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...

12/10/2019 Party: Tōrea Scott-Fyfe, Tom Hadley The study leave period had just begun at uni, opening up plenty of free time for missions in the hills. Everyone else in Dunedin seemed to want to study, so I hopped on a bus by myself and headed to Queenstown. After about two hours of unsuccessful hitching towards Glenorchy, I’d only managed to get myself stuck in Bob’s Cove in the dark. So, I dropped into Tom Spencer's house, hoping Tōrea would come and pick me up. Luckily she did. The next morning, not liking the look of avalanche conditions in the higher mountains, we put on our running packs and headed up the epic looking ridge that rises towards Mt Earnslaw, running alongside the Earnslaw Burn. Starting out at Lover’s Leap, we made rapid work of the tussocky undulations along the ridgetop. When forming a route plan, we’d both envisioned the ridge being a pretty straightforward mission, with mellow tussock slopes all along. However, soon we came across patches of snow and th...

21/9/2019 - 22/9/2019 Party: Torea Scott-Fyfe, Maddy Whittaker, Tom Hadley Not quite knowing what to do with our weekend, Maddy and I did the classic “throw-gear-for-everything-in-the-car-and-head-for-the-mountains” and rolled up at Torea’s house around midnight. Turns out we were both tired and Torea was tipsy, so not knowing what to do, we went to sleep. We woke the next morning and after handling a Grade 5 faff situation, we embarked on the ambitious trip of fastpacking the whole Rees-Dart in one go (which Maddy had done before in 3 days). We started off running up the Rees river at 11am. We were all feeling light and speedy, moving consistently through the beech trees and popping out into the expansive valley. Approaching the top of the valley (4 hours in) we encountered a bit of an obstacle. Seeing as it was September, there was a lot of snow. The next hour or so saw us cover ground a lot slower through waist deep snow, getting us pretty cold and knackered. Maddy and Torea...

Party: Rowan Cox, Lottie Armstrong, Imogen van Pierce, Liam Pyott, Maddy Whittaker, Torea Scott Fyfe, Olivia Truax, Erin Houlihan, Lucas Zeller, Cara Lembo It had been two days since I'd finished my 1400km walk of the South Island. I'd been back in civilsation for what I decided was two days too many. It started as a casual conversation with Liam.  Liam: "Want to go climb something?" Me: "Most definitely....what about Aspiring?" Liam: "Yeah sounds good." Somewhere in the two days between that conversation happening and us driving to Rowan's in Wanaka, the trip changed from a two-person climb to a full-scale OUTC cluster. Lottie and Imogen were driving from Christchurch and Erin, Cara, Lucas and Olivia materialised from somewhere. We got up early to drive out to Raspberry Flat in order to avoid the road blocks that we'd been notified would be going up at 6am for the Wanaka Challenge. However, they were up at 4am! We politely r...

My route - 1400km long The summer I became slightly feral In the summer of 2018-2019, I spent 77 days walking the length of the South Island (1400km), with my journey mainly based around walking the South Island section of the Te Araroa trail northbound. About half of these days were spent on the TA and the other half were spent doing tramps and climbs along the way (essentially used the TA as a pathway to all these places in different national parks which I had wanted to explore). People keep asking me how my trip changed me - who did I become? The answer to that is hiker trash. I became hiker trash. Hiker Trash is a term used to affectionately describe hikers who have sunk to a lower standard of living. Nowhere is it more apparent than in a group of thru-hikers who have been living on the trails for months. However becoming a piece of hiker trash is not an exclusive process. Here is your one stop guide to essentially becoming homeless and not giving a damn: There are thre...