The Ridiculousness of New Zealand Ski Touring
Conor and I drove out to Glenorchy Friday afternoon as soon as he got off work. With a recent 25-30cm dump of fresh snow and warming temperatures, avalanche conditions weren’t looking particularly inviting. Our first option was skiing Mt. Ferguson and Lapith Peak, the second option was climbing Bold Peak and third option if all other conditions were too dangerous was hiking up to Mt. McIntosh hut for a slightly more relaxing weekend.
After doing a last minute weather check before losing service, we decided to tackle Mt. Ferguson. Surely we would be able to find something to ski. We arrived at the Muddy Creek carpark around 5:30 Friday afternoon just as it was getting dark. Our original plan was to start the hike, make it out as far as we could with our energy levels and camp up near the turn off for Arthur’s Creek. However, we weren’t feeling particularly drawn to doing two creek crossings just as it’s getting dark and only make it two kilometers down the trail. So we set up camp in the car and decided to leave early the next morning.
We woke up around 6:00 the next morning, packed up and hit the trail by 7:00ish. The creek crossings were pretty manageable, easily maneuverable across the rocks to avoid getting our boots too wet. Two kilometers later, we turned east off the four-wheel drive track towards the farm. We realized just as we reached the fence line that we had forgotten to call the farmer to get permission to cross his land… We stood there for a minute contemplating if we should still go or not. We decided to go through, kind of hoping to run into him and ask him in person, but also kind of hoping not to run into him considering the possibility of him going absolutely berserk with us on his land without permission. Thankfully, we never found out. We very respectfully told the cows good morning and went on our way.
The Apogee mountaineering blog had a trip writeup with a GPX file that was incredibly useful and helped guide us to where the uphill trail started. It was a relatively well-defined sheep trail meandering up the hill through light scrub brush, marked with pink trail markers. We made it to the start of the ridge line and got too excited and headed up straight towards the forest. We should have stayed on the trail because we got cliffed out at the ridge and had to hike back down a bit to get back onto the proper trail. We were definitely hoping to get a view of our objective once we hit the ridge line, but we sadly didn’t. Just got twisted up in beech trees.
Back on the proper trail, we sidled along the western slope until hopping over the ridge line around 1145 meters. We had one bar of cell service on the ridge, so we were able to check the weather and avalanche forecast. We were grateful to see that all reports said avalanche danger was decreasing significantly, so we felt much safer and more confident to continue to push on and ski hopefully some powder in the morning!
Once in the valley, we stayed north of the creek on the southern aspect, hiking through tussock and rock, lightly covered with snow. After a while of hiking through this, it got to a point where we were sinking almost knee-deep with every step, so finally after seven hours of carrying them on our backs, we put the skis on our feet!
This might have been some of the trickiest terrain I’ve ever had to skin through though. It was lightly covered grasses, rock, and scrub brush on a 30ºish slope. Very difficult terrain to push through! It took an hour to make it half of a kilometer! Absolutely exhausting!
After multiple hours of this, it was starting to get dark and we knew we were still at least an hour or two from where we had planned to camp. Being absolutely exhausted and having been hiking for over ten hours at this point, I looked at Conor at one point and said that I’ll keep pushing if he’s stoked to keep going, but honestly, I don’t really want to. He laughed and said he felt the same way, one of us just needed to be the one to say something. We hiked for a bit longer until we found a suitable and flat enough spot to call home for the night. We leveled out the snow a bit with our shovels, set up camp, and put the stove on to boil water for dinner.
We were camped at 1400 meters and one of the forecasts had said the low would be -9ºC. We were in for a chilly one! Both of our gas cans had basically frozen, so getting water boiled was almost impossible. The water had been on the stove for over 30 minutes at this point and the flame was hardly visible, with the water barely even bubbling.
We had gotten a bottle of mulled wine concentrate to bring out on our adventure that we were extremely excited to have on this night out. Our plan was to have boiled water for our freeze-dried dinners, boil some more for mulled wine and then also make a hot water bottle for each of us to put in our sleeping bags to keep us warm throughout the night. That very much did not happen. We ate sad, crunchy, lukewarm dinners, and wine and hotties did not happen unfortunately. I did however carry the wine all the way out there and I had no desire to carry it all the way back so we took turns taking swigs of cold mulled wine concentrate, sometimes mixing it with a bit of cold water in our waterbottle lids. Being completely honest, it’s not as grim as you would imagine! We called it a night around 9:00pm and set our alarms for 4:30am knowing we had a huge day in front of us.
The 4:30 alarm went off.
The 4:35 alarm went off.
The snoozed 4:30 alarm went off.
The snoozed 4:35 alarm went off…
This continued for an undisclosed amount of time.
My morning motivation out on mountain missions is typically obnoxiously high. However, knowing how far we still had to hike to reach any sort of decent snow, knowing there was no possible way we were summiting either Mt. Ferguson or Lapith Peak, knowing we still had to also hike back to camp and pack up after skiing, and also knowing we still had about an 8-10 hour hike back down to the car after skiing, my motivation was extremellllyyyyyyyyyyyy low…
If we were close to our objective and knew we would have time for a really sick ski run, I would have been up and out of that tent at the first alarm. But damn, I had no motivation. It seemed Conor was on the same wavelength. Neither of us had slept much, it was absolutely freezing, and we wouldn’t really succeed on any of our big objectives.
