Peveril Peak - 11 April 2015

Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary: Tramp No. 158

Peveril Peak - 11 April 2015

Peveril Peak is the southern most bump on the unnamed range that overlooks the eastern bank of the Poulter River. Permission was obtained from Mt White Station for us to acess the mount via a vague farm track from just past the Poulter bridge. Eleven bods started off from the cars around 10;30am on a mild but overcast day with the clouds nestled snugly on the top of our destination.  The promised forecast was for clearing as the day progressed and sure enough the clouds lifted as we ascended. After rounding Little Peveril peak we popped up onto the terrace behind and had to do a bit of scrub bashing to get to the stream bed we used as our access to avoid the low but thick scrub that covers that side of the hill. This worked fine until we struck a small waterfall and it may have been easy enough to scramble round it but the rocks and ground were very loose and after a couple of us tried to negotiate it and dislodged several rocks at our fellow trampers, this approach was abandoned and we had to back track down about 65 meters to find a way out of the stream bed. from then on it was a scrub bash through the knee to waist high wet scrub and then it didn't get much easier on the next stony section as the footing was soft and loose and made for reasonable hard work on what was a pretty steep slope. The party had split into two groups at this stage as it looked like the slower ones might not make the summit in time before our turnaround time to allow us to get back to the cars before dark. Once above about 1500m travel got a lot easier, with the clouds mostly broken up by now and the views pretty impressive, we made much better time to the summit with the first arriving about a quarter after 2pm and myself staggering to the top some 20 minutes later. The wind was quite strong and cool at altitude and wind breakers had been donned further down the hill, but apart from some clouds obscuring the views up the Poulter we had a pretty good vista as we ate and chatted and waited to see if the rest of the group would make the summit. Which the eventually did and with still plenty of time to get us back to the cars before dark. The route back was pretty much as the ascent except we dropped into a sort of shingle shoot that had some reasonable scree patched and allowed us a quicker decent than the scrub before crossing the aforementioned scrub and dropping back into our original creek. Got back to the cars at 5:30pm after 13km and 1480m of climbing. 7 hours.