Goat Hill - 3rd March 2013

Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary:Tramp No.133

Goat Hill - 3rd March 2013

A lovely tramp 3 of us did up this hill overlooking the town of Otira. We met just before 9am at the Otira road bridge on a warm clear morning and headed up Barrack creek until we found the track marker on the True Left of the very dry stream bed. The track up Goat Hill is in very good condition and is well marked with orange markers. The forest is just beautiful and we made good time to the bushline. Westland hasn't had any significant rain since the heavy rains over Xmas/ new year ruined many tramping trips and because of this the track was perhaps the driest I have even been on in this part of the country. Once in the shorter scrub somewhere above the 1200m mark the track became much harder to follow with cairns visible but no obvious track connecting them and higher up we just followed our noses until we got onto the more well defined ridge. Once through the scrubby sections it was more of a rock bash along the tops and was fairly straightforward until the scrambly sections before the top. I was first up onto the summit in 3.5 hours Two of us had a quite long lunch on the summit while waiting for the third member of our group, but abandoned the top after we saw that he had decided not to tackle the last rough bit and had turned back. We retraced our steps and caught up with him just past point 1578 and continued back down, with another nice break in the hot sun near the bushline, obtaining the cars about 5pm. An easy moderate trip just to the top and back but a more epic trip could be a loop round the tops southwards and then westwards down the ridge back to the cars.

Very pretty forest.

The Scrubby bit just above the bushline.

Rolleston River.

Things were a bit messy here before getting up to the ridge.

Looking back where we have travelled.

Our destination the far knob.

Looking for the crew nearer the top.

Possible return route along this ridge next time.

Looking back along the route we came up.

Another ridge back down to the confluence of the Otira and Deception Rivers.

looking down into The Deception river.

Here comes one of the crew up the last part to the summit.

Evidence.

Heading back down through that wonderful forest.