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Orienteering Champs

Douglas and I had a great three days in Naseby (look on Google Maps) at the South Island Orienteering Champs.

It came as a bit of a shock to us. The difficulty was several steps up from what we'ld been doing. We were out of our depth a bit, but had great fun and learned loads.

Sometimes I wonder why I do the guiding work, ... but days like this remind me. I had two clients to take up the Gertrude Valley. It's only sold as an alpine valley walk, so no implication that everyone will get to the saddle. The two people I had were lovely Yorkshire folk, and quite fit, but not so sure about scrambling. They did really well though, and were keen to get to the saddle. They were really pleased that they did too. Great place for a picnic! Coming down the rocky bits a little coaching was required, but no problems. Great day out.

Guiding on Luxmore

Parts of my work definitely has a plus side Yesterday, I collected a client at his high class lodge, where we boarded the helicopter and flew the ten minutes over the lake to Luxmore Hut on the Kepler Track. The original plan was to simply walk down the hill from the hut to Brod Bay, where we wolud get the water taxi across the lake to where the vehicle was, and then drive to Queenstown. However, the client wss fit and able, and very keen to got up to the top of Mt Luxmore, so the hike got extended by a couple of hours! The weather played nicely (though the wind was chilly on the summit)

Read more about Guiding on Luxmore

Merino Muster

Douglas entered his first international cross country ski race at the weekend. It was the 'Merino Muster', part of the World Loppet Series. Douglas entered the 21km race. He didn't feel he had gone very well, it was only his second time on skis this year, and he reckoned it took him half the race to remember how to ski properly. So to get third in the U18 men's wasn't a bad effort.

Orienteering

This is quite topical really, following on from Douglas's discussion with Rob about navigation.

A couple of Sundays ago, Douglas and I went to Invercargill orienteering.I

It was at a little area near Bluff called Mokomoko. Joe Sherriff was organising the day. It was a club day, and Southland Orienteering Club are quite relaxed about things.

Just another day in the office

Some times I quite enjoy my work. This guided trip was a heli-hike, with a longer heli part than usual. The attached map shows roughly the route we took - though the GPS lost signal a little in the Milford area due to the steep valley walls. The blue route is the "commute" from Te Anau to Queenstown. The purple is the route we took with the clients. We flew from Manapouri airport to Queenstown. Met the clients, and flew to Mt Tutoko - the highest mountain in Fiordland at 2750m.

Gertrude Saddle

Nicky Harrison and I took a trip up Gertrude Saddle today. We had fantastic weather - something that's been a bit of a rarity this summer. Gertrude is in the Alps, overlooking Milford (nearly) and it's a great little day walk, up a valley, then up the side of a river to an alpine lake; Black Lake. As you approach the lake, the loose scree/rocks gives way to fantastic easy angled granite slabs. Above Black Lake, you walk up some more slabs, then traverse across to the col.

Kepler Challenge 2013 - Race Report

I felt Douglas' report of Get2Go put my brief statement about the Kepler to shame really, so here's a longer report to bore you all.

Get2Go 2013.

I warn you, this is quite long, and I broke into a sweat while writing... maybe I was just wearing too much. I went through a lot of music writing this. Even 'Red Hot Chille Peppers - 'Stadium Arcadium" could not go on for long enough. I hope you like long stories... I might hand this into school, I've never written anything as long as this before. We competed in the Regionals, and won them, so we thought we would give the Nationals a whirl... not that we had a choice. Of course the fundraising was the big issue. None of us had a spare $2000 in the bank.

Get 2 Go

Get 2 Go is an inter-school competition. Teams of 8 (4 boys 4 girls) compete at a variety of outdoor challenges. At the regional competition the teams had to compete in Mountain biking, Kayaking and Orienteering, plus a problem solving event. Douglas is part of the Fiordland team. The won the MTB, the Kayaking, and got max points on the Orienteering (but so did a couple of other schools) They didn't think they'd done so well in the problem solving challenge, but when the results came back, they'd managed second in that event too, so overall they won the regional competition.