Time off work to go boshing in the hills

Over the last months, I have worked a few weekends at various events in Chch to raise awareness about recycling and to conduct waste audits to see how well people can divert waste from landfills. In return I got a day off work and headed straight up in the mountains.


Mike (Mr Plank), Charlie and Caspar, who was visiting from Wellington, were also keen for an adventure. With two cars our options were more diverse. In the end we settled on boshing up Bealey Spur and along the ridge over some peaks to 1905 m. We turned south towards Bruce Saddle from a 1875m point and then traversed the Black Range to Lagoon Saddle and out to the main road again.


On the map, it looked pretty straight forward. In reality it was a little bit more challenging than we expected.



Within a few minutes, Charlie and I managed to step into a bog. The mud added on a bit of weight on my shoes.

The clouds were really low the entire day and we often couldn't see more than 100 m in front of us. Mike had a slight cold (yeah right!) and kept at the back at the beginning. After a few hours, I am sure that he forgot about his cold, since ha started looking like a happy elk.

Caspar's sporadic thoughts spurred many silly conversations about everything and nothing. Time flies, my stomach muscles got a good work out from all the laughter and it was absolutely impossible to think about work in this company, which was brilliant.

Stunning scenery became visible when the clouds occasionally lifted.


We met these fellows close to Bruce saddle and they were as amused to watch us as we were to study them.

There are some funny collective nouns for animals in the English language. How about "a murder of crows", "pride of lions" or "raft of ducks"? Can you think of a better collective noun for the New Zealand mountain parrot than "a curiosity of keas"?

There were a few sections which were not particularly runnable and we became a bit worried that we wouldn't get back before darkness would fall. I only had a tiny winy emergency head torch with me, which is not ideal for navigating down ridges with.
Heading back in the right direction now towards Lagoon saddle.
Not far to go now, but no time to stop. Time was ticking on and we had to run the last hour through lots of mud. It seemed to never end and we could see less and less of where we placed our feet.
In the end we reached the car at the Lagoon Track car park at 6.30 pm. The pine forest which we passed through at the very end was very dark and it was a bit of a guess to figure out were to safely place the feet.

After almost 8 hrs we were safely back by the car again, ready to eat lots of food. It was a great day out in the hills and we managed to cover 2,200 m elevation in total. Not bad!

Caspar was on dinner duty and said that he had followed the recipe on the curry paste jar...except for adding double the amount of red curry! We were all on fire by the time we had taken a few bites. Mike was panting and looked faint with a dab in his face and I had a very runny nose. I was happy not to self-ignite. I never let Caspar close to the curry jar again that weekend.