Pricks and Prospects - North Mt Owen

A cave prospecting trip report.

Trip members: L Main, N Silverwood and B Sandford. Area: North Owen. Objective: To assess access to and nature of cave prospects as discovered and photographed by N Silverwood.

          This trip had been a while in the making. Neil attempted to get it off the ground several months ago after sighting a number of promising looking prospects while on an earlier assignment on the hillside opposite. For various reasons the first trip fell over, which suited me well enough as I hadn’t been able to commit to that one. As the new year got of the out of the starting blocks, a strong undercurrent of hype eddied about as to the stunning character of these prospects. The ‘next Bulmer’ was one phrase used, ‘phreatic over vadose’ was another, ‘look at the sequence of development’, ‘no known previous exploration’, and even a ‘possible connection to Bulmer’ were featured in the propaganda newsfeed. It was hard not be a little impressed and thus eager to participate.

          A start sometime in the month of February was suggested as the next opportunity. I had a slightly awkward situation at work wherein I was quite keen to give a reasonable amount of notice as to when I would be away. So when in the end I got 36 hours notice, I had to pause to weigh up the exciting-ness of the prospects with the increased awkwardness of the short notice at work. But of course there was no real contest nor drama there.

          I had been having fun planning a extravagant menu on the basis of the anticipated fly-in, walk-out proposal. In the cold light of day the helicopter didn’t eventuate (ask Neil about it some time and watch his blood pressure rise alarmingly). So the packing list had to be re-worked to ‘super-light’ mode. I thought I’d done pretty well, until Lindsay got out his scales at the Courthouse Flats and my pack weighed in at over 17kg compared with ole ‘Slimbeam Silverwood’s’ feather-weight 10.2kg. Ouch. To be fair he had forgotten his teabags though…

Weigh in at Courthouse Flat

Snacks on the road

 

Neil 'Attenborough'

          Day one: Leave Westport at 9am, arrive half a hour late for our 10:30 rendezvous in Murchison only to find that Lindsay was even further behind due to an uncompromising number of stop-go road works. Eventually we arrived at Courthouse Flat, finalised our packing and were on the walking track by 2pm. ‘Grueling’ and ‘brutal’ had been Neil’s two favourite words to describe the walk-in (hence the initial plan to chopper in), but now he cajoled us with the estimate that we’d be setting up camp at 5 o’clock that same day. This was later revised to 6 and in truth ended up being after 8 o’clock. Still, it has to said that the walk up the gorge was breath-takingly beautiful, and equally cold. We swam, we climbed, we slipped and slid our way over enormous boulders and through pools of liquid nitrogen, and at the time thought ‘we’re never coming back this way’. Happily the weather was as warm as toast and once we had exited the gorge (after some 2 ½ hours) we soon thawed and ceased to resemble Smurfs. 

 

The calm before the Gorge

Our camp site seemed idyllic. Flat, smooth, grassy, near to water and clear of gorse. After a few minutes of unpacking and stomping about however we began to notice some very very strange things. A large metal frypan, a bunch of cord and most peculiarly a home-made hanger on a bolt about half a metre off the ground up the side of an enormous block of marble. Clearly others had been here before and had had some odd bolting requirements for whatever they were doing. Later it transpired this area was the fabled ‘Footrot Flats’ that had been much used during the exploration of Turks Torrent.

Base camp at Footrot Flats

Day Two: We decided (or maybe just Neil did) to split into two teams and canvas access options to our appointed prospects. Neil got off to a good start, spying another new cave prospect not far from our camp site and then ‘re-finding’ Turks Torrent all before Lindsay and I had finished our cuppa tea. Neil ventured up stream, found his target and explored it as far as he was able with the gear he had on hand. This we knew in real time as it unfolded throughout the day as we had taken walkie talkies. Lindsay and I had been tasked was to hike 2-300 vertical metres above the streambed and attempt to match the photos Neil had taken from the valley-side opposite. This proved challenging and on the whole unrewarding. The oblique angles of the photos, a general vagueness in specific distances/locations and sheer bluffs of 40-80m metres kept us from honing in on our target.

A word on pricks. It is well acknowledged and generally well appreciated that New Zealand doesn’t have much in way of biting, lacerating nasties. No snakes, tigers, bears or seriously poisonous spiders etc. Which is all very well, until you go somewhere like North Owen. Here there are any number of opportunities to get bitten or lacerated or both by nasty prickers galore. Wasps are numerous beyond belief in the area. Approaching their nests is an open invitation to multiple stings, but even a casual passing-by of a lone beastie can lead to trouble. Wasp stings can give rise to surprising and decidedly unpleasant reactions on a persons person. Both Neil and Lindsay got wasp stings on their wrists, and both swelled up to Michelin Man proportions. Bush Lawyer makes an effortless and efficient job of slicing skin into curious crimson patterns with a single swish. That it then leaves little barbs just short of easy removal to fester away is, I guess, an added bonus. Onga onga is a terror with an interesting twist, insomuch as, anecdotally at least, it seems that you can build up a smidge of resistance to its venom. After 3 days of regular stinging-nettle input with hardly a tingle to make mention of, however, this didn’t help Neil one little bit, when he sat on a branch-full and immediately thereafter sported the best shotgun-splatter eruption of inflamed lumps I’ve ever seen. Sandflies, as annoying and numerous as they are don’t even rate a mention in company such as this. Biddy Bids (which love your socks) and Hook grass (which loves your hairy legs) probably don’t need too much air-time individually either, collectively though they added weight to our general malaise .

