Supervacations!

Supervacations are when you go on vacation when you're already on vacation. I'm already on vacation in NZ, thus any vacation I take from wwoofing counts as a supervacation. Most of these involve climbing.

Two weeks ago, I headed up to Mt. Somers for a weekend of spectacular trad climbing with Simon, Rik, and Dave. I got out of Timaru early and toured up the Inland Scenic Route, detouring off into the Peel Forest for a while. Unfortunately the sky had been misty raining all day and showed no signs of letting up as I went north. Bored and unexcited about pre-hiking in the wet, I drove to our meet up spot at the base of the mountain two hours early. Rik introduced himself in the carpark and said that he was going to get an early start on the 3.5hr hike in and asked if I'd like to join him. Seeing no point in hanging around in my car for two hours we set off. I was wearing cotton pants, lots of wooly top layers, a "Gore-tex" jacket (how stiff do they have to become before they're actually waterproof?), my Smartwool socks and trail runners posing as hiking shoes. It wasn't going to make life any more fun if I got disgruntled about the heavy pack (climbing gear spoils packing light) and silly bottom layers, so I just tried to concentrate on the warm dry hut that would await us in the mountains. I was so relieved to see the hut, I could feel tears swelling. Warm in the hut I got my soaked socks off, rung them out and set them on the wood stove to steam dry. Don't ask, but I only brought one pair. Yes it was raining when I packed my gear. I never go backpacking, I usually just go to relatively street-side crags where wet trekking doesn't exist except in the middle of a steaming hot summer.

Pinnacles Hut was amazing. Complete with 18 bunks, a wood/coal stove, picnic tables, and a kitchen bench, I couldn't believe I'd paid $5 for 2 nights worth of student-rate DOC (Dept. of Conservation) tickets. Fun that night consisted of drinking and making weird faces in response to Rik's bladder of cooking wine. Wee! Fun in the woods. The next morning it was still misty and damp, and the four of us hung out for as long as we could stand it playing card games. I swear we picked one that made us exceptionally antsy, but maybe that happens with all card games (sober). Just after lunchtime we packed up our gear and set off up the trail (about 30min) for the rocks. Everything was still in fog so we couldn't see the rock until Simon led us right up to it. Here comes the exciting part...

I'd come on this climbing trip mainly to improve my trad climbing abilities. This was going to be my acid test to see if I really was going to get into the world of trad climbing and become a super gear junkie, or just stick to amateur sport climbing. (Trad climbing means going up and placing removable protection in the rock as you go, then removing it all before you set the next pitch. It means knowing which little piece of aluminum to wiggle into the rock so that when you fall 20-30ft you don't die. It's entirely more complicated than sport, where you're clipping into pre-drilled bolts, and much more mental.) We warmed up easy on two 15s (5.7). Rik led ours and I agreed to reclimb it placing all the gear. The rock there was like a ramp, slowly climbing more and more steeply into the sky, but never quite reaching vertical. I racked up and lead the pitch on double ropes easily and smoothly, just thrilled to be able to confidently set gear and know that it would hold me. I led a 15 as my second route and felt just as solid on it as my first. I was super pumped to be getting into the rhythm of placing gear and to be climbing on a double rope system.

Dave and Simon put up a harder pitch (19) on the next wall over and I hopped on it on top rope and climbed the 45+m to the top. The rope got stuck at the top as we were trying to pull it and we couldn't get it to budge. We'd been climbing on double ropes because the pitches were so long (over the 30m you can do on a single rope system), and because of this we had to knot the two ropes together in order to rappel down. When the knot got itself into a wedge at the top of the cliff there was no way to flick it out, even after Simon prusik ascended the rope 15m. I volunteered to go back to camp and start cooking up the burrito makings that were in my pack while the guys freed the rope. And then I got lost Bear Grills-style and decided to follow my way down a scree slope to a river bed and then turn abruptly left towards camp and bushwack the rest of the way. By the time I got to the stream just before our hut I could hear Simon and Dave just behind me. At least I had fun feeling "lost" and running Man v. Wild dialogue in my head while I made my way back to camp.

