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Summit (sunburn) Luncheon

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Date: 7-9 December

Location: Ruapehu

Leader: Max Jenkins


The Squad: Max Jenkins, James Judd, Anoek Grosmann, Daniel Tidbury, Jason Rose, Laura Jacks, Nicola Caitlin, Sach Knight, Sean Thompson


Author: Max Jenkins

Our story began one rainy day when Sach sent a challenge to Victoria Uni tramping club to play a game of cricket against the very best in AUTC on the summit of Ruapehu. Once upon a time, there was an honoured tradition of having such a game each year, for which Vic still holds the trophy. Impressed by our skills and fashion sense, they cowardly declined, but we still had a weekend to kill, and James had stuff in his house that hadn’t gone up Ruapehu yet.


A couple of weeks later 2 cars rolled up to the top of the Bruce, along with 2 kayaks on top of James’ new car (who goes by the name of Rambo). With them came our heroes bringing jeans, umbrellas, flags, fancy teacups and in some cases actual tramping gear.


Taking kayaks up through scoria was a bit trickier than we anticipated. The smaller kayak weighed 12kg and fit neatly on James’ back with a minimum of headbanging and balance issues, but the larger one weighed 20kg and needed to be carried between 2 people. This made climbing up ridges rather interesting. We arrived at NZAC hut in need of a lot of water and chocolate.


Luck shone in our favour. From here on out it was snow all the way up, so Jason in his wisdom created a sled arrangement of sorts, using sling rather like you would to make an anchor in climbing. It makes it just about possible to walk along with it; possible enough that the kayak teams went faster than I did up the hill. One issue with kayak hauling is that it’s rather difficult to stop to slap on sunscreen. This turned out to spell tragedy for us…


We arrived at the summit plateau and began sunbathing immediately. Those of us who weren’t on kayak duty began to build the sleeping arrangements, and what sleeping arrangements they were! We dug a slot out of a snowdrift to make a flat sheltered spot on which to pitch tents.


Sach and James, unconvinced by the amount of suffering we’d encountered thus far, proceeded to make some igloo walls to pitch their tarp over. This took many hours and was truly a marvel of engineering. The blocks fit snugly together and the walls were stunningly well aligned. There was a doorway, buttresses, kayaks and probably Wi-Fi.

                                              

What a wonder of the modern world. Such skill and finesse impressed the tramping gods so much that they decided to join in the fun!

Sadly, the tramping gods are cruel beings with minds of their own. The temperature was above zero during the night, then Sach, James, Nicola and Daniel started hearing mysterious sounds from the walls of their igloo. First, they built in additional structural supports, then followed this with additional pegging for the tarp. Eventually, they decided to sit there and nudge the worst of the blocks away from them and tried to sleep. In the morning we gazed with mixed feelings of disappointment and amusement at the results.


Such fun. I personally slept like a somewhat unruly baby in my tent through all of this, stopping only to stumble around at 2am trying to appreciate the stars through my shivering, also to contemplate my life decisions while trying to ignore my sunburnt legs. What a thing it is to be at the centre of the action.

The slings served us well on the way down, and the kayaks finally paid off for some beautiful, fully safety conscious hightails down the Whakapapa glacier. Apparently, you can sit on the rear end of the kayak and use an ice axe to turn the kayak around and eventually break it or wait till you run into a flat spot. Either way, they are certainly a step up from bum sliding and hopefully justified the effort required to bring them up.


At this point, it bears mentioning that every single person in the group was quite severely sunburnt. It was super-hot atop of the mountain, and we’d spent the day in T-shirts. Despite our best efforts to steal Laura’s supplies of sunscreen, everyone had developed some impressive tan lines by the end of the trip. Highlights include James’ tomato red legs and Sach’s neck blister.

We slogged our way down the ski slopes once again and gladly collapsed into our cars. Couches in National park made a good break before the journey home accompanied by 70s music and attempts to shade our legs from the sun.


“I think this an instance of type i[1] fun, where it’s glorious but you can’t do it for 2 weekends in a row.” -Max


The fun didn’t end there, and we spent another week or so comparing blisters, tan lines and peeling. This hasn’t dissuaded James from planning to bring trees up the mountain next year. I hope VUWTC is pleased with themselves.


[1] A new category of fun/suffering which borders on surreal absurdity

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