Day 114 - this is the life
Crooked Spur hut —-> Royal hut 16km
Apart from a few lone clouds sitting lowly around the mountains, it was a gorgeously clear morning. The ground outside the hut and amongst the tussocks was frozen - the clear sky overnight had kept the temperature low enough for me to caterpillar my face with my sleeping bag for warmth.
John and I left the hut first around 8am and set off up through the tussocks towards the moon.
John is in his sixties but you’d think he was half that with the pace he makes going up hills. The trail was easy but climbed steadily through the tussock and then over skree for over an hour. He easily beat me to the top and I had to pretend my stops for breaths every ten minutes were pure scenery spotting.
Our roles reversed on the downhill however and I became the pacemaker as we set off down the skree.
The ground was thankfully still frozen at 10am. The crunch underfoot much more welcome than the sloppy mud it would have been otherwise.
Stone hut, our intended lunch destination came into view across the river around 11.30am. The notes estimated that Crooked Spur to Stone at 5 hours, but we’d done it in 3 and a half… I couldn’t work out if I was walking faster than normal or if the notes were just wrong. I was certainly taking less breaks than usual.
We had an early lunch at Stone hut and sat out the back of the hut basking in the sunshine.
The afternoon’s trail was for the most part lovely. A bit of bush bashing through the giant tussocks but otherwise a gentle meander alongside the stream to reach Royal hut a few hours later.
This landscape felt other worldly. Huts were placed on random flat bits of land that could have been stomped down by a giant potato masher. Maybe it was because the walking hours were wonderfully short but I was loving this section so far.
Like Crooked Spur, Royal hut was an old musterers hut dating back back to the 60s. It was so named as apparently King Charles and Princess Anne visited as children?! Steph had told me I could find their names on the door but after a good half an hour of looking I realised she was probably having me on…
A whole afternoon to relax, we dried our gear in the wind and I got a lot of blogging done. Two NOBOs Sarah and Jo turned up just as it was getting dark, they’d come over Stag Saddle that afternoon; our challenge for the morning. We swapped lots of stories of the trail so far and after hanging our food - we’d already heard the mice running around, I went to sleep slightly less cold than the night before.
