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Emmett 2018 May

Mt Emmett revisited 2018 May


Even as we savoured our summit views on Mt Emmett five minutes before our absolute latest turnaround time, I knew that the light was already a little too golden; the shadows, marginally too long. We would be descending in the dark: not a good idea when the forecast was for negative five overnight, and when we had several patches of very thick scrub to negotiate before we reached a path. I sure hoped we could dispense with all the tricky sections before we completely lost visibility.

Can you see my daughter climbing? The light is already a bit too golden.
Down we climbed, trying to combine haste with care – the need to get out of here with the equally important requirement not to break a bone or damage a muscle needed for movement. (I was, a bit later, to skewer an eye with a twig, but that didn’t stop forward progress, fortunately. I bled and kept going).


That’s Barn Bluff in the distance there.
It wasn’t just that darkness was rapidly approaching. My anxiety lay in the fact that the “Emmett-Lump saddle” ahead was very thick indeed, with the barest hint of a pad that was almost impossible to detect even in good light. One metre to the side of that adumbrated pad, and you were in a fighting wall of bosky resistance from which you would not necessarily emerge that night. My other angst stemmed from the fact that, already, one could see ice crystals forming in slightly more open areas. It was not a night to be outside without the protection of tent, sleeping bag and insulating mats and so on. We just HAD to get out of here, and fast.


Oh oh. It’s getting dark, and we still have a big descent to do. But when it’s this beautiful, who cares about the time? Not us.
Out the other side of the thickest of the patches, we safely reached a brief band of alpine grass in between two scoparia swathes. I quickly grabbed a couple of photos, because all around, the scenery was beginning to look absolutely magical, but I still had too much sense of urgency for carefully constructed shots. We still had this last band to negotiate, and THEN we could relax. After this next part, the rest would be easy alpine terrain and then a track. It wouldn’t matter then if darkness took control.


The dawn we climbed back up to see.
Mist rose to left and right in roseate, colourful swirls that chased each other across the slopes, obscuring and then revealing the mountains all around. Indelibly etched in my mind is the image of these wisps, my daughter’s silhouette and the setting sun behind Cradle Mountain just ahead. It took your breath away. At last, all the tricky parts were dispensed with.


Now we could relax and photograph and enjoy. We’d missed the best light, but the remnants were still floating us up in waves of pleasure. Behind us lay the mountain of our quest, Mt Emmett, which had entered the “blue hour” tones; leaning over its shoulder was a nearly full moon, piercing the indigo sky. In front lay Cradle Mountain , which was still sporting alpenglow pinks, yellows and burnt orange.  The clouds swirled some more.


Pelion West and Ossa floating above the clouds.
“Hey mum”, said Kirsten, “Let’s climb down the mountain to our packs, eat, and then bring our stuff back up here to sleep.” (We’d left our packs at Rodway Hut far below.)
How I love my daughter!!!! I don’t know anyone else in the whole world who would say that to me. To say that, you need to love nature so much you’re willing to do it; you need to be fit enough for it to be a possibility (we’d already had a very full day, as you might imagine); and you have to be as zany as I am. Who else, but a daughter?
“Yes, yes. Fabulous idea”, I enthused.
Now, the job of descending from this realm of beauty was less depressing. We’d be back in a few hours.


Back at Rodway Hut (where it was surprisingly cold inside), we cooked and ate dinner, packed our stuff back in the packs, and off we set up the mountain for the second time that day (having driven from Launceston that morning). We left the hut about 7.30, torches on and climbed through the moody rainforest, with patches of silvery moonlight casting shadows every now and then.


When we arrived back on top, despite now being much higher, we were a great deal warmer than when we’d left the hut. Climbing had warmed us up so nicely, we could pitch the tent without frozen hands (yet). It was so beautiful, with a star-studded sky, we barely had time to even ponder the extent of the chill enveloping us. As per our previous adventure together at Easter, (see my blog on Mt Sprent), we squished both of us into my solo Hilleberg tent. THAT warmed us up, definitely. We made sure we put our water under our sleeping bags so it couldn’t freeze overnight, had one last gaze at our starry environs, and turned in for the night. It was cosy, to say the least.
“You wouldn’t want to do this with someone you didn’t like”, I mused, before we closed our eyes to sleep.

