Novara Peak

My first ever NZAC trip! Lead by the fantastic James Thornton and Nina Dickerhof, also tagging along were Jen Ormsbee, Rachel Smith and Kate Salmon. Weekend of the 6th- 7th of April, we headed off after work on Friday down to Mt Cook, nearly had a cold night out when our booking at Unwin Lodge somehow went missing, but was all sorted out in the end.

Headed off early the next morning and managed to get both car successfully to Husky Flat, to save a significant amount of marching on the 4WD track. Crossing the Tasman was a bit more mellow than I'd been led to believe but getting on and off it on the far side was certainly interesting!

It was freezing cold at our snowy camp overnight, -8! Well we'd been for-warned I didn't actually think it through and so ended up there with my summer 400gm sleeping bag... oops, at least it was good to know I could survive a night in it in those conditions, but I was certainly happy to start moving early the next morning.

Novara Peak was probably relatively straight forward, but we decided to make it slightly more interesting, but going slightly the wrong way on the way up, which resulted in some fairly interesting scrambling. We found the straight forward way on the way back down to camp and then all that was left was to reverse the process back the way we'd come.

Side note, while the photo make it look pretty serene the near constant helicopter traffic, was pretty disruptive on the ground. You have been warned!