Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary: Tramp No. 170
Deep Creek Hut - 29th December 2019
A trip up onto the tops of the Pisa Range above Lake Dunstan and Cromwell had been on my to do list for many years. I had done a walk into Meg Hut a few years back but that trip stayed down in the valleys and never made it onto the tops. Friday I had to stay in Cromwell to let my legs recover a bit from the Carrick Range trip on Thursday and My Wife was keen to stay on another day in Cromwell with her mum on Saturday and this was the day with the best forecast for good views on the tops. I was still pretty stiff on Saturday Morning as I left the car near the end of Swann Rd on a nice mild and sunny day. Over the style onto the farmland that granted me access to the track that would take me to the tops and within minutes I was astounded by the number of rabbits I saw as I walked through the thorny bushes towards a small hill I had to climb over to get to the main route up.
A farm track left from an old derelict stone hut beside Tongue Spur Creek and zigzagged up the ridge amongst the prolific Matagouri and sheep. I followed the track up and would you believe it, meet the same runner I had met on the Carrick Range track two days earlier. She recognized me, we chatted for a couple of minutes before I headed up and she continued down. I got to the end of the farm track in just under two hours about, with a refuel break not too far from the end. The route then becomes a singe track which sidles the side of the range in a southerly direction for quite a way before the final slog up through the tussock and spaniards and rock tors to the tops. The top was pretty windy but actually not as cold as I was expecting. I followed the poles and connected with the four wheeled drive track that traverses the range along this edge. I spotted a hut of some sort in the near distance and followed the poled route in its direction until I discovered it was actually an old sheep sorting shed. Was this Deep Creek Hut, I was not sure but then I looked around the area and spotted another hut down the hill a bit, about a kilometer away and headed in that direction. I passed over a fence, leaving the farm land and officially entering the Pisa Conservation area and soon made Deep Creek Hut in the 3.5 hours suggested on the sign at the start on Swann Rd. This surprised me as I didn't think I was moving all that fast with the soreness still in my legs from Thursday. The hut is a restored Musterers hut originally built in the 1890s and restored and added and subtracted from over that long time to the roomy six bunk DOC Hut it now is. Spent about a half hour lunching at the hut before donning my wind jacket for the trip back to the car.
As I stated back on the downhill part of my journey, I realized that due to the soreness in my legs I was going to have to take things a lot slower than I usually do going down or I was in danger of really putting severe strain on already taxed muscles, so the trip down was much slower and gentler that it would have normally been and actually took me over three hours to get back down. The sign at the top suggested it was about 10KM back to Swann Rd, plus the distance to the hut itself, so overall I must have walked at least another 20 Km this day although looking on the map it seems less. It appears to be about 9KM from car to hut. My phone though seems to think I had walked 37500 steps at 29Km and although I felt like I had indeed walked that, it is way off for some reason. Time on tramp 7 hours 25 minutes.
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