Leader: Chris Louth
The recently accessible Flora carpark was quite full as five of us assembled on a glorious morning for the hike up Mt Arthur. The huge scar on the side of the hill on the road up, and the heaps of rock laying in the nearby fields were testament to the scale of the recent slip.
At Arthur Hut, Gail bid us farewell as she had a neck problem and would amble up the hill behind us and reunite coming down later.
At the turn-off to Gordons we did a right turn and started to lose some of the altitude we had just gained. From here we could assess the best way to ascend the proposed route up the north-east ridge to the summit.
We left the track near the floor of the valley and made our way through the jagged karst to a gully that would lead to a notch high on the ridge. The route was largely dictated by skirting the many sinkholes that abound in the limestone of this area. From across the valley the gully had seemed a fairly constant grade but, in fact, it was a series of plateaux that were quite hard going in the hot morning sun.
At the base of the massif we left the grass and the spaniards behind. The next challenge was a near vertical ten-metre climb up on to the rock above. Thankfully there were plenty of secure hand and footholds. From here the going was easier as we scrambled up the steep but grippy rock to the crest of the ridge.
Dawn had described herself as a broken down runner trying to stay fit, but her light frame easily handled the climb as she skipped on ahead.
Higher up, the ridgeline narrowed to about a metre in places, with a sharp drop off on both sides. Definitely not the sort of route to navigate on wet, windy or icy days!
At the summit we were greeted by about a dozen others who had followed the conventional route up. We had passed some of them further down, so we had clearly taken the longer way.
A long lunch was spent admiring the views and watching the groups of people still making their way up. Stories were recounted about the many times various people had been here before, in all sorts of crap weather ... and what a magic day today was.
By this time the top was getting quite crowded (by backcountry standards) so we started down. The last snow of the year was still hanging off the lip so we had some fun glisading down to the track below.
A bit further along we met Gail, soaking up the sun by the side of the track, and she joined us for the trek down.
Back at Mt Arthur Hut we were greeted by a pair of adult wekas having a very raucous domestic, watched by three young downy chicks not long out of the nest.
We arrived back at the carpark, hot but happy, at about 4pm.
People with nothing they’d rather be doing two days before Christmas were: Kelvin Drew, Gail Malinosky, Graeme Ferrier, Dawn Pascoe (visitor) and Chris Louth (scribe).