 Day Three: It was decided that we would see if our super-powers combined would crack the access to the prospect that Lindsay and I had not got anywhere near on the previous day. Firstly we walked far enough upstream to get a direct bead on our target. It seemed surreal to see the prospects in the flesh after all this time. This immediately gave us a useful perspective on the situation and was probably what we should sought out first the day before. Much discussion ensued as to the various merits of the upward trending routes that we could see before us. Choosing a likely looking line we took a bearing off the sun and charged off into the thick undergrowth. As we ascended the bush opened a little for us and the percolating sunlight - which allowed for a more verdant and consistent Onga onga ground-coverage, but on the whole our progress was steady and non-fatal. Bets were placed on what the altitude of the prospect would be and from memory we were all at least 100m too low. Extraordinarily the trail of bush we were siphoning through continued all the way to our destination. Good management rather than good luck of course. By lunch time we were just below a cavernous black shadow with only metres of greasy slope dotted with stinging-nettle left to negotiate. It was a team effort to scramble up the last block of slick high-angle rock from where we could finally see clearly the tree that stood in the entrance. Neil had worried about this tree, that it existed that is. Large healthy trees should know better than to grow directly in front of large cave systems. And of course they do. As our eyes pierced the shadows we could quickly see that this was a rock-shatter overhang and nothing more.

Lindsay scrambles up into 'Hamburger Hill Cave'

 

Neil lunching in Hamburger Hill Cave

Selfie in Hamburger Hill Cave

View out from Hamburger Hill Cave

Hamburger Hill Cave lower left as seen from afar

We sat in the shade of the overhang and lunched in morbid silence.

After eating, we took a cursory look at the access requirements of the next large shadow above us and declaimed the likelihood of it being of the self-same nature to that of its recently visited neighbour. By the time we had reached the valley floor again it was nudging teatime. Neil found another prospect close to our camp site. Having been for a closer look at the really big prospect below the camp the night before (to count how many bolts/drill batteries would be needed to reach the entrance when we next came back), this evening we cruised upstream to the latest point of interest. Why it is that I get designated as the ‘youngest’ in these groups (greenest perhaps) I not sure, but I was dispatched to see what lay in store. The first of the two shadows was another rock-shatter feature. The second was mostly the same also, excepting that it did have some small amount of solutional development off to one side. Enough that I could say it was a cave, had lots of brittle skin-piercing cave coral and a nice selection of small-bird bones. That said, you’d be safe to place a large-ish wager that it’ll never feature in a high-gloss, full-colour, adjective-laden coffee-table book on the subject of caves.

That evening it rained, only a little, but enough to make the apportioning of the sleeping spaces under the single communal fly to take on critical proportions. One person (names cannot of course be named here) maintained a territorial border at approximately the mid-line of the shelter – they protested that there was a steep sided bank on their outside edge that necessitate this. One of us had to maintain a clear line as to how far they could shove over only because this was the actual dripline (the one that was dripping) and if the fly could do one thing for us, surely keeping us dry was that one thing. So far so good, unless you were that third person. There wasn’t much room left in the middle. In some social circles the communal housing of males in this context would dictate that there was already no room left at all. However, by lying on their side, and using a large-scale shoe-horn it was the work of few minutes to achieve a horizontal orientation. There was only one other minor hiccup to be overcome for this ‘middle’ person, which was that the site selected for the raising of the shelter happened to place a large hole inside its perimeter, just about where you might have thought your hips should have gone – if you were that middle person. No problem to any good caver though. Lindsay had bought a 60m length of climbing rope that could be laid out much as one might lay out a Flemish flake that been adapted to meet a gap-filling role. Of course one did well to remember that the chasm needed back-filling before one lay down, or else one to go through the awkward process of getting up again, finding the rope, piling the rope into the hole, squeezing ones sleeping mat in edgeways between the comatose bodies either side and then choosing whether you wanted to lie down on your left side or your right side for the rest of the night, all over again. Pity that person.

Pools of liquid nitrogen

As the days had gone by, the Arctic death-embrace of the trek-in up the Gorge had mellowed in our collective memories and was by the final day being recalled with descriptive fondness; ‘fun’ and ‘a blast’, and ‘I’d bring my friends here’ etc. Added to which we had been exposed to some fairly robust vertical tramping during our prospecting and the thought of carrying our packs out, right to the top of the hill in this warm weather helped to tint our eye-glasses a deeper shade of rose. Thus the leafy-cool shade of the gorge cunningly serenaded us. We voted 3-0 with no abstentions that down-stream was the one true way. Indeed the going was much improved. Partly on account of now going with the ice/river-flow, partly that we were by now familiar with the general arrangement of the thing and partly that we omitted the chapter on ‘getting lost in the bush’ that we had dabbled in on the way up. Neil was so enthused with the canyoning aspect of the route that he attempted to follow the river the whole way back to the carpark, but thinking we’d be lonely without him, re-joined us after an hour or so.

Great scenery and caving potential, good food and company, gloriously fine weather, an excellent trip all told.