One thing I wasn't going to mention to my wife after my fall on Rome Ridge several weeks back was that The Spurs was where a friend in the club had also taken a bad fall about 5 or so years earlier. I had originally signed up for that trip but pulled out after having a big day the previous day on the Atkins tops in Arthurs Pass.This club trip was lead by the same leader as the Rome Ridge trip and several of the same participants were with us. I meet the group at Windwistle and jumped in one of the cars for the long drive in to Glenthorn Station. when we arrived we had to report into the station house to let them know we were here and what our intentions were. The leader received instructions on where to park our cars and how to get to the access point to get us onto the track up towards Gargarus saddle but somehow we missed the correct spot and ended up bush bashing a while until we finally found the track we needed to be on. You can see from my track profile on Google Earth that I hadn't started recording until we were in the middle of the bush looking for the route.
We finally found the required track and continued on towards the saddle before veering northward for the climb to point 1706. It was a decent slog, sometimes on fairly loose shingle and this scribe was the last to reach the top where some food was taken in and the views enjoyed on a mostly calm day as the predicted winds managed to stay away. Then is was on wards for another 200m of ascent and things begin to get a lot more rocky and some mild rock climbing is required to get to point 1902. After that some of us dropped slightly to go below some more rockier stuff before heading on to the high point of 1985. By the time I got onto the actual Spurs at point 1964, the rest of the group had disappeared from my view and after looking around to see if i could see which way they had gone, I had to consult my map to figure the direction I now needed to go. I soon spotted the rest as the were sideling around point 1632 and heading for the saddle below. We regrouped at the saddle then plunged down the average scree to the head of a side stream of Boundary Stream. The trip down the stream was pretty tough underfoot at first and lots of bush bashing and stream crossing was needed to get us to the farm track that took us the long slog back to the cars.
The trip took about 9 hours, we walked about 16.5km and climbed about 1600M. I was knackered.
Here is a great video taken by one of the trampers on the trip.
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