Winter Solstice Weekend, 19-21 June 2009
Team: Myself, Mark, Geoff, Andy H, Steijn, Rob, Several Others
The weather at the lodge was marginal, tending revolting. My group had originally intended to walk to Whakapapaiti Hut, cook up a brew for lunch, then wander on down to the village for a beer and hot chips before returning to the lodge. After a talk with Geoff K (Chief Guide), we decided to can that idea because it involved what would be a very cold river crossing about 3 hours from the road end.
Mark was keen to do Tama Lakes, but with the wind gusting as strong as it was, past experience suggested that lower Tama Lake would be as far as you would get, and even that wouldn’t be overly comfortable. Instead, we decided to do the Taranaki Falls loop – or as much of it as we could do, considering we had heard conflicting reports about whether it was open or not.
Knowing we had a maximum four-hour walk ahead of us, we all took our time, and took our cameras. We had a lot of fun testing the frozen streams to see how much weight they could hold (most that Mark tried easily held him), and how many large rocks we could bounce off them before they cracked (they often won that one – we gave up before we got a break).
All of a sudden, we were in a sheltered, sunny spot (but it was still not very warm) at the top of Taranaki Falls – which appeared to be frozen too! Awesome. This put paid to any remaining idea that walking on to Tama Lakes would be good – everyone was too keen to get down and wander around the frozen waterfall.
After some fun playing with the waterfall, we had a brief debate. There was a sign clearly stating that the track beyond the lower bridge was closed, and we were wondering whether this was more to keep out underprepared daywalkers, or if there was something seriously wrong with the track. We decided that we would climb the fence and continue down the track anyway, being prepared to turn around at any point where it became obvious why the track was closed, and we felt unsafe continuing on.
Turns out, the track was closed for maintenance around an old slip, which we easily navigated. Our biggest difficulty actually lay in getting past some of the machinery that was on the track to do this work!
Before too long we were walking back out of the valley, taking the long, slow march from the forest edge to the van, parked in the carpark, soaking up the sunshine for us. We had all bought our swimming gear, and had always planned to head off to Tokaanu for a soak in the hotpools, but some people felt they really hadn’t done enough walking to earn it yet – so we stopped off on the way at Lake Rotoponamu.
The loop walk around the lake takes about an hour. Some of us didn’t really feel like walking all the way around, so we walked down to the lake and back up while the others ran around the lake. We had some exceedingly interesting conversations while we waited for the runners to get back to us… Poor Mark was the only bloke that didn’t run.
The hot pools were divine as always, and we stayed longer than we really should have. By the time we were coming back to the side of Mt Ruapehu, the sun was setting on the mountain, lighting it beautifully. The problem with this was that by the time we got back up to the carpark, it was dark and we had no headtorches! Oops! Thankfully Serac Lodge had its light on over the path, but the shadows were still huge.
After that it was party time – a yummy dinner, an 80’s themed dress-up party and a good quantity of alcohol meant pretty much everyone just chilled on Sunday morning. Once a good sized group were up and about, someone decided we should take the lodge toboggans down to the snow in Happy Valley and have a play on the snow. It was great – till I came off awkwardly and gave myself whiplash! Oops. Thank goodness Mark and I were travelling back in Robs car rather than the club van, as that was way more comfortable for the drive home. Needless to say, I wrote off the rest of the season for possible snowboarding lessons (on the advice of my Osteopath), which I wasn’t really complaining too much about!
