Ball Pass Day 1

After a week of recovery from the cuts and futile attempts to dry permanently sopping wet boots, we decied we had to do something more extreme than Twalk. Caitlin had been wanting to do Ball Pass in Mt. Cook national park for awhile, and I knew I needed to do at least one mountaineering trip down here. It happened! We ended up having 2 groups of 5 - quite a few more than we were planning really. We had 2 cars and parked one at both ends so we could get out!

Night before. Don't worry this is not a hobo stealing our food. We just have good friends 

Sunrise on the way to Tasman lake for the start of the hike

Lateral moraine of the Tasman Glacier a few miles in. Walking along a narrow strip of land on a steady incline up next to this giant mass of ice. Biggest glacier in NZ! The next bit of ice this large would be in Antarctica, 2000 miles away. Unless of course all of an Ice Shelf decided to float off :/

 

Tasman Lake
(Note: Henry's Leggings)

Those hills are rocks... sitting on a LOT of ice. You would have no idea, but there are 100'+ vertical cliffs at the start of the lake and a huge river of ice running down from above.

Navigating the real way. Very glad I bought and brought that map. We needed it.

Decided to take the alternative path up the hill. Background: Tasman Peak and Glacier, Mt. Cook not visible to left (just 5k by air from here!)

Swim trunks. Classic mountaineering attire.

Up toward Caroline hut. Pretty spot on with the navigation.  I thought it was on the flat we're approaching, but we all were too blind to see it. I finally spotted it, long after we could see it. Somehow galvanized steel blends in well with brownish rock. We got there and received a nasty weather report by the radio in the shelter... should have been hiking faster.

Bobby, Kelly, Thomas, Henry, Luke

Up above the hut a little ways. Ball Pass is on the far left. Glaciers run right down from it. We heard /saw some solid avalanches on the way over - not near us, but it was awe inspiring to be surrounded by real mountains. 

The other group made it! We were getting pretty curious.

30k wind was enough for a balaclava. Up on top of Ball Pass at 2121m. It was getting darker, but we got to glissade down!

Some fun glissading! Those possum fir gloves I got last time I was here did great. Wouldn't guess it, but so warm when soaking wet and tough enough to cope with sharp snow.

We ended up sleeping here. Tiny little space for 5 people, but it was cozy as could be when you consider the side of a mountain in the middle of a thunderstorm with snow falling all over. We got the hard way up and over! The other group had a hut! But my oh my this was an adventure. Easily in my top three trips here! 

Day 2 coming soon!

TWalk

Made it to the 5th of May! Missed out on a cinco de Mayo party.. for something much better: 24 hours of nearly no sleep, lots of sheep and many fleet feet.

So twalk (1 syllable) is the tramping club's extravaganza of all things dear to Kiwi's hearts - long rugged walks, tussock covered hills, barbed wire fences, sheep, mud, swams, endless river crossings, orienteering, sheep, moonlit adventures, good food, sheep, a challenge and mud. We all were happy that our maps were laminated!

This was a walk in the park compared to what half our team did... they managed to crawl through a few hundred meters of Madagari (sp?) then through a tunnel of thorns inches over the creek. 

Clues were all over the place. 

And Bobby was indeed wearing a stuffed Kimono.

So the proof of having been to the waypoints. We got all of the first leg. Didn't do so hot after that.

Almost to the "hash house", our meeting point for the evening. So much good food to be had! We ate dinner and headed out an hour before dark. It was the night of supermoon so we hardly needed headlamps! Didn't help much though. We spent 9.5 hours out on leg 2 and didn't get much of it. Took a 3 hour nap on the floor of the sheep shearing barn we were all set up in, and ran off to leg 3. It was a long night, but really amazing to see the moon so large and bright, lots of headlamps and keep bumping into random friends in the middle of very questionable patches of very rural NZ farmland.

The incredible hulk of course.

Morning fog on Lake Colridge

After doing half of leg 3 completing a challenge board item, doing awards and playing with electric  fences (maybe that was just me) everyone fell asleep in the sun while waiting 3 hrs for the buses to show up. Somehow they thought we needed pickup exactly one week later..

These two are borrowed from Henry. This is on the 3rd clue in leg 2, supermoon rising for the night! Great weather! Pretty frosty though.

This hasn't been rotated, but may as well be in this orientation. The two real lessons of the event were nothing about orienteering.

1: If you see a field of Madagari - no matter how bad it looks, you can get through.

2: NZ is not all an idyllic movie set from Middle Earth, but you can still get swallowed into the dead marshes in what looks exactly like a field.

As grumpy as I might sound through an ocean of fiber optic cable and a whole bunch of microprocessors, Twalk was really pretty fun. A little bit of that 9 hour leg was type II fun, but then I gave up on trying to score well and we started joking about how hard the clues were and how clueless we were (heh). 

I also scored 5kg of sliced carrots that I never quite finished... that alone was almost worth the entry fee.

One of the organizers put up lots of twalk pictures for you to see!

Amiable Amble About Akaraoa (again) - aaaawesome!

Here I am again! The last few weeks have been pretty eventful, even without as much going on over the weekends. And this last week was as much work as a week at Rochester! Currently working off the caffeine from an all night adventure to finish my 3 lab reports for thermodynamics.. They're done. Back to a few weeks ago for a quick moment! After finishing up fall break (glory) I took my strength of materials test first thing Monday morning and we all got a little work done for the week. Friday, my flatmates and IES was kind enough to throw me an excellent birthday party! It was a week into my 20th year, but it was fit for no less than my golden birthday.

A few of us felt we had to go hiking the next day.. after all, it'd been a whole week since we'd been on break.. So we headed back to Akaroa for the day! Daylight was already getting shorter so we didn't have much time to go for a long hike. The grumpy I-Site lady wasn't much help but we found this and off we went.

What a gorgeous place to live. Yet another mini shelter I'd love to be able to always pop up to whenever the world's frowning. (Don't miss the sign on the door)

We made it to the top!

And it was windy. Reminded me of Mt. Herbert, but this time I had more than a XC singlet on

Oh New Zealand!

 

We revisited the Pa on the way in as well. The weather couldn't have been better.. so we did handstands, headstands and of course yoga poses on rocks. (Thanks to Kelly for these two pictures)

 

PS: Stump is pretty fun. And Ilam is a great place to flat.