Oh boy, the alarm came far too early for our Taranaki hike day.
I think I set it for 4 a.m., but ugh. 😬
Yuck.
I mean, we didn’t get to bed until like midnight or after, and with so many nights of lack of sleep in a row, my brain was just screaming, “no!!!”
But Chase really wanted to climb the mountain, so, after we both napped a bit longer, i put my big-boy undies on and got ready–finally leaving for the hike about 5:30.
Now, when we were at Torpedo7 the night before getting gear for the climb for Chase, the lady who was helping us (Amber), suggested an alternate route up the mountain than the one we were planning on taking. She said it avoided the scree but included some bouldering scrambles.
She also mentioned that the first part of the route we’d been planning on taking was actually really hard.
Still, Chase wasn’t comfortable with the bouldering, and i didn’t care enough to vote against him, so we stuck with our original plan.
And if you’re wondering, yes, the first part of the hike was super tiring. The first 2/3rds, distance wise, was on a gravel road, basically. It was an access road for the power station thingy up the mountain.
But it was steep.
The climb was steady for multiple kilometers, with one portion of it, the part that they actually added blacktop tracks for, being so steep that we turned around and walked backwards for, in short stretches, to at least keep our forward progress but use different muscles in an effort to get some respite from the burn. 🙃
It was about that time that the clouds rolled in, and it started misting–at first similar to the fine Western-Washington-like mist.
But then it started coming down harder.
That was significant because this mountain has killed many people over the years (or better said, many people have died on that mountain because they made poor choices and weren’t prepared for the consequences.)
It’s just a big canonical volcano, so one of those mountains that’s big enough to create it’s own weather, I think. The weather can change rapidly. And then there’s the temperature. It’s tall enough that it has snow year around at the top.
Temperatures would be on the 20s for the low at the top.
You know that thing about creating it’s own weather? Well, the clouds rolled in. The mist began. And then the mist turned to rain.
The rain wasn’t a problem for Chase, in some ways, as he had a waterproof pack cover.
I, on the other hand, did not.
So my pack was getting wet, which meant it was only a matter of time before all my preparedness gear inside would be wet as well. 😬
There was another, bigger problem, though. Both Chase and I sweat–a lot. So though it was cold outside, we’d been working hard enough to climb the mountain that we were sweating quite a bit, the t-shirts under our waterproof rain jackets getting soaked.
Why was that a problem?
Because it was cold. Once we stopped to get out of the rain, we both got really cold really quickly.
Gratefully, we’d made it all the way to the hut (lodge) up there, so we could at least get out of the wind and rain, even though we weren’t members, so we couldn’t go all the way inside (the hut was privately owned).
For the next… maybe 45 minutes, we waited there at the hut. For the first 15 minutes, perhaps, we just reasoned through our circumstances. It wasn’t smart to continue up the mountain if the rain continued, plain and simple.
After a little while, it dawned on me that it was still early in the morning. I realized that the sun hadn’t had a chance to burn off the clouds, so to speak, so even though i was tired, and part of me wanted to just go down (and would have been absolutely justified in doing so), i suggested we wait for 15 minutes to see what the sun might do.
After 15 minutes ish? the clouds seemed a bit thinner, so we waited longer. After perhaps another 15, low and behold, despite what it had liked like, and despite the tendency for volcanic mountains to hold onto clouds like they’re going out of style, it cleared up!
So on we went! I got my little microfiber towel and dried myself off. I took my rain jacket off to let it blow in the wind and dry out, and i put my t-shirt around my neck to do the same.
I wore my light regular jacket with no shirt on underneath until both the rain jacket and my t-shirt had dried out.
I threw my rain jacket and light jacket in my pack and put my t-shirt, now dry, back on.
🥳
Up a gazillion flights of wooden stairs. Up up up. Up loooooong stretches of scree. Up steep fields of boulder-sized lava rocks that were really rough against your fingers when you needed to grab them, and then finally, the summit was visible!
