The story is coming along nicely Clint, it's great to see the photos on the big screen, I haven't had a chance to look through them yet.
We certainly had another great adventure in the New Zealand Southern Alps this year, probably a bit more adventure than usual with the weather we experienced towards the end. We got to see and stalk a lot more Tahr in this valley compared to the other areas we'd hunted in previous years.
The hike in was as tough as usual but we had to stage it over 3 days and we had plenty of time to rest and recover during the long nights. 5 hrs of hard hiking the first day, 6 hours the second and 7 hours the 3rd. Our packs contained everything we needed for 14 days and weighed between 28-30kgs (we didn't have a scale to do the final weigh in).
What Clint didn't mention was that we had a very steep 1000m elevation gain from the river crossing to our camp with a rather scary last 50m climb over the lip. We had put on our crampons to help grip in the steep tussock grass and they helped find purchase in the cracks of the smooth rock for the last push over the edge. Even so I still had visions of tumbling end over end all the way back down to the river below as the large and heavy pack on my back changed my center of gravity for the worse. I for one was very relieved to crawl over the lip and stand on relatively flat ground again. We set up camp 50m from the edge on a flat bench with a snow melt stream running close by. As was already mentioned water was not an issue for us in the area we were hunting. We didn't need to carry any with us as it was in plentiful supply with snow melt streams running down the slopes on this side of the range every few hundred yards.
I'm going to sit back and let Clint continue the story.
Topic: NZ Tahr hunt 2014- Pilgrimage of Adventure. (Read 6279 times)
