Will G and James K
6th to 9th of jan 2025
Knowing when to pull out can really help avoid you getting into difficult situations. This is an essential attribute to have, and in our case, it was determined by asking one question: why am I doing this?
There are really two reasons why I tramp: the first is that I kind of based my whole personality on it, and the second is that I really bloody enjoy it. After 2km of vert with 20kg packs, realizing we had to descend 700m down the back side of Ivees Peak to our camping spot when there was a beautiful blue lake 200m down in the other direction really made us consider the enjoyment factor of our planned trip.
The idea was to traverse the whole Victoria range from Black Adda to Wheel Creek hut and maybe onward. Currently, there is no online record of someone doing this. James and I can now see why. Getting around Ivees Peak is gnarly, it's a bloody long way, and the ridge line beyond PK 1734 looks like it has huge bluffs. A lot can hide in 20m topo contours, and this seemed to be the perfect case. If we had carried on it would have been a very painful and slow few days, and with the weather being a bit dodge, we decided to pull out!
The substitute was to camp at a lake below pt 1601 followed by a fantastic saunta up Ivees Peak and down to check out Top Waitahu hut. As quoted by James at the end of these missions, 'every days a big day here'. The terrain is rough and not having knee-high gaiters leaves you very exposed to Spaniards. I have never experienced a denser population of Spaniards before, to the extent that being in the middle of a flax bush was the only spot of respite I could find on our way down to Top Waitahu biv.
Top Waitahu is a great biv to bag, with the hut book going back to 1980 and there being about 3 parties a year reaching the hut. Otherwise, this was a very enjoyable and character-building 4 day mission. It is tough, it is remote, and there are a lot of Spaniards. Because all the rock is granite too, you can get some really cool echos going. We had great fun making obnoxious noises and hearing them bounce back multiple times.
For more in-depth route descriptions read the Remote Huts website or the Lake Stream Hut book has good descriptions of the routes.
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