An Atomic Shuttle tour of the South Island We're on an Atomic Shuttle tour of the South Island. Afternoon tea at Geraldine, fish and chips at Omarama. On the Lindis pass, tussock slopes sweep down out of gathering night.
A Saturday interlude near Haast. We're four now: Jo, Andrew, Stuart, John. Beside the beach a tumbling waterfall, a lagoon, tide coming in, bare feet on untrodden sand - we could camp here for a week. But by evening, a zillion mosquitoes - no we couldn’t!
Before the mosquito-ridden night is finished we bolt cold breakfast, then hurry through the darkness to the jet boat depot. The lights of a vehicle approach, towing something. A giant tea urn, perhaps? Sorry, a jet boat. Somewhere up the dark Haast River the boat man searches for somewhere to put in. Low cloud and drizzle hang on about the slopes. Though March, it’s as dark as winter. The man says, “strange weather map on TV last night, no good”. Then, looking at crampons, snow stakes, and ice axes, he says, “But I s’pose it's all in a day's work for you.” Is it? Looks like wet cold steep mountains, we think.
We roar up the Haast, turn into the mighty Landsborough, then its tributary the Clarke - which to our North Island eyes is mighty too. At Rabbit Flat we pay the boat man and trudge off into rain. There’s no light for photos. The way to Monro Flat, says Spearpoint’s Moir, is to follow flats, old blazes through bush, and grid references. We do, and in late afternoon an eight-legged creature crosses the boisterous river at Monro Flat, with its four minds thinking, What a good thing I'm with friends. Of the two ways to Marks Flat, (3 km away and 350 m up) the direct route up the Clarke cataract seems impossible.
We camp on a mattress of spaghnum moss, across Saddle Creek in case it rises. In the morning it has, as has everything else. It's raining still, so back to sleep. By late afternoon the Listener crossword is nearly done, Andrew has read Spearpoint on the cataract route (and wants it), toes of sleeping bags are wet, and a pre-dinner brew is on the cards.
Tuesday morning: rivers and tents are down, trees drip, the cataract route is on. It's no trouble, and a glimpse of Mt Hooker raises spirits. A fertiliser-sackgaiter is lost somewhere in the last bush. On Marks Flat Jo leaps the Clarke for the camera.
The airport rock bivvy at Marks Flat is one of scores of fallen bits of Mt Hooker which litter its lower slopes. A log book in a screw-top plastic jar shows 19 parties have stayed here since 1997. From a selection of sacks, Chilean nitrate is picked to replace the lost gaiter. We pitch tents to avoid drips. On the radio, Stuart gets a good forecast for Thursday. And Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday! John is starting to be glad he came.
Tramping & Mountaineering 2003 John Rhodes After sleeping in, we take a Wednesday tour of Marks Flat. Tarns, lakelets, streams, rivulets, great schist blocks tumbled down off the mountain, a paradise duck entertaining us on the water. Sadly, Hieracium weed has invaded here. In spits of rain we lunch on Kea Cliffs looking across the flats at our mountain, Hooker. It’s a landform grandly controlled by geology, with its schist foliation sweeping down the smooth western flank and intersecting the eastern skyline in a descending series of pinnacles like miniature summits marching down the ridge.
Thursday morning early, we stumble down the dark flats to the base of the Hooker route. An hour and a half later at 1700m, early sun touches the peaks making rich colours with dramatic shadows. Crampons on. An icy gully (proceed with caution!) leads to a vast apron of ice and snow, the Hooker Glacier. Crevasses are few and obvious. At 11.30 am we’ve reached 2400m on the mountain's west ridge. Cloud swirls up from the Otoko Valley. Andrew leads a mixed rock and snow route to a ledge below Hooker’s low peak, on the Otoko side.
The rest of route involves a steepish descent on soft snow, then a 200m climb into murk. We each wait for someone to say, “Lets do it” - but nobody does. Lunch in the snow: three Tararua biscuits, two slices of cheese, a centimetre of salami. The 2640 m peak appears and disappears in the cloud. It seems this spot on the flank of the low peak will be our Mt Hooker.
Going down, we're happy but somehow not quite satisfied.
At the apex of the huge debris cone above the flats we sit and nibble lollies and talk about trips and the people we did them with and look at the great valleys and peaks and the black-streaked glaciated wall of Kea Cliffs and the huge gash of a nameless stream draining the side of Hooker. Below, tarns and winding streams mark the golden tussock flats with brown. Rimming our basin is the gentle Solution Range, and beyond it lie range upon snowy range. We miss the elation of success. But in this mountain world and with this friendship we feel richly blessed. This is no place to hurry from.
