Location: Mt. Ruapehu
Trip Leader: Helen Liley
Trampers: Gregor Kolbe, Sam Richardson

ClimbNZ rates the complete traverse of the Nga Tohu Pinnacle Ridge as one of the best alpine adventures in the North Island. They also promise that “Rock is sound over practically the entire traverse and there are a number of sound and adequate belays”. This climb had been a goal of Greg and mine for the 2015 winter season, so on the arrival of a good weekend weather window, we roped in a token “friend-with-car” (Sam) and headed down late Friday night.
Arriving around 1am, we set up camp in the emergency shelter, enjoyed 4 hours of sleep before enthusiastically bouncing up off the cold floor around 5am. Our general joy of mountains and awakeness was fueled by an outstanding breakfast of a boiled egg and a packet of m&ms each, which was actually fairly disgusting, but still probably the best meal we had the whole weekend.
We had decided previously to do this trip with the lightest packs possible, and somehow this turned into a challenge to traverse the pinnacles and go straight to the NZAC hut, followed by a day climbing on Sunday, while leaving the car with only day packs. I happily revealed that my daypack was in fact, a 5-7L cycling backpack, perfect for multi-day alpine trips. This culminated in the decision that one 500g sleeping bag would do for the three of us.
We slogged up the Rockgarden in the dreary darkness, and managed to initially overshoot the easy face leading up to the ridge north of Great Pinnacle. Once on said face, we all started sugar crashing hard. There were huge amounts of whinging, mostly about the lack of coffee, but also concerning the no sleep and terrible breakfast. Despite this, we managed to struggle up the fairly short climb to hit the ridge just as the sun rose.
The shot of vitamin D got us feeling more invigorated than a happy little bunch of spring chickens, and we charged up to the peak of great pinnacle, and whipped out the rope, which was tied in a bit of a tangle to the outside of my tiny pack, for the big abseil down to the col at the top of grand gully. This was our first experience of the supposedly ‘sound’ rock, which although was slightly more solid than further up, still had a habit of breaking off the face and zooming past your head while abseiling. Apart from this, the climb up Great Pinnacle (coming from the other direction) looks like a cool challenge.
A couple more pitches and some easy soloing on soft snow and steadily deteriorating rock took us to the top of the first pinnacle, where we stopped for an energy lunch of lumps of cheese and bits of stale wraps. Greg produced his coup de grace, a litre of wine, which was delicious, perfect for the place and conditions, and well worth the sacrifice of what would have been space for Sam’s sleeping bag.
We dropped down an easy gulley south of the First Pinnacle, and made it back to the NZAC hut for some much needed afternoon naps. Our hopes at scrounging leftover food from the hut were thwarted, probably by Pet and Owen, who had been living there all week. This left us with a dinner of plain pasta with… more cheese. The following day we headed up to the summit plateau with renewed energy, mostly due to Edwin arriving late Saturday night armed with coffee. We did a couple of fun ice routes on Tukino Peak, while Ed stole my super hard core multi-day mountaineering pack to tick off the 12 summits of Ruapehu in a 10 hour push. An adventure to aspire to for next year!
Author: Helen Liley

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