BlogRoddus: Trovatore/Travers Peak

Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary: Tramp No. 131

Trovatore/Travers Peak - 10th February 2013

This trip had been on my to do list for a while and I had an opportunity to complete it last year when there was still plenty of snow on the tops but I forgot to set my alarm and missed the boat so to speak. I had a spare day on Sunday the 10th and with the long range forecast looking pretty good, flicked off an e-mail to see who wanted to join me on this expedition.

Three of us set off along the Rolleston track from the St James car park about 9:30am on another near perfect Lewis Pass day. Thirty minutes later we hit Goings Creek and started to look for the entrance to the Trovatore track. We found it another 200 odd meters down the road and proceeded on the 900m climb to Travers Peak, through lovely open beech forest on a well formed and well used track. First lunch was had at the bushline before continuing on to Travers and having second lunch about 12:30pm. The tops were pretty easy travel to this point walking on top of a dense short snow grass. Things got slightly more challenging after dropping of the very steep North face of Travers and point 1690 and its associated ridge looked pretty gnarley in places, so we sidled round to the east of the ridge from the saddle and followed a vague benched track northwards until we climbed up a pretty seep gut back onto the tops for the last bit of ridge travel to Trovatore. After third lunch in the warm sun we headed off round to point 1755 trying to find the access to the scree slope that would take us all the way back down to the river nearly 800m below. We slightly over shot the scree, so backed tracked and dropped down into the gut. The slope was hard and loose nearer the top and was a bit difficult to get onto but once we got to the softer stuff the going was pretty good. Uncle Roddus, scree god, was first onto the slope and rocketed off down hill while the others were still trying to get onto it. This was not such a good idea from Uncle R. as the others were sending rocks bouncing down the scree and much vigilance and the occasional dodging was required before getting out of range. This scree had been reported by another as the one of the best he had been on, but I found it to be shallow and couldn't relax into it as we had to keep sidling back and forth to stay in the soft stuff. My scree rating, 7/10. Unfortunately the front half of the sole of my tramping boot decided to part with its lifelong partner, the innersole, just as I was nearing the bottom of the scree, so some emergency repairs were made as I waited for the others to descend. The rest of the trip consisted of a rock hop down the riverbed to the swing-bridge before the final leg along the St James walkway back to the car, which we obtained about 5:30pm. So we did an 8 hour day, travelled around 16kM and climbed about 1100M.