With a complete lack of plans I was quite enthusiastic when Cara invited me to join the crew she was organizing to the area around the Cascade Plateau, south of Haast. The total number of participants was a mystery until the last minute, causing a cluster fuck of car conundrums as transport was re-evaluated. Despite this we somehow managed to find ourselves packed into Cara’s Corolla cruising towards Wanaka. The plan was to meet up with Kerry who was coming from Invers and attend the Mt Burke rogaine outside of Wanaka on Sunday. We had a 'fast' team consisting of Kerry and I (Torea got stuck in Queenstown apparently) and a 'social' team of Cara, Jamie and Ian.
The only hiccup with the so-called fast team was that I had destroyed my body the day before with a spontaneous 35km mission up Signal, Cargill and Swampy. This being so we decided to take a more chilled approach, if that word is in Kerry’s vocabulary. My rogaining was a little rusty and at one point we found ourselves attempting to traverse over, under and through a dense concoction of prickly shit, lasting for about 20 minutes into what Kerry termed 'The Gully of Doom’. Luckily with perseverance we escaped the gully and with a final 3km sprint because we had lost so much time we collapsed at the finish line. The social team had somehow also managed to fuck up their timing, eventually rolling in 19 minutes late. Not to…
