The One in which I Came the Closest to Dying

Year: 2016
Destination: Ivory Lake Hut
Goal: Shenanigans
Status: Barely Alive

Goooood Evening Ladies and Gents!
Welcome back to another episode of Is Luke Alive, with your host, Luke Notdeadyet Jensen. This is a special installment in the series folks; "Surviving the NZ: Snow Edition" with special guest Tyler Smallwood! Can we get a round of applause? Wooohooooo! Peachy. Moving on.

For this week's episode, we take you deep into Western New Zealand, where our two fearless adventurers make an attempt at the remote Ivory Lake Hut. To begin their journey, they stopped and consumed the most essential ingredient to their adventure, Subway, their power meal for the days ahead. After arriving at the trail-head shortly after, they spent the night in the car, eagerly awaiting their future expedition. We awoke to a bright and sunny West Coast day.

The morning and early afternoon were filled with a quick jaunt up onto the ridge. Now, this was by far, the craziest trail I have ever hiked on. I have done some pretty crazy bushwhacking, but when it comes to an actual trail, it was pretty dodgy. I would say that we were on the trail about 70% of the time, and that pretty generous... and also not including the times we purposely left the trail. Yeah, it was pretty hard to see sometimes, and who knows what happened to the trail markers.
Anywho, whoever decided to make the trail clearly never maintains it, but that wasn't the real issue. Turns out they also hated switchbacks, as we were literally hand of hand climbing through scrubs and around trees for a good portion of the day.

That night we stayed at Dickie Spur Hut, just on top of the ridgeline. After looking through the hut check-in book, we discovered that on average, about 15 parties make it to Dickie Spur a year, and fewer than that actually make it all the way to Ivory Lake. (Check out this dope picture-Creds: Tyler)

The plan for the next day was to traverse Dickie Spur Ridge, and Sawtooth Ridge, and then descend on the other side towards Ivory Lake Hut. This is not the typical approach of attack. Usually people descend from Dickie Spur, follow a valley the length of our planned ridge traverse, and then ascend back onto a different ridge-line and down to Ivory Lake. However, there was a decent avalanche risk in the basin at the end of the valley, which we wanted to avoid. The other option was to bushwack through a valley on the Ivory Lake side of the ridge, but it is usually a 12 hour day... in the summer. We decided that our best bet was to get onto the ridge via a non-snowy route, and then follow the ascending ridge-line into the snowy regions, as there would not be avalanche danger on the top of the ridge.


Sooooo we got a nice and early start in the morning, and valiantly made it about halfway across Dickie Spur Ridge! Eventually, we had to make an executive decision that the knife-edge ridge was too sketchy too continue. There was too much snow to easily traverse the alpine bush, but there was too little snow to cover all the bush, and we kept falling through the thinly crusted top layer. Love innocently traversing along a ridge, and then sinking up to my mid-thigh in powder; my favorite. All in all, it was pretty dodgy.

We had two clear options at that point. Either A) We could turn around and head back to Dickie Spur Hut or B) We could build a Snow Palace! We clearly went with the safer, more reasonable option, and got to work on the Snow Palace immediately. We worked on our new home for about six hours until it was complete. The hope was that it would keep us warm so that we wouldn't freeze to death that night, and also that it would look cool cause Eye Candy is the name of the game when your life is on the line.

After completing our dope igloo that the Eskimos would be proud of, we retraced our steps a bit to a nearby peak, where we ate dinner and watched the sunset. Now, I need to make a short rant about Tuna Fish. Tyler Smallwood introduced me to probably one of the tastiest tramping dinners I have ever consumed. We put an incredible Tuna mix into couscous. That was it; it was amazing! Unfortunately, they do not sell this particular Tuna mix in the states, so naturally, I will be filling my suitcase with it for the return flight.

It was a COLD night despite the igloo. When we were having dinner, I'm pretty sure the moisture in my feet completely froze. Nature was definitely out to get us because we had to stumble our way through a wet jungle before heading up into the snowy alpine regions. Lets just say that our boots turned into great insulators, they were great at keeping the heat out. Praise the Lord for sleeping bag though, because those combined with the powers of the mighty Snow Palace, got us warm enough to fall asleep.

The next morning we woke up (This was the clutch part because weren't sure if that would actually happen), and after a quick victory dance, retraced all our steps from the last two days, and got back to the car by late afternoon. We took a quick drive out of our way on the West Coast to reach our essential ingredient for the post-adventure: three Domino's pizzas for $15. Now that's is NZ dollars mind you, which is $10 US.... for three pizzas!! #AllHailDomino'sPizza #Domino'sforPrez2016.

I would also like to make a shout-out to the goat, whose tracks we followed for most of the ridge. We couldn't believe some of the terrain that he managed to cover; rock on lonely, alpine goat.

Here are more pictures of the tramp. (If its a super-yum photo, creds are probably to Tyler; if its a meh photo, creds are probably to Luke). Honestly tho, this man is a wizard with a camera.

Woohoo river crossing through snow melt! That was a couple degrees from bathwater let me tell ya.

Stumbled upon an awesome homestead. We wanted to get in because we could see toilet paper and honey through the window, but it was locked. *Insert tears of sadness here*

Spiders are crazy yo

This is a good summary of how to navigate a West Coast track.

The goal was to get all the way to the end, in the top-left-hand corner, and then descend down the far side.

Buuuuut, building an igloo sounded way more exciting!

Ain't she a beaut

Sunset: Good. Clouds getting sucked down into a crazy hole: Better. The tuna and couscous I was eating: Best. 

Yeah, the Eye Candy came out all right.

That my friends is what the sky looks like, when you are sleeping.

Well everyone, thanks for reading! That's it for now!

Cheers,
Luke