Friday night after work I went home and hung out for a little while. Ben, Mel, and I decided to head down to Te Kuiti and stay with Ben's mate so that the drive would be less in the morning. Harris didn't want to come down.
Saturday morning we took off for the snow at about 6:15am and got to Whakapapa at about 10 past 8. Rode all day. The snow was pretty decent and there was lots of it. Not many rocks showing through anymore. I started over on the West Ridge Chair. I took two runs over there before they managed to get the Far West T-Bar dug out of the snow and moving. On my way up for my 3rd run I got on that. From the top I just started walking. I wanted to walk up a ways to see if I could find some better snow up there.
About 15-20 minutes into my walk a cloud blew in. It was really dense and I couldn't see anything. I knew that if I had to get down I could just follow the valley to the east of the ridge I was on. I sat down for a few minutes and tried to wait out the cloud. It did blow out after about 15 minutes so I carried on. There were some other people tramping up along the eastern ridgeof the Whakapapa Glacier. I went right up the glacier instead of taking the ridges.
After another 30 minutes of walking (and taking a lot of breaks as the altitude was getting to me) I came across a guy coming down. He told me that Crater Lake was just over the ridge from where I was so I headed over it and sure enough. Absolutely incredible. Very beautiful up there. I hung out for a little while, but I had to meet Ben and Mel back at the base for lunch, so I rode down. Unfortunately the best snow I got was about 5-10cm of fresh. Most of the time it was rather icy. Glad I did it though and now that I know it isn't a very hard climb I will be doing it more often.
For the pictures of my adventure: http://picasaweb.google.com/ldm5180/20040821?authkey=DY7HEEkpad0&feat=directlink
After riding all day we checked the weather and it wasn't looking good. Ended up just going home to Hamilton instead of trying to stay somewhere because we didn't think there would be much skiing on Sunday.
Sunday morning Simon and I got up early to go hike Mt Pureora. Good thing we hadn't tried to go skiing because everything was closed. Simon and I got up Pureora, but couldn't see anything because we were in the clouds. It was a good tramp though and we both enjoyed it.
Pictures are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ldm5180/20040822?authkey=yqTFxkVOcLI&feat=directlink
No comments:
Post a Comment