L1/WL-131 The Peak
Activating The Peak marked the completion of a personal challenge I had set for myself some time ago, to activate all the SOTA peaks, that can be activated, on the Remutaka range bordering the Orongorongo catchment.
There is one more, In the headwaters, and within the water catchment area that is closed to the public, It’s completely out of bounds unfortunately, and that status will likely never change. So, though it is a SOTA summit, and falls within my challenge area, it must be excluded in the mean time.
We spent the last week of Sarah’s school holiday break at the hut we use in the Orongorongo valley, this coincided with Wellington anniversary weekend and that meant we would also have our 4×4 with us over the weekend and I could drive down river to the start of my planned route to the summit. Having the ability to drive to my start point saved me a very long walk down river from the hut.
There is no official track to The Peak, but thanks to an extensive trapping programme in the valley, a trap line usually runs along nearly every main ridge. I chose the slightly longer of two possible routes and made sure both options were loaded on my gps. A gps was to prove to be essential for this one.
Starting the climb from Peak stream, near its confluence with the main river, I was pleasantly surprised with the condition of the “track”, this was only so until around 600 meters asl, from which point things slowly deteriorated, becoming overgrown in parts and hard to follow the markers in general. I’ve learnt when following trap line markers in heavy bush you can’t look down for too long, they can be easy to miss.
Many times I had to stop, backtrack, and find a suitable route to move forward on, sometimes with the aid of the gps, eventually picking up another marker and making some headway. Once near the summit I began to realise the trap line I was following bypassed the actual summit, instead carrying on along the main Remutaka ridge in a northerly direction and perhaps 100 meters short of my goal. I wasn’t too surprised at this realisation and from there it became a true bush bash, aided by gps, to the summit. I did eventually come across some very old rectangular blazes at one point and found my way to the summit, just short of four hours after starting out.
The difficulty of getting there was quickly forgotten as the views were awesome and made it all worth while.
I had SOTA business to get done before I could start the long trek back down and I was thinking I needed to make this activation a fairly quick one as I was pretty sure the down hill stage was going to have all the navigational challenges I had experienced going up.
I soon got setup and ready to put a spot up and call CQ.
I tuned to 7.090 in preparation and there was Warren, ZL2JML and Ada, ZL2ADA activating ZL1/WK-062 (Ngongotaha). So I grabbed a quick summit to summit with them and moved down 5, called CQ and settled into a steady stream of dedicated ZL chasers including a good strong simplex qso with ZL4CZ, Steven, from his QTH back in the Hutt Valley. Someone had spotted me and it was all on for a while, copy from everyone was good considering my link dipole was only about 1.5 meters above the ground due to the lack of suitable trees and only my walking pole and a low bush available to prop up the centre.
After the ssb callers ran out I switched to CW on 40m for a short time with no takers. Apologies to VK stations as I usually try and accomodate everyone by covering all the bands I can, both ssb and CW, but this time I felt I was pushing it time wise so had to cut the activation short.
After a quick lunch, while packing up, it was time to get going and retrace my saved gps track from the ascent.
You might think that would be easy, but all the same overgrown bits, vague windfall areas and obscured markers were there for the down hill phase and it was once again slow going until reaching the 600 meter height again. I finally reached the bottom and the parked 4×4 a little over 3 hours later.
All in all it was a very successful day, and very pleasing on a personal level, with a few challenges thrown in to keep it interesting.
Summit – ZL1/WL-031 The Peak
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