The trip was a lodge based ice climbing trip. The difficulty: no ice. I only had one other punter and due to severe jet lag they decided to bail too. What to do?
The answer was to recruit someone on really short notice. Luckily I was climbing with Simon on Thursday and 
persuaded him that the Tararuas really are not worth the trouble. A negotiation of routes and kit rapidly followed, just how many ice screws do you need?
We picked the Pinnacles traverse as something moderately difficult, close to the lodge and not in need of a great deal of snow.
The usual drive up to the lodge was punctuated by the fast food of Bulls and I almost managed to fall asleep. We were sharing the trip with the summit baggers.
The forecast was good (hence the lack of snow) and so an early start was in order. The worse alpine start always makes me cringe a little so we aimed to get up at 6:30am and head out after an hour. We left at 7:45 am.
The route we took crossed a streambed where the snow had been washed away, pretty much the only ice we saw. We then followed up the slopes crossing through an obvious snow gap in the rock band to gain the ridge. Simon thought that the
route was round the right side of the first pinnacle, aptly named the Grand Pinnacle. It wasn’t and there was a 15m rock pitch on the rope to the top. (The route is normally along the ridge). Normally this is just good fun/training but the ability of two 20kg rocks to not stay on the mountain but roll out of my hands just missing my legs increased my heart rate somewhat. “Welcome back to NZ mountaineering” Simon said! I caught my breath and then went off to bag the top.
We then spent far too long faffing about setting up a belay for the next stage. I’ll skip the details though the abseil was a nice 50m. You are supposed to be able to ice climb this face, but we were just being careful about not knocking any more rocks off.
Time was on my mind as we had just wasted too much of it and the sun was warming its way through the breeze. The Middle Pinnacle gave it back to us, a snow walk almost to the top followed by a 20m abseil to the slopes below. Simon mentioned that last time he couldn’t get through this section but the snow was generally good, though starting to soften a bit.
We stopped at the notch for lunch looking at the possible routes ahead. There were three ways, a short bypass to the right, a longer bypass but all the way to the top round to the left or over the top. The fact that it was 12:30pm, and the escape routes were easy made us decide on over the top. It comprised of a moderate snow slope requiring both ice tools followed by a rock climb to the ridge. The snow actually went further than we could see and we set an anchor for the rock section. It didn’t look too bad up to the ridge bu
t the ridge looked sharpish.
First impressions some times are right and the climbing on the ridge was definitely towards fun. We managed about 30m of it. From an anchor on the ridge we dropped to slopes 10m to its left which gave easy access to the top, called the First Pinnacle (We had gone the wrong way, doh!) Here there were many more fresh footsteps and some good down climbing that brought us to a broad section of the ridge from where we dropped in to a gully which led to the ski field.
We stopped in the café for a drinks and chips at 3pm before heading down to the lodge for a shower before the main group came back.
The next morning we ran through some rope work with the summit group. We had done our job and it was murky outside!