On our second day we got out reasonably early and quickly got our gear racked up. I chickened out of leading the "hard" 16 straight off since our two experienced crew members were warming up on a 15. Rik belayed me on the second 15 from the day before and it strangely felt no easier. Dave went off with Simon to put up a 21 and I scrounged up the courage to get on the 16. It was a pretty hairy start and I clipped a bolt that was technically off route about 15-20ft off the deck just for peace of mind. I finally found a wire placement, got my nerves settled, and headed up into the crack system. The rock yawned into a wide V that let me stem easily and go hands free to place gear. I couldn't tell from the ground because of the mist, but there were bolts all the way up the route on the arete. It was a much more mixed route than I had anticipated; I could clip my left rope into the bolts and my right into gear. The route felt really good and I got a nice sideways cam placement in along with a whole string of good nut placements. After cleaning the gear off that route and being wayyy too amped up to call it a day, I joined up with Simon and Dave again and wore myself out cleaning out the gear from the 21. I've never had my calves burn so much from climbing. The 21 was in a right angle corner with loads of good jams and great stemming all the way up. Two thirds of the way up, just as the route was finally kicking it up, I really started to lose it. I was trying to shake out the lactic acid in the my legs from so much slow climbing earlier in the weekend, but that required putting more weight on my left arm, and I ended up doing some sort of strange, awkward chicken winging before I fell on the rope and rested. Needless to say, definitely wore me out. Three hours hike out in the beautiful woods I'd missed on the way in and we were soon relaxing at the pub in Methven for a cold beer.

____________________

The second supervacation was this past weekend with Kara down to Hampden and Moeraki. I will write about that shortly, but am heading to bed now as it's 2am. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Photo gallery of Moeraki trip instead:

Oamaru beach

And below: giant hogweed. bull kelp at Oamaru beach. New Zealand flax. me at Moeraki boulders. old iron dock at at Moeraki. the boulder field.

A Dunk of Diesel and Dettol

On Tuesday afternoon Nath, Kara, and I rounded up the chooks into the hen house and closed them in with the corrugated metal panel. Nath had prepared a mix of Dettol and diesel to cure the mites growing scaly on the chickens' feet. As I guarded the door, Nath went after the chooks with the net and Kara clipped each one's wing and dipped their feet. The chooks were going absolutely nuts of course, but once we had them in our hands they were much easier to handle than I thought. If you place your thumb on their knees then the chicken can't move its legs. We snipped their primary feathers down on one side (no need to do both) so that they can't fly off. If you clip their wings young enough they won't ever learn that they can fly. It sounds like a traumatizing process, but the chooks were just as friendly and food-seeking as usual the next morning and laid a good dozen and a half eggs.

In other chicken news, we have 4 chooks sitting up in battery cages to get them off the cluck. Once chickens get broody their hormones keep them on the cluck, but they don't produce any eggs. Putting them up on cages gets air under their bums and cools their body temperature down to egg laying conditions. We give them food and water and take them out once they start laying or seem off the cluck. We're still trying to sort out Araucanas from the brown layers (there are 2 green egg layers in the main run). We've checked at least 8 chickens now and none of them are the culprits! We're starting to get down to the chooks we were so sure couldn't lay green eggs. Ever elusive. Distinguishing Araucanas is tricky if they're half-breeds.

We also have brand new "bock-bocks" as Kara calls them. I found a squacking mother and 4 chicks outside the run last week and they've been captured and placed in a box with straw, feed, water, and a warming lamp. After much ado and tramping through the woods behind the hen house Kara and I weren't able to capture the mother who'd escaped above our heads into the trees. We think she's returned the to hen house, but with so many hens looking alike we can't be sure. The chicks were struggling quite a bit when we brought them in, traumatized from the capture and being separated from their mother. We taught them to drink by dunking their heads in the water feeder and now at least three of the four are happily pecking away in their new quarters. The fourth is getting extra TLC from Kara. Its left eye was shut this afternoon and it hasn't grown as much as the others. This wee bock-bock escaped the initial capture and got separated from its mother when we went after her. The chick managed to find its way into the hen house and was laying outside the box of its siblings when we found it. A rough start so we're trying to help it catch up.