DeeKnow’s Grotto

The west coast theme continued this weekend with a walk up Mount Karioi a few miles south of Raglan. There are a couple of marked track approaches to summit, we took the one a bit north of ruapuke on the coast road itself.

According to the sign at the start of the track we were facing a 3 hr walk to the summit, and the slope wasnt looking like a doddle, my lungs were complaining before I'd even gotten out of the car. But it turned out the views were worth all the suffering.

Tour führer for the day was Graham, who happens to be a vegetarian (which I like to remind him of when eating BBQ'd meats) so Kym and I tried to keep well behind him, and as upwind as possible at all times as we went up the climb. This meant that we seemed to be tail-end-charlies. Fooled them aye?

About 40 mins from the top we stopped for lunch at about the height of the cloud-line. There was a cool but broken view looking down and north to Raglan and after we pressed on along the ridgeline the wind picked up, flicking an cold spray horizontally across the track.

Things were looking grim. The expedition lead pair of Castle and Littin had to make a tough executive decision. Given the state of the elements, our dimishing oxygen supplies and ever-sapping energy levels, it was decided that we should turn back towards the safety of base camp.

Despite the obvious Everest-like fantasy injected in the above sentence, basically the weather turned to shit and we didnt fancy a wet and cold drive home. Tho we didnt quite make it to the top it was a great walk. 5:30 hours roughly, 6:30 if you took a few more breaks. A bloody nice one-day tramp.

9:24:32 AM