Chris Dislocation Creek!

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By Tadhg McLachlan, 04 March 2024

Moeraki Basin 4-7 March 2024

Tadhg McLachlan & Chris Russell

 

For fans of the ‘Chris Death Spur’ route and the associated publications comes the thrilling third instalment of hot g̶i̶r̶l̶ tramper summer: Chris Dislocation Creek! 

(The lesser known prequel, ‘Chris’s GoPro Gets Heat Stroke Bay’ is readily available from your nearest Chris or Tadhg and is highly recommended for fans of ‘really cool rocks’).

 

Chris and I have been slowly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the overlap of our weekends. Chris has a 6 ½ day weekend. I have an almost three day weekend (if you include the night after I finish work on a Tuesday and the wee hours of the morning before i start work on a Friday), (which we do). 

 

A gruelling 40hr work week of drooling over NZTopo, DoCGiS, MapToaster, MapsPast, NZRoute Guides, Remote Huts, ClimbNZ and scarily high res satellite imagery of the coast (excluding the Adams Landsborough Wilderness Area which hasn’t had a long enough dry spell to get footage of I guess) has me convinced that the saddle between the Moeraki Basin and Serpentine Creek totally goes. Chris Believes me. We coordinate accordingly.

 

Tuesday night we meet an hour later than intended because we were waiting for each other at different road ends (on the West Coast, road ends for tramps are actually State Highway river bridges) in an attempt to do a car shuttle. There is no reception in South Westland. Morale isn’t exactly high after this start but we’ve both had caffeine after 5pm so we go ahead and boost it the 9 or something kilometers into Horseshoe Flat Hut. The three trip reports I read all described the track as ‘boggy’ and ‘impossible to stay on’. I relay this to Chris at the first bog and we get our head torches out and press on. We walk very fast because we are mostly talking about people that annoy us as well as how in highschool I considered getting a tattoo of tally marks for how many times I have been bitten by an eel (3). We work out the most logical tally marks for Chris to get tattooed is his number of PLB pulls (1 at this stage). We go into another bog, this one has eels. They are small and do not bite me so at this stage my tattoo motivation levels are stable. We startle a huge deer. We come out of the bush next to the river which when we last saw it was impassable rapids but it is now very very wide and very very still. It looks like a black hole and has even sucked the stars into its reflective surface. We see creepy lights in the bush on the far side of the valley and keep going. We reach the hut in three hours and are met by some very sniffy barky jumpy dogs and their person who says ‘the walk in was a lot harder than [he] was expecting, did we also find that?’ and we say ‘nah dude that was a piece of piss we are from the Tararua Ranges we hardly noticed the walk in’. We feel bad about this because he was very nice and set up his tent to sleep in at 11pm because his dogs are being silly. 

 

We sleep better than we did under Brewster Hut the week before. I am jazzed in the morning because I packed tortilla/nutella/banana breakfast. Chris eats the flavouring packet out of some noodles. The stretch up to Middle Head Hut also flies by and although it does make us sound insufferable we keep talking about how these tracks are clearer and easier than anything in the Tararua Range. We hear two whio whistling to each other and see a flatworm. We have an early (very early) lunch at Middle Head Hut (I genuinely think it must’ve only been like 9am at this point, maybe the tortilla/nutella/banana breakfast is not as jazz as I have been lead to believe). It is important to note, dear reader, that at this stage Middle Head Hut has a roof. We cross the other fork of the Moeraki and follow a very well cruisetaped but not at all cleared or cut track up to the basin past several cool fungi and a very spiffy rock biv and continue to say that even this ‘track’ is better than some ‘tracks’ in the Tararua Range that will not be named out of respect for their dignity and reputation (Fuck you Cow Creek to Mitre Flats). 

