By Zita Keller, Lina Heuer, 09 August 2024
Ice climbing
Written by Zita, with sprinklings from Lina
To sort-of quote Béatrice: Heading out at a silly hour just to get more time with the maunga? YES PLEASE No thanks! Who wants to get up at 4:45am? Well, we managed, in various ways... Tommy slept in so I had to wake him by knocking on his door; Lina didn't go to bed at all; I guess the rest of us coped. I didn't make it the whole way and swapped driving with MJ halfway there; Lina slept in the back seat; and Tommy sustained himself with a 2-litre bottle of milk from Taihape.
We made it to Tūroa around 9(?), MJ valiantly navigating some black ice on the way up. We found the others - James, Anita, Colan, Robbie, Luke (sorry if I forgot you from this list :( ) - and started heading up the mountain. At first it was rocks, but we encountered some fairly hard snow and I was grateful for Colan doing the hard work ahead of me, kicking steps. The people on the ski lift gave me some encouragement as I sweated up the last few metres. Tommy wasn't so lucky - he got heckled for walking up in shorts.
The ice climb was about 100 metres east of the Giant Cafe, in a shaded gully. Hamish and Béatrice had gone before us and set up a top rope, and when the rest of us arrived they were already climbing. The area underneath the wall was sloped, and naturally a few items went rolling away down the mountain... much to the delight of everyone (except that unlucky person whose belongings were slipping away of course). Suddenly, learning to cut a seat for your pack at NZAC Snowcraft didn't seem like such a random skill to have.
Beatrice gave us a quick ice climbing demonstration, in which she essentially took a pleasant stroll up the wall and filled us with false hope about how easy this was going to be. While others were climbing, we cut a pretty epic couch into the snow and made it cosy with my sleeping mat, which Tommy gets credit for carrying up. You heard it from me: sitting on snow is COLD. We threw a few snowballs and had some tea as the clag came in, obscuring the view outside of the gully and bringing an intense cold.
When it came to my turn to climb, I'd only gone a little way up when I started to feel a bit out of my depth. We were ice climbing with crampons and an ice tool in each hand, but the ice wall was very solid. It took a lot of effort to kick in or dig my ice pick in. It was easier to find a nice hole or ledge, but I didn't always manage to find those. About halfway up I swung my ice tool back into my forehead which really hurt and I'd just about had enough of ice climbing! But I made it to the top and my patient belayer lowered me back down.
Many of us had several go's at the wall, Hamish and Béatrice went off to climb somwhere else, and Lina and MJ headed down early to hitch-hike back to Welly(!). It was consistently claggy by now, and windy. We went around to Hamish and Béatrice's wall, which was a frozen waterfall that you could walk behind. It felt several degrees warmer in the 'cave' and it was sheltered from the wind, not to mention very beautiful. Unfortunately we had to head down at some point, so we trudged away from the wall through the deep snow. Visibility was poor and Tommy walked off an invisible ledge at one point... but eventually we got a better view and made it back down to the carpark. There were no issues on the road this time and we went looking for dinner at various food trucks in National Park (who knew there was more than one?! Cue confusion.) We were concerned about the road conditions to Whakapapa, but they were actually fine and we made it to the TTC lodge without issues, and settled in to wait for the rest of Snowcraft II...
The hitch hiking experience
Written by Lina
Not wanting to spend the weekend on Snowcraft, MJ and I decided to hitch hike back to Welly that same Friday night. Our journey home started off with a trek down the mountain, where I took the first of three falls that day when my crampon caught the snow and I went flying towards some rocks, much to the amusement of the people on the ski lift just above me. The trek down wasn’t all bad though – we managed to convince the ski lift operator to let us take the lift down!! It was my first time (on a lift), and no one thought to tell me that they don’t stop to let you on and off. Hence the second of my three falls.
Once we got to the carpark, we wrote ‘Wellington’ on a piece of cardboard and settled in to wait for our ticket home. The wait involved a lot of people squinting to read our sign as they drove by, and then laughing once they saw where it was we were looking to go. The rain got heavier, our hands got colder, and the carpark was becoming emptier and emptier. At one point, I thought our luck might have turned when a guy came to talk to us saying he was also going to Wellington! But it turned out he was just a hitchhiker, and when I asked if he wanted to wait with us he simply said ‘no thanks’ and walked away - fair enough I guess? At this point, I was starting to question my ‘it always works out in the end’ attitude – would we have to live in this carpark forever??
But finally, our luck turned! Two women took pity on us and said they’d give us a lift down the mountain – and so, all smiles and ‘thank yous’, we strapped in for the short drive down into town. After being stopped by the police, who just checked if we were wearing our seatbelts (always buckle in kids), we got into town and said farewell to our two Snowboard enthusiast angels. Now we just had to get someone else to take us the remaining 5 hours to Wellington. Piece of cake… right?
Walking to a main road, we had some timtams to lift our spirits as we waited. Amazingly, we only had to endure about 15 minutes of more people laughing at us from their cars before a woman stopped and said she was going down to the Hutt! We couldn’t believe our luck! We hopped in - MJ in the front seat, and me in the back next to a fishing pole. For the next half hour, we chatted about this and that, and then I promptly passed out cold for the next several hours. I’m sorry to say that I can only recall a limited number of things about this woman, some of which included that she was going to Wellington to go fishing and meet up with a man she’d met via snapchat, that she worked as a lollipop lady, and that she’d been to a Māori funeral and thought they did a much better way of celebrating life than traditional western funerals. As I said, I was pretty much out cold, so that’s all you’re gonna get.
Once in the Hutt, she dropped us off at the train station and wished us luck. This was the final part of our journey, and also where I took the last of my three falls tripping over a sidewalk. The train home was relaxing and relatively uneventful – MJ revealed to me her miniature vodka bottle full of milk (a strange thing in and of itself, but even more incriminating considering she’d spent a lot of the drive up to Ruapehu being absolutely baffled by Tommy’s milk consumption), and I was given a paper ticket to pay on arrival because I didn’t have a snapper card… which I 100% definitely did…
At around 10pm, we were finally back in Wellington – tired, but happy :)