glacier for the morning. It made a nice change to see some colour after the monochrome of rock and mist.
It was still wet in the morning so the alpine start ended up as 10am, by which time it was starting to clear. The glacier was easy, and the cloud had prevented the snow from getting too soft. I didn't like the look of the snow in the gully that the journals had recommended though, so climbed the rock ridge to its left. This turned out to be a very good idea as the gully avalanched later. The rock ridge led to a minor summit, then a sharper ridge went across the top of the gully to another summit. This was all still in the mist, but it didn't feel high enough to be the main summit so I carried on. The ridge soon started to rise again as a dramatically sharp arete (the West Ridge, Grade 2, I now know). It was mostly snow but with short rock sections, made easy by a line of footprints. Things dropped away pretty steeply beyond the airy summit, and with no view to look at and worries about the snow conditions I didn't hang around and went back down the way I'd come. I avoided the steeper rock I'd climbed on the way up by staying on the main west ridge and going out to the nearby summit of Top Heavy (2076m). This had the additional benefit of avoiding crossing the glacier in the softening snow.
Back at the hut I contemplated heading straight down and hitching back to Wanaka, but it would have been early evening by the time I reached the road and I figured that there wouldn't have been much traffic. What I didn't know in those pre-internet days was that another huge storm was due to turn up overnight. In the morning it was raining heavily, and the river at the bottom was a huge thundering torrent, carrying down whole trees. It was obviously uncrossable, very frustrating with the road just on the other bank. It was only 5km to where the road itself crossed over, but the ground in between was thick forest right down to the riverbank. There were short sections where you could wade along out of the main current, and occasionally you could scramble along rocks, but mostly it was swinging from tree to tree, very awkward with a big rucksack. The subsidiary Fantail Creek was in spate too, necessitating a 300 foot climb up the bank to where it shot through a narrow gorge. Here a log had jammed and I was able to climb down into the gorge, straddle across the log and climb out the other side. Then it was back down to the main river and more wading and swinging. After two hours I had made half a kilometre! A wet night out loomed.
Here I had a huge stroke of luck. The storm had taken out a bridge on the main road and there was a road gang repairing it (I had wondered about the lack of traffic but it wasn't my main concern at the time 😏). At this point there were rock islands in the stream and I could wade or jump all the gaps except the last one. The road guys got their digger down to the bank and managed to extend the grab to a point where I could grab its spikes and haul myself over into the bucket. It was full of water but I couldn't have cared less! The roadway of the bridge wasn't useable but the parapet was still there and I could walk across on it. A few hundred yards further on I came to the place where the police were turning everybody back and got a lift back to Wanaka with a Japanese hippy, an unusual breed at the time. His company were about to move him back to Japan, where his lifestyle would have to revert back to formality. He had been offered the opportunity to stay but it would have meant leaving the company and "bringing disgrace on his parents". He was very torn and I often wonder which way he chose.
As for me I had a day cleaning up and recovering in Wanaka before getting a bus to Mount Cook and squeezing another epic into the gap before my friends arrived, but that's another story.

Aspiring and Rob Roy
(Sadly I don't have any pics from the Brewster part of the trip as it was either in thick mist or I had both hands fully occupied at the time! 😁)
Comments