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.