My Hutt - 21 February 2015

Uncle Roddus Tramping diary: Tramp No. 154

Mt Hutt 21 February 2015

Another CTC club trip to the top of Mt Hutt which is, of  course, behind the famous Mt Hutt ski field on the Mt Hutt range, overlooking the Rakia River.

 I met the group at the corner of Blackford Rd just past 8am on a mild and mostly clear Saturday morning. Just the four of us on this trip as we left the cars at the little river bridge and trudge up the wide rocky stream bed heading for our ascent ridge. Once on the ridge, we followed a deer fence most of the way along the lower ridge before a steep ascent up loose rocks and scree to the upper part of the ridge. It's a long climb with several stops to catch our breath and drink and eat and enjoy the views developing as we climb. We made the summit just past 2PM, it taking us just over 5 hours to climb the 1700m to the summit from the car.

 From the summit it was a fairly easy womble along the tops and along the north east ridge above Little River. We dropped of into the top of the side stream and bounded down a pretty patchy scree before hitting the main stream near a small hydro inlet. It was then a simple slog down a farm track back to the bridge and cars. Time ; 8 hours 36 minutes, distance: 15.9Km, total ascent: 1875m.

Foo Fighters - Christchurch - 18th February 2015

The first big outdoor stadium gig here for quite some time and after a mate pointed out they were coming I thought it might be worth going along. The Foo's are a majorly successful rock band but I am not all that familiar with their music, sure I know some of their "hits" from radio, but I don't own any of their music. I thought I should get more familiar with their stuff before the concert and so listened to them on Spotify  while working in the office. I wasn't overly excited by their music and so wasn't overly excited about the gig, but we are starved for concerts here and one must take advantage of them while they are happening. I missed Nine Inch Nails and Queens Of The Stoneage last year.

 The concert started quite early, with gates opening at AMI stadium about 4:15pm on a rather hot summers day. Mrs. Roddus I myself headed off into town to pick up the two mates also attending with us after 5PM and after a quick feed at Burger King we found a car park on some quiet side street and walked about 1.5km to the stadium arriving some time close to 6:30pm. The Foos were due on at 7:15pm.

 Here things fell apart somewhat as the que at our gate was rather large and rather slow moving  and the entrance to the venue was rather small and there were only two of them to let in 26000 people. So there was a lot of grumbling as we spent nearly 45 minutes shuffling inch by inch closer to  getting in as the time got closer and closer to the band starting. We actually got to our seats about half way through the first song but many didn't get in for another 30 minutes. Terrible organisation, you would thing they would have things like this sorted by now.

We took our seats in the south stand and started to tune in to what was already happening on stage, Of course it was bloody loud, and as it goes with these type of rock concerts there is a wall of noise blasting out  during the heavy numbers and it took a while for my hearing to get use to it. Overall the sound was average, lyrics were quite hard to hear and as I said we were quite often assaulted with a wall of distorted white noise.

 As the gig progressed My ears adjusted and the quieter songs and Dave Grohls's solo songs sounded fine.

 An obvious thing was the amount of times Dave Grohl used the word FUCK or derivatives of, It got quire ridiculous. Mrs Roddus made the comment that she though was quite immature for a man of his age. I tend to agree. Also there was some fairly cliched rock guitar god posturing from Grohl ans he ran out onto the long stage extension that went out to near the center of the park, with him flinging his hair back and forward with his legs wide apart, you know the drill.

 Still, Dave's banter with the crowed was pretty good and every body lapped it up, especially his story about his early morning bike ride through the earthquake ravaged Eastern  suburbs that day.

 I was enjoying the music more by now and actually enjoyed some of the songs I didn't know more than the ones I did, there were two great rockers I didn't know that really got my foot tapping. The other very cool thing was when the whole band rose up on a small stage about a quarter of the way out into the park and played several songs, one being a great version of ACDC's "let There Be Rock". The band played for about 2 and 1/2 hours and I think overall it was a pretty good gig.

Mt Enys 15th February 2015

Uncle Roddus tramping Diary: Tramp No. 153

Mt Enys 15th February 2015

My third or possibly 4th trip up the highest peak in the Craigiburn range, this was a club trip run by Bryce to fill in the last stretch of the Craigiburn ridge that he had not yet walked upon. Also it was a different route up for me with my previous attempts being from the Ryton river side of the range.

 One dozen of us headed off across the paddock from the quarry before crossing the porter river and negotiating our way through Matigari before the up hill section rounding below point 968 and continuing up the ridge via points 1197, 1531 and 1842 to get to point 2029. The tops were mostly cloud laden as we departed the cars but majestically lifted as we climbed upwards so that we only had a very short time in any mist. Bryce commented it was exactly as ordered from the weather gods. We duly arrived at point 2029, had food, enjoyed the clearing views and spied Mt Enys looming above us about 2kms to the North of us.

 Next it was the ridge top section that we had climbed all this way for, which involved some down and then back up before down again somewhat and then followed by the final ascent onto Enys, all fairly straight forward with a little rock scrambling here and there. By the time we got to Enys the skies had cleared considerably for us to enjoy the magnificent views. 

The route down was more down hill before yet another short climb onto Carn Brea followed by an easy stroll down Dead Mans Spur before dropping down the scree shown on the GPS route above. The scree was a bit dodgy at the top but got quite soft further down and made for mostly good travel right down to Enys Stream. The group was quite widely dispersed now, as usually happens on scree and the scree hoppers like me, fly down the hill at high velocity leaving the more circumspect to take things more sedately. So it was a free for all route finding on the last section back across the plateau as myself and 3 others seemed to find the shortest route and ,although floundering around in the long grass and scrub in a stream bed for a while, beat the rest back to the cars by over 30 minutes. This trip I took my newish GPS, which I have had for some time but kept forgetting to bring. The above red route on the Google Earth snapshot is the route recorded on my GPS that day. We took about 9 hours, walked 15 or so Kms with a height gain of just under 1600M.