After a couple of trip cancellations the weather Gods were finally smiling on Arthur’s Pass and so Mark (trip leader), Lee, Volker and I headed up to Kennedy Lodge on Friday night to team up with Arthur’s Pass locals Hamish and Dave for a climb of Mt Franklin.
An early start Saturday saw us walk up the Mingha and reach Goat Pass hut in good time and enjoy a lazy lunch in the sun with a brew to help fight the hang over one person was experiencing following late night partying in Arthur’s Pass the night before. We were soon into the Deception river and exchanging wet runners for mountaineering boots before commencing a long climb up scree fields to reach Good Luck Creek. With only a few patches of snow, travel was quite slow and so our high camp was a little lower than we would have liked. We did however, enjoy cooking dinner to the distant sound of kiwis calling.
We reluctantly crawled out of our sleeping bags, donned our head torches and set off for the summit at 6:30am Sunday morning. In mostly soft snow we ascended to Lake Anna, with a beautiful sunrise lighting up the surrounding mountains. We then cramponed up to an obvious gap on the South ridge with stunning views over Lake Sally. Hamish bravely commenced climbing along the south ridge but with only a very thin layer of snow on a very exposed section of rock it was decided that this route was too dangerous to pursue and given our slow progress so far we were going to run out of time if we went for the summit.
On descent we did check out an alternative route further north to access the ridge and decided it would have been a much better option. We were back at camp for lunch to discover Mark’s tent had been attacked by keas. He had said at the beginning of the trip that his tent wasn’t very waterproof and it certainly wasn’t now!
Leaving camp we traversed over the scree slopes and started descending the most horrible scree gully I have ever been on. Although it hadn’t been much fun to come up it was certainly worse on the way down! I didn’t make it back to Goat Pass Hut until after 6pm. Dave decided to call it quits here and although tired and envious, after refueling the rest of us continued on in the dark to eventually make it out to the car by 11:30pm – a 17 hour day in total!
This was my first CMC trip and although we didn’t reach the summit I really enjoyed the views from Lake Anna and the great company on the trip. Although memories of the scree are still pretty vivid, I could be convinced to give Mt Franklin another go come early Spring when there is more snow! Big thanks to Mark for leading the trip (and waiting for me!) and Lee, Volker, Hamish and Dave for their company over the weekend.
Katrina
(photos to come)
