Te Atuaoparapara Summit return trip

By Sarah H

You know it’s been a good weekend when the memories of it keep you fizzing away with happy vibes throughout the following week.

After getting into Sunrise Hut around 2am with Mike, Maj-Britt, and Alex the previous evening, I think our respective body clocks felt like they’d been hurled across a very long room into a very solid wall (or was that just me?). Mike’s suggestion to go to Te Atuaoparapara¹ Summit and back seemed just the thing; not too fast for too long, but still with a bit of tops travel and a bit of off-track. Also no husbands yelling “mush!” at five-minute intervals behind me is always a bonus²!

We (that is, Jude, Carla, Vignesh, Sue, Mike, and myself) set off from Sunrise Hut at 9:16 am, and the weather was proving to be as stunning as it had promised us that morning. We heard some excitable (and somewhat inexplicable³) yelling of “Oli, Oli, Oli, Oi, Oi, Oi!” ahead of us and realised it was Marty with the group doing the Te Atuaoparapara Loop (see Bang’s post). About ten minutes later, I was confused because they’d stopped. What could it be? A problem with the track? An emergency poo? Nope, just the aftermath of Marty flinging his cellphone down a giant landslide!

After being treated to an amusing spectacle of cellphone retrieval starring Marty and Julian, we passed a tarn near Armstrong Saddle that bears an uncanny resemblance to a triceratops footprint. Here be dragons?

We continued following the track towards Top Maropea Hut (which is poled at this point) for approximately 500 m, then veered a sharp left to follow the ridgeline leading to Te Atuaoparapara. So I may have said earlier that there was some off track travel on this route… While this part of the route isn’t marked on the Topo maps, in reality there’s plenty of evidence that people (probably also deer) walk this route on at least a semi-regular basis. Most of the way to the summit is marked by a worn path, bits of geriatric flagging tape, and cairns. However, the path is criss-crossed by deer tracks in quite a few places and disappears for a hot minute into a thicket of stunted mountain beech. So, it’s pretty easy to wander off it, and we certainly did that a number of times. Bush bashing ensued.

Nevertheless, the ridgeline itself is an easy landmark to follow on a clear day and we summitted Te Atuaoparapara around noon in time for lunch next to the trig. Yay! The views from the top were breathtaking; wild and windswept with a seemingly limitless amount of ridgeline slinking off in all directions. The views on the ground weren’t too bad either; I imagine the bonzai-fields of alpine plants would have caused an alarming amount of froth to spontaneously erupt from the mouth of any passing botanist. Fortunately none of us are botanists, so we just had a good time.

We returned to Sunrise Hut the way we went up, so there’s not much to tell about the return leg. Although we did manage to stick slightly more to the foot-track this time. Improvement!

All in all, the return trip was 8.7 km and took us just under six hours at a fairly leisurely pace, including an hour-long lunch break at Te Atuaoparapara trig. We definitely had the perfect conditions for it (fine with almost no wind). Most of the ridgeline, and particularly Te Atuaoparapara, is extremely exposed so I imagine it would be difficult and potentially pretty unsafe in poor weather. But the Weather Gods smiled on us that day, and for that, I am glad.

Footnotes

1 By the way, I would absolutely love to know the meaning or the story behind the name of this peak! I can only tell from my, frankly, abysmal knowledge of Te Reo that it might mean “The God of…something”.

2 To be fair, he “yells” in the sort of tone one might use for one’s favourite husky. The husky is an attractive and noble animal, so I do not mind too much.

3 I was later told that it was a homage to Roger Campbell’s new name.