Conor and I toyed around with the idea of sleeping in and having a chill morning at camp, enjoying the views, and then just hiking out around midday. It took a bit of convincing for both of us, but we had already changed out of our warm, cozy thermals, into hiking clothes and put on our wet socks. We were committed at that point.
We had finally decided we were getting up and then hit a road block…frozen solid boots.
And I mean
frozen.
solid.
Ski boots are difficult enough to get on when they’re not frozen solid. This became expert level. Even my snowboard boots were a challenge, when on a normal day, they just slide right on with zero issues. Conor and I both had to sit with our fists in both of our boots for almost 20 minutes just to get them to thaw out even a little. What a sight! We sat there laughing at how ridiculous we both looked! I was finally able to get mine on, but Conor’s had to be a team effort.
This whole ordeal added so much time to our already faffing-around-for-ages morning. We finally made it out of the tent! Skis were back on our feet and we started our uphill battle around 7:00am. So much for a 4:30am alpine start…
It continued to be tricky terrain to skin across and we had to take our board and skis off at one point because it became way too icy to easily traverse over with no ski crampons. We put our skis on our backpacks and switched to boot packing with ice axes. Around 9:30am, we knew we didn’t have much more time before we needed to start thinking about starting the trek back to camp to pack up and leave before midday, so we had to just pick at least a relatively skiable line.
We were climbing up an incredibly icy slope covered in rocks… Unfortunately, this slope was basically our best option. We climbed out of the gully we were in to a more open face. Knowing we really didn’t have any other options in our time crunch, we front-pointed and climbed straight up this face to about 1675 meters. We could have kept climbing to the top of this slope, but being honest, it was just more ice and rocks above us and neither of us were feeling particularly inspired by it, so we called it where we were.
It was an awfully difficult place to try to transition into downhill mode since we were on an almost 40º icy slope. But we set our eyes on the most promising-looking spot, just below a few large boulders on a bit of wind-deposited snow where we could kick in a bit of a platform.
Conor and I looked at each other, laughed a bit and wished each other a fun run down. I dropped in first and basically just scraped down the ice slope on the heel edge of my board, getting maybe one turn in. I stopped a few hundred meters down the slope and gave Conor the okay to come and join me.
We had seen roller balling on some of the southern aspects, which is not a good sign for avalanche danger, so we went one at a time. We continued down, picking the least icy, least rocky lines possible, which proved to be significantly more challenging than what you want in a ski tour mission.
The creek that we had been following up the valley was covered with snow at the bottom of the slope we were on, so we were able to easily cross over it and continue down the valley, following along the southern side of the creek. This was by far the most fun part! The snow was lighter and fluffier and we could just cruise through it. It got a bit flat in some sections, so being a snowboarder, I had to use my poles to keep my momentum going forward. We were able to ski/board significantly farther than we had originally thought we would, down to about 1450 meters. So much fun!
We only had to hike another 20ish minutes down the valley before we made it back to camp. We packed up, ate lunch and then hopped back on our skis to skin back out around 11:45am.
Skinning slightly downhill on already tricky terrain was significantly more challenging than the trek in. I had to hop off of our already-made track and get a bit higher to make skinning easier for me. This option was more physically challenging, but was less technically challenging, so I stuck to my own route. Even still though, it was incredibly tricky terrain to cross and the tips of my board kept getting caught under branches and roots as I was moving forward. I face planted SO many times!
It was funny for a couple of times but then I was starting to get quite frustrated. I am however getting better at being aware and controlled with my emotions when facing challenges in the backcountry. It was only a few times when I got really irritable, the other times, staying calm and collected and I’m quite proud of that!
We ended up keeping the skis on for significantly longer than we had when coming in, which saved us heaps of time. We switched back to mountaineering boots and off of skis when the snow became too sparse to skin over. Back to bushwhacking and carrying our skis on our backs for another seven hours…
Thankfully it wasn’t terribly far to go before getting back on the ridge line where we hopped back on the trail. The trail was quite straightforward and we were able to follow it decently easily until the sheep trail where we followed the pink tags in the trees. We unfortunately lost the trail at some point and had to do lots of route finding to get down the slope because it got quite cliffy and overgrown in lots of areas.
The sun had already set and was dark at this point. Conor and I were both so tired and just wanted to be off this slope. After lots and lots of back and forth, we finally made it back down to the valley! We scooted through the farm again unnoticed thankfully and then hopped back on the four-wheel drive track. We crossed the creek a couple of times and made it back to the car at 7:00pm.
We immediately took our boots off, cracked a beer, and fist bumped for the wild adventure we just had.
This was one of the first missions that I kind of took the reigns on with planning and executing. I had basically opened a topo map and found a peak over 2000m that was relatively close to a road (at least it looked that way on the map). I looked it up and found a couple of trip reports on this route, did more research, checked the weather and Avy forecast, messaged Conor to get it in the books and made it happen. I felt quite proud of myself, was glad that Conor was stoked to join and I’m excited to keep making trips like this happen!
Hopefully though, the trips in the future involve more actual skiing and less carrying skis on our backs through farmland…haha
