A little bit of fail on Mount Greenlaw

This was a trip report that I wrote for the Canterbury University Tramping Club TROG back in 2016. This was one of my formative early "close-call" mountaineering trips, and interesting for me to look back on now! Enjoy, be safe,

and may you have more success on Mt. Greenlaw than we did!

It was the middle of summer and after a few chilled out weekends it was decided to tackle something a bit more challenging. Mt Greenlaw seemed like a good option; it sits just outside the Arthurs Pass boundary at the head of the Avoca valley and is the highest in the area after Mt Murchison. At mountaineering grade 2 it seemed doable. The plan: Walk into Anti Crow hut Friday night. Head up the Anti Crow river and over Gizeh Col to camp at the head of the Avoca river on Saturday night. Sunday: get up early, climb Greenlaw then walk out back over Gizeh col and out the Anti Crow all the way to the car. Easy! Sure Sunday would be a big day but should be manageable right? When I told my friend Simon about the plan his response was “Greenlaw?!?! Man that is a biiiig weekend!”. Hmmm…

Walking up the Waimakariri to reach the Anti Crow River.

So Fraser, Mary and I set out and it all started according to plan; the gravel bash into Anti Crow in the dark on Friday night that always seems like it’s taking way longer than it is, then a long walk up the Anti Crow River on Saturday that also seemed to take a lot longer than you’d think looking at the map! The nor’wester did make for some nice moody clouds and rainbows however, and we were glad to be just east enough to be out of the worst of it!

The lower Anti Crow River.

Time to change out of wet boots!

Mary falling in one of many holes in the rough upper Anti Crow.

Nearing the top of Gizeh Col struggling up the steep loose rock and scree, feeling some solid gusts and watching the clouds racing overhead we thought we might have to go to plan B and camp on the Anti Crow side of the Col and do one of the smaller peaks around there. I don’t think Mary would rate the climb up to the Col in her all time favourite tramping moments, however once we reached the top (about 6 hours after leaving Anti Crow hut) it was definitely windy but not actually as bad as we’d feared, and the view made it all worth it. You could see all the way down to the Waimak, down the craggy upper Avoca, up to Mt Harper looking particularly gnarly from this angle, then the bulk of Mt. Greenlaw dominating the whole scene.

Gaining height to Gizeh Col. The Anti Crow valley and Waimakariri below.

Gaining height to Gizeh Col.

Gizeh Col!

We found a nice campsite on some benches at about 1750m with a fantastic view of Greenlaw. No water, but we’d filled up enough on the other side of the col. The campsite did have the unfortunate attribute of apparently being quite the wind tunnel. My old Fairydown tent was getting pummeled, almost bent inside out by the gusts. It turned out that just moving it 10m away into a slightly less scenic spot made all the difference. So Fraser and I set our alarms for 5am, thinking it looks like about half an hour to the base of the climb, six hours or so up and back to the campsite. Sweet!

Camp in the upper Avoca valley, looking across to Mt. Greenlaw.

The tent not doing too well in our wind tunnel.

Sunset over Mt. Greenlaw.

Fraser and I got away at 6am, leaving Mary to have a pleasant sleep in, then quickly found that we didn’t really know the way down to the Avoca River from here in the dark. We were pretty sure that there must be an easier way than down-climbing bluffs but it wasn’t obvious. After a tough climb back up loose talus we made it to the base of the bluffs of Mt Greenlaw. It only took us almost three times longer than we’d envisaged! After much discussion about how to tackle the bluffs we took the wrong route. We started scrambling up the rock just on the downstream side of a steep sided gorge. I’m pretty sure the better way would be to go up nice looking red rock further downstream. Fun easy scrambling started to get a bit less easy then decidedly too steep for our tastes so we descended into the gorge, found there was nowhere to go, abseiled down a waterfall with a chockstone as an anchor, then finally found another chossy route up on the true left side of the gorge.

Climbing the lower bluffs.

Abseil in the lower bluffs.

Easy climbing near the top of the bluffs.

By about 9:30am we made it to the base of the Avoca Glacier and were putting our crampons on when we heard an almighty crash and a series of boulders hurtling down off the face of the glacier and down the gully beneath it, right where we’d been walking ten minutes before. In hindsight we should’ve known that things would be starting to melt and we should’ve avoided that gully as much as possible, a lesson that I’m glad we survived to learn! We hurriedly headed up the hard blue glacial ice, away from what we thought were likely rockfall paths.

The Avoca Glacier.

It turns out that Mt. Greenlaw is in quite the state and is really falling to pieces. We carried on up to the bottom of a patch of particularly loose rock beneath the top snow slope. Getting across this rock involved some classic choss scrambling where you never really know if your hold is going to stay attached to the ground. By the time we got to the bottom of the top snow slope we just had about 200 vertical metres to go but it was 11am and we knew we had the hardest part of the climb ahead of us; up the steep rock between the snow slope and the summit. There was also the constant chatter of rock fall and the thought of our descent back down the bluffs, back 300m up to Gizeh col then all the way out the Anti Crow. So we soaked in the view and decided to call it at about 2100m.

Turning around from our high point. Mt. Rolleston and Mt. Armstrong in the distance.

We thought we could get away with descending the first snow slope we came to on the way down without crampons, however it was still a bit hard and covered in lots of small bits of rock debris. A small slip started me laughing and half-heartedly planting my ice-axe pick to stop myself. When this didn’t work it was “crap I guess I should actually self arrest or this could get bad”. I eventually came to a stop, with a few grazes from the rocks on the snow. My first self-arrest in anger! Further down we decided we couldn’t really avoid the gully of rockfall death beneath the glacier so sprinted through it one at time. We descended the chossy gorge without too much problem, just a couple of abseils, and in no time were scrambling back up to the campsite to join Mary for lunch and a wee nap. The problem with naps is that they don’t actually seem to provide you with a lot of enthusiasm for getting up and walking for hours more. So we were thoroughly tired by the time we got back up to Gizeh Col at 5:30pm, with only another 7 hours worth of walking ahead of us.

Back at the top of the bluffs. Our campsite was on the patch of grass directly across the valley.

Abseiling a step during the descent.

Climbing back up to camp.

Back at Gizeh col! Mt. Harper behind, which was the scene of my one of my first, and still most scary, mountaineering trips. A story for another time perhaps...

The walk out the Anti Crow predictably took ages, and seemed even longer in the dark. Slowly the aching in my legs spread throughout my whole body and the thoughts crept in of whether I really needed to be back in Christchurch on Monday morning? I think the others were getting similar feelings too because by the time we reached Anti Crow Hut just after midnight there was no enthusiasm for anything other than sleep. We got up earlyish on Monday with Fraser resigned to a half day at work (as a postgrad student I didn’t have such a moral dilemma) and made it to Klondyke Corner just in time to be welcomed by Frasers dad, who had been a bit concerned when we didn’t turn up on Sunday night!

Descending the Anti Crow as it gets dark...

Walking out from Anti Crow hut on Monday morning.

So overall I think Simon’s analysis was right. Mt. Greenlaw is a big weekend trip, possibly too big. Though I think we will be back, maybe just when there’s a bit more snow and an extra day up our sleeve! I’m sure for people with more fitness and better decision-making abilities it would be fine as a weekend trip.

Date of trip: 27/28th February 2016.