Mt Torlesse/Red Peak - 18th January 2020

Uncle Roddus Tramping Diary: Tramp No.172

Mt Torlesse/Red Peak.

First real slog of the year with this Christchurch Tramping Club trip up Mt Torlesse and Red Peak.

 Another close to home walk for me as I met the party at Springfield about 9am on a very pleasant Saturday morning. The leader said we might be able to get a key to the gate at the Big Tree and drive part way up the Kowai River and so it came about that we were able to shave off about 2km of slog up the Kowai river to the hut.

  Our Party of eight took just under an hour to get from where we left the cars to the Kowai hut, where we had a scrog stop and topped up water bottles before the 1200m slog up the southwestern ridge to the summit of Torlesse. I was last up the hill as usual but was impressed enough to find that I had actually done the climb in just over 2.5 hours including another rest stop about half way up.

  The tops on this day were fabulous, with almost no wind and plenty of sunshine and a very relaxed lunch was had at 1961 meters.

  Then it was on wards as we dropped down and then re climb up to Junction Peak where we regrouped and then the same again onto Red Peak where another slightly extended break was taken. This also meant that I had now, over several trips and many years, walked along the entire tops of the Torlesse range, except the 1km of so from Red Peak to the Gap.

  It was well past 3PM as we dropped into the scree run off Red Peak. The scree was patchy and there were plenty of larger rocks to slow the decent but overall I would rate it about 6/10 and others in the group agreed. We were still able to drop 6 to 700 Metres in pretty quick time although it was pretty hard going at the bottom as we dropped into the stream.

  It was then just a case of negotiating the last 2.5kms down stream to the hut, but this was quite slow going in places as we had to scrub bash round a gorgy bit and a waterfall and we also waded through another gorgy bit as the water levels were pretty low. Took a good couple of hours plus to get close to where the hut was.Then it was the last slog down river back to the cars.

  The trip was listed as 22KM with 1600M of climbing. We shaved a few KMs off with parking the cars up the river, so my estimate was climbed about 1550M  but only walked about 18KM. Took 9 hours 36 Minutes.