
What a great feeling on a mid-week peak. After driving out from Christchurch at 7am in the pouring rain to finishing the run in the scorching sunlight of a blue sky day. Canterbury outdoes itself yet again.
Another week, another peak in the Craigieburns! Some great (ish) conditions led me to head out with a group of mates & Caralyn across the top of the ski fields towards Mt Cheeseman (2031m) and join them for some ski touring.
What were they thinking, naming a peak Nervous Knob? a quick Google search on the subject might not be the best idea… but I decided a Winter ascent of the peak was in order this weekend, standing at 1820m, it’s a peak of a pretty high order too. Having run across the ridgeline earlier in the year for Peak 7 & 8, I decided to go bag it on a far from fine Winter’s day.
Getting my act together over Winter has been an interesting challenge. In the height of Summer I didn’t even regard Winter as a challenge (as we’d had a good 5 weeks of blue skies in January) so thought that I’d be able to manage it all the way through with no issues. How wrong I was… into July and a good 5 weeks behind schedule after a few failed attempts, things started to look ominous for the whole 52.
Winter is coming. That’s what all ‘Game of Thrones’ fans are shouting at the moment – but it’s also true of New Zealand’s seasons for the 52 Peaks Challenge. This weekend we had the first dump of snow in the Torlesse and Craigieburn Ranges, not a lot but enough to sugar coat the peaks above 1200m, two of which I was climbing.
So something slightly more epic this week; running from Broken River camp ground all the way up to the top of the Craigieburn & Broken River skifields, along the ridge and down again for both the 7th and 8th out of 52 Peaks.
This was a little bit more adventurous, off the trails and purely on scree slopes and rocky ridges. From the car start at 800m we (myself and Karati, a friend) ventured towards Helicopter Hill and took a sharp (and steep) left up the ridge that leads towards Mt Hamilton.