Adventure 2 - 24th - 28th September - Lake Sumner Excursion
This months adventure was a little bigger than the previous one. It was the school holidays so I had booked a trip with the kids down to catch up with Glenn in Christchurch. We had a loose plan of heading up to Lake Sumner for a few days out in the wild.
The forecast wasn’t great with some rain and reasonably strong westerly winds as well as temperatures down below freezing over night. Jo had been down to Christchurch the week before and had some low temperatures with some snow in the hills so we were very conscious of packing enough warm clothes for the kids. Several shopping trips to Hunting & Fishing and Macpac in the week leading up got us the gear we needed.
DAY 1
We had a 6am flight on Wednesday morning. Jo was very kind to get up at 4:15am with the rest of us to drop us at the airport. A quick flight and an uber ride saw the boys and I arriving at Glenn’s place in Kaiapoi at around 8am. We had a bit of a gear check before packing everything into Glenn’s Ute. A quick stop at the supermarket to grab some fresh food, and the gas station to fuel up and we were off.
Waikari kitchen is a required stop whenever travelling in this neighbourhood and we arrived there for a significant “morning tea” around 10am. Suitably full we jumped back in the Ute and headed for the hills. It wasn’t long before we were entering the Hurinui River valley via Lake Sumner Rd. The twisting gravel road offered some spectacular scenery as we wound our way up the valley. We stopped for a brief break at the split of the south branch of the Hurinui River giving the kids a chance to throw some rocks into the raging current. Then back into the car and onward to Lake Taylor. The public road stops at the southern end of Lake Taylor and from there it is a much rougher 4wd track through to Lock Katrine. We arrived at Lock Katrine just after 1pm.
Glenn and I had been waiting to see the water state on the lake before deciding on our next move for the day. There was a reasonable north westerly breeze blowing down the valley which was creating a short chop on the lock. An option was to set up some tents at the doc camping area at Lock Katrine, and see if we could get some calmer weather the following morning. We decided to set up the boat and see how we go on the water, if we needed to we could bail out to the camping option.
Glenn inflated the boat as I got the kids ready and did some final bag packing. We loaded our 4 packs as well as an extra gear back with some tents and spare food into the front of the boat and all jumped abord to start the first section of the water crossing. The chop on Lock Katrine meant it was slow going with a bit of water splashing up over the front of the boat onto the gear and us. We eventually made it to the northern end of the Lock where a small manmade channel has been dug out connecting the Lock to Lake Sumner. We enjoyed the calm water of the channel before heading out onto the open water of Lake Sumner. The wind was pushing down the length of the lake creating some reasonable tough conditions. We quartered the waves making our way over to the northern side of the lake where we had a bit of shelter.
From here we had a few options to choose from. We could stash the boat here and either camp on the shore or set out for Hope Kiwi hut (about a 3hr walk away). We could push into the chop to the western end of the lake and head for the Hurinui hut (about a 2hr walk away), or we could head with the chop to the eastern end of the lake and make for Gabriel Hut (about a 1/2 hr walk from the end of the lake). We decided that Gabriel was our best option and prepared ourselves for a long ride down the lake. We took a bit of water into the front of the boat but most of the gear (and the kids) stayed dry. We eventually made landfall at the beach at the eastern end of the lake. Glenn and I were both reasonably damp and it was now around 3pm. We were please to have what we thought would be the most challenging part of the day behind us and were looking forward to reaching the hut.
We stashed the boat in a small hollow at the back of the beach and chucked our packs on for what we understood to be a short 1/2hr walk to the hut. With the kids leading the charge we made our way up the initially well defined track. It wasn’t long before we came across some serious windfall blocking the track and had to start climbing over or squishing underneath fallen trees. Somewhere in this process we managed to lose our route and ended up bush crashing through some fairly inhospitable vegetation. We had a GPS amp on my phone and tried to use it to cut sideways across where the track was shown to be. Eventually we managed to located the track again and pushed on towards the hut. A final stream crossing to make sure I didn’t keep my boots dry and having turned what we expected to be a 1/2 walk into about 1.5hrs of misery we were there.
The kids were very excited to have finally reached our destination but this excitement quickly evaporated on closer inspection of our accommodation for the night. The painted deer skulls fixed to the front of the hut, the broken wooden floor showing the dirt underneath and the general shack like appearance of the hut left them less than enthused. “Are we sleeping in that? Can we set up a tent instead?”. Once the gear was inside and the fire going it was a lot more inviting and the kids got busy setting up their beds for the night.
We had carried in some fresh mince so I made chilli con carne for dinner. Couple of lessons here for next time, I need a little chopping board in my kitchen kit as there was nothing in the hut which I would describe as sanitary to cut on and cutting onions in a bowl is tricky. Also my knifes profile is not great for cutting vege’s as it tends to split them rather than slice them. Something to keep a watch out for next time at the shops. Despite my poor onion cutting meaning some fairly big chunks we managed to get the food into the kids. Glenn followed this up with some marsh mellow toasting over the fire before everyone headed off to bed.