The snow field that lay before us we were told by someone who summited after us was 15 meters deep, apparently a lot deeper than the last time he summited. He was super surprised by how deep it was, saying the scramble to the top was so much shorter with as much snow there as there was.
The snow field (at least the point between us and the next scramble, as the entire crater was just a huge snow field) was only probably a couple hundred meters long. That early in the day, the shadowy parts were ice snow.
Maybe I shouldn’t say early. I think it was probably… 10 something by that point? I don’t remember.
Chase didn’t want to do the last scramble to the top, so I headed up, wandering around the top, enjoying the views, looking down mostly on the canopy of clouds below us, and seeing the ocean and the green of the land below through a few breaks in the cloud cover here and there.
It was definitely a beautiful view. 😊
On the way back down, I slid down the snow for a much quicker descent than ascent. 😁
That’s one of my favorite things to do when coming back down snow-covered mountains. 😊
The trip back down was actually pretty challenging with our jello legs. It was about a 5341 ft ascent over 3.9 ish miles of one-way track, so pretty steep, making the down pretty hard in places.
The scree, over of the hardest parts on the way up, was much easier on the way down, having lots of experience going down loose rock. It wasn’t as nice to go down as a good small-rock rock slide, bit still a lot quicker and easier going down than going up with the fast sideways jump-and-plant technique.
Once again, the blacktop section going down was hard, our legs burning, and again changing directions, walking backward for a moment to give some relief to the muscles.
We got back to the car so much earlier than expected, somewhere around 2 o’clock, despite the long rain delay at the hut and hanging out at the top.
We were, however, super tired, so we sprawled ourselves out on the grass by the visitor’s center and took a nap–until the heat of the sun cooked us a little too much.
After our nap, we headed into town, getting some water from Pak N Save. While still in the parking lot doing online stuff on our phones, the girls showed up and scared Chase by running up to the car window while we were sitting there.
Funny how we keep thinking we’re going our separate ways and then there we are together again. 🙃 It’s actually been really funny that way, but as hard as it has been for me, I also enjoy it.
We ended up hanging out with them the rest of the night. We’d gotten some playing cards earlier, and we taught them how to play… i think it was 5-card hold ’em? Or maybe that doesn’t exist, and we made up 5-card hold ’em.
We thought about playing with candy, but Chase didn’t like the idea of everyone touching the candy/food, so that was nixed. He wanted to find poker chips, but that was a no go, so we decided to use coins. 🙃
We went to like 7 different stores changing a total of $180 (New Zealand dollars) into coins ranging from $0.20 to $2.
Man, there’s a lot of sheep in this country.
Squirrel.🙃
We ended up playing for… hours. The girls, who’d never played before ended up winning because little Mr Stephen was playing like he was playing with people who knew what they were doing, and lost everything he had because he got called on a bluff when no experienced player would have risked everything for such a tiny pot, but one of the girls, thought if I went all in, she had to as well.
Oops. 🙃
She had a slightly better hand, so that was it for me. I was… done for the night, having to sit there for hours while they kept playing. 🙃
Ugh (my attention span for poker is pretty short).
I would much rather have played something else, but… smart me lost everything so quickly that… 😆
Not an option. 🙃
At midnight, i got out the cake for Chase, as it was his 25th birthday (ish, as it wasn’t quite his birthday in the States yet, being a day later in NZ). We ate cake while everyone kept on playing.
Finally, we called it a night when the girls had all the money between them, Chase having been severely handicapped when i lost all my my money on that one all-in move. 🙃
Oops. 🙃 Sorry, Chase!
Anyway, we were at a self-contained only camping place, and after my conscience reset, I wasn’t wanting to stay where we weren’t supposed to be, so we said goodbye again.
I didn’t realize that saying good night then was saying goodbye again until everyone was hugging, and I was like… oh, ok.
That was a bit rough on Chase, something i wasn’t intending, as I figured we’d see them the next day since we were once again in the same city.
But… I guess not.
We headed back up to the Taranaki visitor’s center where we’d stayed the night before, called it a night, and crashed.
And that… was that day.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 