 

The upper Moeraki basin is stunning. I cannot stress this enough. Cliffs shining with snow melt. Lazy creeks blue with snow melt. A whio surfing the snow melt higher up. Yesterday's snow has melted off the saddle so our way is clear. Our route looks, y’know, doable. Creek bed, skirt the bluffs, dodge the deepest scrub, yank on tussock to the top. The other side of the saddle is a problem for post-second-lunch us. We scramble up progressively larger and colder schist boulders in a dry creek bed in the only corner of the basin that has not seen the weakening autumn sun yet. At 840m above sea level (943.6m above sea level if you are measuring from the Indian Ocean Geoid Low) we pause to assess our course up the next boulder, roughly the size of a NZFS 4 bunk hut and just as beautiful. I am standing on the side of a large mostly buried rock, nice and stable. Chris is standing on a round rock the size of a large casserole dish that is sitting on top of more rocks and other alpine flotsam. Chris and his 65L pack and crossed arms wobble briefly and then hit the proverbial deck. The deck in this situation is also more rocks. I turn around and Chris is lying on the ground with his arms still kind of crossed. I ask him if he’s okay and if his airways are blocked because in DRS ABCD, A for Airways comes before B for Broken Arm. He says he’s fine but he moves to hold his limp left arm exactly how my friends who have broken their arms have clutched at theirs. I just ask him if he’s fine again because he’s not making any pain noises and he says ‘yeah but I can’t move my arm’. I say ‘this is not a bad spot to get helicoptered out of’ and ‘hey you can add to your PLB pull tally tattoo’. Chris slithers out of his pack straps and stands up and in doing so his shoulder goes clunk back into place and it dawns on us that since he wasn’t in that much pain but couldn’t move his hand that his shoulder was most likely dislocated. Chris then says he has mad pins and needles so the new problem is that maybe hes pinched some nerves or blood vessels inside his freshly reunited joint. I give him some tramadol and we put all our warm clothes on to hang out in the ONLY PART OF THE WHOLE VALLEY NOT IN THE SUN for an hour. I eat the rest of my lunch. It's like 10.30am. We wait for the sun to reach our pozzie and see if that makes things better. It does so we pack up and gear up and I crawl up the side of the boulder we had stopped to consider almost an hour ago. Chris goes to follow but the second he has to flinch his arms out sideways to balance he say ‘nope, nope, nope, this is not going to work’. We had previously agreed that our priorities were not getting more injured, not embarrassing ourselves, not making it into a Stuff article and mostly: playing Catan™. This makes it an easy decision to slither back down, give Chris a second tramadol and trot back down the basin. Chris’s legs still work so we don’t call a chopper. At the time of writing, me and Chris still don’t have tattoos. 

 

The perks of not continuing with our route were:

  • We saw Strawberry Bracket fungi 

  • We saw Bush Lawyer berries

  • We met the Haast DoC team at Middle Head Hut who had removed the roof of the hut but not put the new on on yet which made for a very funny sight through the trees

  • We were asked by them if there was any windfall on the track between Middle Head and Horseshoe Flat and we said no we didn’t notice any

  • We got the giggles because actually there was a fair bit of windfall on the track but we hadn’t noticed or remembered because it just felt like part of the track to us hardy Tararua types

  • We met the now elderly ex-babysitter and sailing instructors of the ex-VUWTC character Eric Duggan who coined the phrase ‘Lost Sheep Tours’ in the 90s. They had noticed our signing in the hut books and asked after him but we had to explain that he’s a legend not a personal acquaintance. 

  • We got to see what the bog track was like in the daylight. It is actually boggier and confusinger without the blinkers of night so our apologies to the man we downplayed it to. 

  • We got to stay at Blowfly Hut which is extremely cute albeit colonial

  • We got to eat all our chilli beans including the emergency chilli beans

  • WE GOT TO PLAY CATAN. Actually Chris had forgotten to pack Catan so the biggest perk of not continuing was having a big sleep in, boosting it the half hour back to the road and playing Catan in the rainy, sandfly-y, boggy cattle track carpark to the assured amusement of all the loopies driving past. Chris beat me 15-3 and I couldn’t stomach a rematch so I was back in Waiau by 3pm.

 

Chris said he would see a physio when he was next in Wellington, if you’re reading this please pester him into actually doing so. You can cold call him at 022 7734 946.