Back home on Marks Flat, evening light paints the tussocks with gold, and the immense silhouetted boulders make a fantasy world for goblins.
Friday morning we trek across the flats to the old airstrip, still marked with cairns, and the schist-block walls of its roofless terminal building. This is
Looking down into Marks Flat and Kea Cliffs John Rhodes wilderness now, so landings are forbidden. Sunshine reaches us as we climb to the Solution Range. John drops his scroggin bag and picks chocolate buttons out of the scree. Tarns reflect Hooker. Our ridge rises easily to the north, with views up the Landsborough to the Douglas neve and Sefton and Cook. We lunch opposite yesterday’s high point nearly 1000m above, whence the Otoko Glacier falls into a grey lake with forlorn icebergs. Easy snow basins lead to a broad ledge above the lake, from which we must descend to the upper Otoko. “Take care, but travel is not difficult” says Spearpoint. We disagree - it’s precipitous!
The Otoko pours through a jumble of broken rock. On a visit here in 1964 this was glacier. The river steepens and the scrub begins. We try to stay by the water but big rocks force us up. Shrubs with stems like iron grow horizontally from the bank. Progress is inch by inch, curse by curse. The trackless beech forest of the Clarke now seems paradise in comparison, and we’re thankful we didn’t come up this wearisome valley with full packs, especially in rain. By 4.30pm we've shed 300m of height. We emerge battered at what the map calls (and was, last time) Otoko Lake. It’s now a sea of gravel with meandering, sparkling streams. People write about New Zealand’s "dynamic landscape" as though mountains pop up before your eyes. But suddenly it becomes real: a retreating glacier, scrub where was rock, alpine flats where was a glacial lake.
Tramping & Mountaineering 2003 We try for some down-valley distance before dark, but it’s a mistake. The boulders-plus-scrub theme continues and camp sites are nil. After an hour and a half with little more than a kilometre done, Stuart and John stumble on a tiny soggy clearing. The others are out of sight. John races to catch them. The river's roar precludes conversation. Determined to stop, John makes sleeping gestures and points back into the scrub. Andrew, with a gashed leg, has had enough too.
You need to pause to appreciate the upper Otoko. On the move, your thoughts are: How do I get round this? Where can I put my foot? Can I squeeze through here? Have my arms enough strength to drag body and pack up here? Would it be better somewhere else? But now tents are up and aerial strung and dinner cooking, there’s time to look around. IB Base in Christchurch runs through the sked - “Calling IB 134, IB Base. IB 136, IB Base”. What does IB Base see when he looks up? Electronic gear, walls, a ceiling? Above us here, the precipitous towers of the Strauchon Range plunge to high, inaccessible slopes streaked with snow and sun-lit olive tussock, which in turn swoop down to awful precipices with their feet lost in the scrub and forest of this lonely valley floor.
Saturday: it's fine again. Our goal for the day is Stag Flat, about six kilometres away - a ridiculously short distance. But Spearpoint says the travel “has a name
Mt Hooker overshadows Jo, Andrew & Stuart as they wander the Solution Range John Rhodes for being slow and unpleasant”, and so it is. The day passes in a blur of scrub, boulders, scrub; and increasingly as we lose height, forest, with logs and more boulders but mercifully, deer trails too. It was in an Otoko clearing by a side stream years ago that John saw a deer herd of a dozen or so.
We break out into a bouldery clearing which leads down to Stag Flat. Old chopper blades support a rough hunters’ shelter. We camp, wash, and watch ducks playing on the Otoko.
Sunday: we’re ready before dawn, waiting for enough light to pick up any indication of a trail. There's a horrendous maze of house-size boulders separated by black tramper-gobbling holes, but otherwise the valley is more open and the going easier. In late morning a real track with markers leads to where the Tramping & Mountaineering 2003 Otoko runs beneath gravel cliffs and turns to join its sister, the Paringa. We cross twice to avoid the cliffs and climb to a grassy terrace with kahikitea and rimu and rusty fences and cattle-trodden mud, with the tussock tops across the Paringa baking in the sun. It’s Westland and it's unutterably beautiful.
On Monday morning we chat to the bus driver as we roll north up the Coast. The bush flashes past, with curtains of fern hanging on road-cuts in shades of rich green and the most delicate pink. Through gaps in the fog shrouding the coastal plain we glimpse snowy peaks. It's breathtaking!
We're on an Atomic Shuttle tour of the South Island.
Andrew McLellan, Jo Mckenzie, Stuart Palmer and John Rhodes.
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