Of Wild and Wonder

18/2/2020 -  19/2/2020 Party: Torea Scott-Fyfe, Tom Hadley I'd just arrived back in the South Island and Torea had just finished 12 days of fieldwork when we met in Wanaka. There was 2 days of workable weather ahead of us and we were both ready to get stuck into some mountains. Tom: “Hmmm well the Raspberry flat road is open again”, Torea: “Oooh yes we could climb some domes”, Tom: “Hmmm how about climbing the big dome...?”, “Yes let’s climb Mt Aspiring!”. The next morning, we set off with light packs and lighter legs from raspberry flat at 8am, jogging and walking along the expanses of the Matukituki valley. The open grasslands soon turned to beech forest, then to scrub as we carried on. We arrived at the waterfall in 4 hours time and began the push up to Bevan col. After negotiating slabs and bluffs, the expanse of the Bonar glacier spread itself out before us. We moved our way through gurgling blue crevasses to arrive at an empty Colin Todd hut, how good! At 5am the nex...

The West Coast Névés (Lottie Armstrong) Party: Maddy Whittaker, Imogen van Pierce, Lottie Armstrong, Jamie Gardner, Rebecca Vella King and Conor Vaessen Times are certainly changing. It turns out walking from the Fox Township up the Fox Glacier to Pioneer Hut is not what it used to be! On Waitangi Day, six of us set off from the township and 14 hours later arrived at Chancellor Hut, the first day of our four day trip on the West Coast névés. The crux of the entire trip was getting to the start of the actual Fox Glacier - the point where not all that long ago a road used to go to. Now the road has been claimed by the river which runs hard against a series of bluffs - which involve hundreds of metres of vertical bush bashing to get around including a rock chimney in the forest and some pack hoisting. It is certainly an inspiring country. From the swift opaque waters full of chunks of ice in the rivers to the constant rockfall around the glacier - there is no part of this la...

7/2/2020 Party: Ian Gilmour, Tom Hadley The full traverse of the Tararua Range, also known as the S-K, is a gruelling test-piece of New Zealand mountain running. The history-rich challenge has become established as a challenge by successions of athletes clawing their way across the Tararuas in a bid to knock precious minutes off the hotly contested FKT (fastest known time). The course is somewhere around 80km long and contains a total 6800m vert. There is a fantastic site all about the challenge found here:  https://tararuafkt.wordpress.com/routes/s-k/ . I’d had the SK on my mind for most of 2019, so when I arrived back in Taranaki, my home for the uni holidays, I knew it had to be ticked off before I headed back down to Dunedin. The first struggle turned out to be finding another person who was keen for around 24 hours of punishment in the Tararuas. I was stoked to find that Ian, a friendly guy who I’d met briefly at a race, was keen. In no time at all, we were at Putara get...