The 4 of us went up to cascade saddle from the Matukituki valley and camped by cascade saddle for a night. beautiful.
Its a 1400m climb which which sounded daunting with full gear but we took our time and made stupid lame jokes all along so it didnt seem that bad. I felt that marions lookout on the overland was harder but thats probally because i had a 35kg pack earlier this year.
Some sections were quite steep due to the track wearing away from the recent earthquakes
and some sections were hard to follow because the orange poles that marked the path were totally covered undersnow or just jutting out abit at the tips. A GPS helps in this circumstance
unaware of the dangers, we had actually camped right in an avalanche zone the previous night because there was a river there for water supply. Only after we packed up in the morning, did we realised how dangerous it was. the red spot was our camp spot the previous night and you can see an avalanche falling down. DOCS did say that you cant camp anywhere except on the saddle itself, but who listens to DOCS anyway?
Then we rafted down the dart towards dart hut which was pretty easy going. a few portages due to low water levels but nothing too hard. The only scary bits were the constant avalanches all around us. one probally fell within 100m of us.
Right after dart Hut theres some pretty funky rapids that we chickened out which was probally a sensible idea. however from cattle flats onwards, it seemed really easy going..... until one part a few km after the cattle flats swing bridge where theres a massive boulder that hides the rest of the river. we thought it was easy going so we continued around it, only to find some pretty hardcore rapids. I'm not going to gloat and claim it was class 4 or 5 but i remember that it was simply all whitewater, very fast, and much scarier than the class 3 i did with a tour company. I was yelling Yeee haaa going through all these rapids then there was this whirlpool type of thing in the river that spun me round and round for quite a few turns and dunked me. i fell into the rapids and then the river kind of goes under all these massive boulders which i got sucked down underneath with it.
some reason i was pinned underwater by my paddle to the front of me and white water behind me. it was totally dark like in aan underwater tunnel or something. seemed like a minute had passed and i was running out of air after taking 2 gulps of water when i managed to free myself and got ejected out through a little 50cm opening and managed to cling onto a rock. half an hour had passed before i managed to leap frog back to where i got dunked only to find my raft still spinning round and round, so I was lucky nothing was lost (including my life)
2 friends who were behind me luckily saw me get dunked from behind and had already docked to the side to avoid the whirlpool but one mate who also got stuck in that whirlpool was on the other side of the river without his raft, with cliff faces on both sides and rapids in between. we chucked over 6 lots of 1.5mm glo cord to tie to him and winch him over which was a stupid idea because they all snapped under the rapids but luckily he got to the side again before falling into that little tunnel where i got trapped. (what ever you call it). unfortuantely it was that other side and not our side.
i think that near miss freaked him out and there was no way for him to climb the cliffs to get to the next or previous swing bridge, so we just popped the epirb and call in helicopters.
http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/southland/137824/hunter-had-broken-leg
the incident nearly made me sell the packraft ... but nah! fun outweighs the dangers.
lesson learnt: when in doubt, scout!
The helicopter rescue guy said he's saved quite a few people from that section of water. it puzzles me because unless they're packrafters, i wonder how they got their rafts into that spot in the first place. Its highly unlikely hikers would be found climbing down the cliff into that section of water.
other than that rocky section, the rest of the river from the helicopter looks fairly easy sailing.
below is a pic of that dangerous section of water. theres no signs there to warn of the dangers so maybe i'll contact DOCS to make a sign there for stupid rafters like us. It really is an easy trap to fall into when you think the water is calm and then it suddenly turns into a raging drown machine.