Leader: Kate Krawczyk
Our plan was to climb up the Parachute Rocks track on to the St. Arnaud Range, then follow the ridgeline northeast, descending to the top of the Alpine Meadows Road.
I only had one carload of trampers which meant that Ben brought his bike to retrieve the vehicle at the end of the trip. The night before the trip, Kazu got in touch. He wondered why I hadn’t answered his email yet. I said “what email?” and for the life of me couldn’t find it… but oh well… another person and another vehicle was no biggie.
We dropped Ben’s bike at the top of the Alpine Meadows Road on our way into the start of the track at St. Arnaud. We then drove to meet the other car only to realise that, because of the last minute addition of Kazu, we had another car to do a car shuffle at the end instead of Ben riding his bike to get the car! That was a bit dumb!
We returned to the Alpine Meadows Road where I left my car parked nicely on the grassy verge, out of the way of private driveways.
December was very hot and dry, but I foolishly assumed that the stream I’d crossed many many times on the way up to Parachute Rocks would be ankle-deep, as usual; that I could fill my bottles with my favourite mountain spring water before we started the climb – how wrong I was! Thus, I only had a litre of water with me for the 800-metre climb ahead on a hot and humid day. I was in trouble. I drink a lot of water huffing, puffing and sweating my way up mountains! Not a good look for a trip leader.
Halfway up to Parachute Rocks, my phone rang. This was very strange on a Sunday morning. It was the Nelson Police! Apparently a lady who lived at the top of Alpine Meadows rung about my ute thinking it was stolen or dumped there. The lovely policewoman also mentioned that it was parked on private property and the lady wanted it gone. I apologised and explained that I could either turn around immediately and be there in an hour or we would be finished our walk in about 4–5 hours. After ringing the lady back the policewoman said “No worries,” so we carried on, but … not a good look for a trip leader!
All of these things going wrong did shake me a bit. By the time I caught up to the group at Parachute Rocks a big part of me just wanted to turn around. But they said “no! Let’s carry on! Bugger that lady and here’s some water!”
And carry on we did, having a wonderful time up on the ridge. It is a beautiful part of the St.Arnaud Range. There is nice variation: rocky bits; a tiny bit of easy scrambling; some lovely open tussock slopes leading into open scrubby mountain beech goblin forest.
There is no track, just some old flagging tape where an old track used to be, no longer maintained. However, navigation was quite easy and I had my GPS with me to get us back down to the offending vehicle. The only tricky bit was turning off of the ridge at the right point, then staying on the spur to exit in the right place. We did have a bit of misadventure getting sucked into a bit of a steep gully, but without too much drama, we climbed out, traversed across the slope and managed to come out right above my ute.
I felt the need to apologise in person to the lady who had complained to the police and left a nasty note on my vehicle.
As I was there representing the club, I went to knock on the door. But the door was wide open and I could smell cigarette smoke. I knocked anyways and called out, got no response and so poked my head inside. There she was, a smoke in her hand, pretending to be asleep.
Enough said.