This is the first winter we haven’t gone on a epic winter discovery tramp, as we were actually basking in the sun on a bike touring through Europe!!
But it does bring to mind last years winter discovery expedition. We’d been running quite a lot of transport down to the West Coast and occasionally we would go over Rahu Saddle between Springs Junction and Reefton as it’s such a quiet and scenic road that doesn’t get a lot of traffic. Rahu saddle runs staight through the Victoria forest park. After scouring the maps we thought we could eck out a week exploring the areas backcountry and also tackling a tramp in Arthurs Park National park.
It turned out to be a very wet and cold week, however that didn’t deter us deter us, we started out with a day hike in the rain at Duffys creek, there was so much water on the track that the end clearing had actually turned into a lake!!
Next day we started another rain drenched route up to Lake Stream hut(2 bunk) for the night, it was a freezing night, and just before we nodded off another party arrived at the hut, we gave one of them our thermarests to park up on the hut floor and luckily enough the others had a tent with them.
After getting up to boots frozen solid , we hiked to the sun on the Mount Blackadder range. It was a good scamble across the tops to make it to camp that night at the top tarns at at the end of the Klondyke valley route. We spent a blustery night in the tent beside the mountain tarns before heading back down to vehicle.
I’d just like to really recommend this as a great back country route, it’s logistically easy as its a loopable circuit, and it affords great valley and mountain scenery….. and if you do it in summer it could be done in two days without frozen boots!!!
Leave a Reply