31st May – 1st June
By Zoë Marshall-Means
Participants: Zoë Marshall-Means and Max Truell
I’ve made an incredible discovery, I was planning a tramp to a random little biv to get out of the city for the weekend, and instead Max and I found the coldest river valley in the entire world. I’m not kidding. Science. It was very cold.
I also discovered how to make a chill tramp kinda sketchy. Take an easy walk up a river but cover EVERYTHING in a layer of ice. Literally every rock. Then make it so the sun never reaches them. And then give yourself a still-healing, post-surgery broken wrist, just to spice things up if you do slip. Anyway, I didn’t really give a shit, and neither did Max, so we just kept on walking. It was slow, but it was chill. Really fucking chill.
The next day we couldn’t keep our eyes off Mt Valiant. That is one sexy hill. We knew we had a Climbing Club committee meeting that evening back in Christchurch, and despite floating the idea of joining via zoom from the summit (what a flex), we decided to only walk up as far as we could.
Mountains are a lot bigger than they look, so that turned out to be not suuuper far up, but we got some snow, and we got to walk across some steep, frozen scree. Now, Max has a habit of terrifying people he goes tramping with and running out of people to go tramping with. And while this didn’t actually put me off, the knowledge that I realistically couldn’t self-arrest with a broken wrist made it not the most chill thing I’ve ever done, and possibly not the smartest either.
But anyway, we made good time back out, and got to go to our committee meeting absolutely filthy and kinda stinky (nothing new tbh), and no one died, so I’d call it a very successful wee walk.
CUTC 