Tramping with the UCTC

Last weekend, the 6th of March, was the first tramping trip run by the University of Canterbury Tramping Club (aka UCTC). This trip called Freshers is an epic, with most of the over 200 people who are part of the club partaking.

Fortunatly, the trip was split up into many smaller groups based upon difficutly so that we weren't all moving at once in the same spot, that would be horrible. This year's trip was to the Woolshed Creek Hut of Mt Sommers, a mountain that is right on the edge of the Canterbury plain, about 100km due West from Christchurch.

The whole gang left the university at 0830 in a mixture of buses and cars. The buses were probably the most disreputable vehicles I've been on in a long time, one was lavender and one was pink, and the inside appeared to held together with a few bolts and popcans.

Anyway, my group (the "hard" group) got to our start point at 1145 after missing our turning because we were following the pink bus to the "easy" start point. Our route involved taking the track up to the top of Mt Somers and then walking down the back along a ridge until we met up with the route taken by the "medium" group. Hiking up was as steep as going up Avalanch, with the added fun of mud in selected spots as it had rained a few days before. Unfortunatly I don't have any pics as in a group it was more about keeping moving. At one point, fortunately before we split from the "medium-hard" group one of our members realised that she wasn't cut out for the pace and vertical climb involved.

We took several breaks to enjoy the view, drink some water and eat gourp (which is called scrogin sp? in NZ) and could tell that, if there weren't so many clouds, the view from the top would be really nice. Then we got into the cloud and pushing forward became of more interest. The ground became quite unpleasant too, with loose rock and soil underfoot with just enough vegetation to keep it steep, but not enough to make it stable.

Eventually we got to the top around 1530, to find that, as expected, the view was entirely obstructed by cloud. Then we hung around waiting for our fearless leader Tom to catch up (he had hung back to escort another person who was caught unawares by the vertical gain). We left the Peak and marked trail at 1630 walking down a ridge.

Down the back was quite pretty, the clouds weren't crossing over and the land was all golden grass tufts and rock. One person quickly made the link to the terrain of Rohan of LotR, which was filmed in the region.

Eventually we got down to the camp around 1830, and unloaded our food for the execs (I was carrying a can of diced tomatos) who started making us all dinner. We had couscous with bits of tomato, parsely and green onions to keep things easy for the vegetarians. I think it would have been a bit better with some nuts as well, but it was still quite nice. Desert involved throwing pounds (literally) of butter and brown sugar into a pot and then adding some powdered digestive biscuits. This was then added to steamed apples and raisins. Very tasty.

The tent was borrowed from the club (for free!), and was quite cramped, I ended up going to bead early with earplugs, but others stayed up to consume the alcohol they had lugged around the countryside.

The next day I woke up at 0715, but we didn't end up leaving until 1030ish, so it was a very relaxed start with plenty of time to dry our fly on the sunward slope. We took a different route back out that started with a suspension bridge and then traveled along a lower ridge before returning to the carpark.

The weekend ended with a BBQ back at the carpark as we waited for our grumpy busdrivers to get there to take us back.