Day 84 - the rintouls

Slaty hut —-> Rintoul hut 13km

The tradie mouse kept the night interesting with its nonchalant attitude towards hut etiquette. It’s intermittent attempts at gnawing through the wall and zoomies around Annie’s bedside meant no one had much rest. Andy was also in the middle of a horrendous bout of sickness which kept him up all night poor guy.

Amongst it all, I got a few hours sleep so at my 6am alarm started to get ready. The others were so exhausted, and Andy so under the weather that they decided to rest for the morning and walk the afternoon if they were feeling up to it.

Josh and i started walking this morning as we’d finished yesterday - surrounded by cloud. It was a 5 hour walk to Old Man hut and we kept everything crossed that the five hours wouldn’t be spent with these views…

After an hour, a glimmer of hope broke through the cloud and the sun beamed down on us from above.

The cloud started to thin out, and whilst we couldn’t see properly off the edge of the mountains, we could at least see more than ten metres in front of our feet.

With every minute the cloud lifted further and we started to see what the Richmond Ranges were all about.

Suddenly being able to see gave energy to our achy legs and we hopped from peak to ridgeline with a new found ease, gawping at the views as we climbed over each new rock.

We were often right on the cliff edge, but it was so beautiful neither of us really noticed.

We found a relatively flat patch of rock for our chairs, and had the most perfect lunch we’d had on trail to date. Zero wind, sun beaming down, incredible view - this was why we were doing this.

We had a decision to make after lunch, to push on to Rintoul hut (another 5 hours) or to stay at Old Man hut, very close to where we were having lunch. The section in between Old Man and Rintoul is lauded as the hardest section of the entire TA… and not a section to be done in bad weather as you climb and scramble across two major peaks - Little Rintoul and Mt Rintoul. With a clear sky and full bellies, we were game.

We set off, waving down to Old Man hut, grateful that our knees didn’t have to endure the climb down.

The skree slope up to Little Rintoul was an ascent of 300m over 1.3km - one metre up for every four travelled - pretty bloody steep. Heads down poles in, we powered up.

Stopping every few minutes under the guise of admiring the view allowed the burn in our calves to temporarily die down.

Closer to the top the skree turned to rock and we climbed around the backside of the peak, wincing ourselves and our backpacks along the thinnest of ledges.

There was a moment where I held my breath as we rock climbed around the final tip to reach the top…

…but as soon as we had made the final clamber we had a 360 degree view across the range and to Mt Rintoul opposite. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

One peak, tick! Now we had to get off little Rintoul and repeat it all again for Mt Rintoul. Looking across at the other peak it seemed impossibly far, both to go down and to climb back up again.

We clambered down off the peak,

And after some peanut butter and crackers in the saddle of the two peaks, started the ascent up the next skree slope of Mt Rintoul. Just as long, just as steep and on tired legs took us just that bit longer to reach the top.

The views were just as incredible from the top, and we now had the added bonus of being able to see out over Nelson and the Tasman bay.

The sun was getting lower and with that brought the cold so we pegged it across the tops as fast as we could, eager to finally call it a day.

But the descent was going to be the steepest section we’d faced - almost a 500m descent in 1.5km. We both took some ibuprofen for our knees and prayed the skree was going to play ball.

By the time we’d descended back into the forest, we were both exhausted and in agony from the days downhill climbs. Never thought I’d look forward to an uphill vs downhill!

Mt Rintoul hut was set at the base of the mountain with a wonderful view up to the ridgeline. There were already a few inhabitants of the hut and whilst there was room for us, we chose to set up the tent for fear of another tradie mouse scenario.

We made dinner outside on the picnic table watching the sun go down. Before the final bits of light had vanished we were asleep.