Sunrise was predictably lovely, although the cloud bank to the east prevented the rocks turning orange as the sun rose. Mist enveloped us completely from time to time.
We were pretty cold after the photo session. My feet were numb, but that didn’t stop us breakfasting al fresco. The day morphed into a cold, moist one. We didn’t care. We were buoyed by the beauty of the preceding sixteen or so hours since sunset had begun, and by the wonderful feeling of having been in the wilderness together.

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Emmett 2014 May

Mt Emmett

We had not set out intending to climb Mt Emmett on this trip: instead, Mts Inglis and Proteus were on our agenda. However, the dismal weather forecast had us altering our plans. The worst day was to be our second one, so it was decided that we’d only go as far as Scott-Kilvert hut, behind Cradle Mountain, on the first day (instead of to the tarn on the moorland past the belly of Barn Bluff), and see just how much rain was going to fall thereafter before we finalised Plan B.

Approaching Hanson’s Peak, day 1

Day two was as bad as predicted, so the new plan was to climb Mt Emmett on this day, and then move to a better location for attacking Inglis the next one. 

 
En route, day 1

To the average person, Mt Emmett is not a name that means a lot. If you get out the appropriate map, you’ll find it sitting beside Cradle Mountain, minding its own business, looking nice and harmless as a bunch of smooth brown elliptical lines. When seen from the Cirque between Cradle and Waterfall Valley hut, it looks like a nicely rounded and gentle scree slope, much like many of the English Fells that you can dash up at a run. Before I knew better, I had once planned on sleeping on the top. 

A beautiful autumn bonsai Fagus plant on Hanson’s Peak

 Cradle from Hanson’s Peak
Unfortunately, the reality of this cozening deluder is that this is a mountain of angular boulder rubble, which could have been part of some story of angry gods throwing fridge-sized stone missiles at enemies and then cursing them so that they became covered in slimy black moss to destroy any approach efforts of hapless humans.

Twisted Lakes in autumn glory

We had already had one failed attempt on this mountain, admittedly due to snow (see my other Emmett entry: http://www.natureloverswalks.com/mt-emmett/ ) and I had not entertained the notion of taking my husband with Parkinson’s disease back there. My plan was to do it in summer on a nice dry day (without him), probably solo as this is not a popular mountain that anyone I know volunteers to do twice. However, the group was doing it in the rain, and my husband said he could do it too. Should a wife tell her husband he’s mistaken and make him stay behind for his own safety and the good of the group? (He laughed and said “Yes” when I read him that sentence.) “Not this time; not yet,” was the equivocating conclusion I came to after long reflection during the night as I listened to the insistent rain.

 

The moist mist swirled around as we left the hut the next day. We had elected to camp the previous night rather than stay in the hut, so were lugging a wet tent up the slope, but we love our tent, so that’s OK. I stayed at the back of the train, observing my husband’s progress, trying to read from his movement whether I should exercise some power of veto here. I was genuinely worried about this mountain – but again I let him have the call, not wanting to cramp his style with my own anxieties for his safety. 

Laccaria sp near our tent

Even highly competent and experienced walkers find Emmett with a water film over the slime to be a challenge (see rockmonkey’s blog) but we nonetheless set out over the slippery rocks that presented a line rather than a flat plane as their uppermost surface. I hoped that if Bruce ran into trouble, it would be in the first hundred metres to enable an easy exit. He seemed to be coping as well as some of the others in the group, and as he often goes much better if I’m not there as a backstop, I went on ahead, having fun crabbing my way on all fours across the slippery obstacle course, whilst checking behind at regular intervals to make sure he was coming, though the thick mist meant that, at best, I could see people who could see people who could report that he was progressing steadily.

Deceptive Mt Emmett from the Cradle Cirque next day

There were no commanding views to be had in the fog that day, but the best view for me was that of my husband approaching the summit of what I thought was his most challenging mountain yet. Bravo B. It snowed lightly (sleet really) before we began our descent. The weather was so bad I had not even bothered to bring my camera to the top; I have plenty enough photos of people in a grey, obnubilating veil labelled as this or that peak. 

Ramaria ochraceosalmonicolor beside the track

The trip down was as careful as the ascent had been and we all got there uninjured, picked up the heavy packs that we’d deposited in the Cradle-Emmett saddle, and made our way further on to Waterfall Valley hut where we could attempt to dry out our sodden gear before the next day’s demanding adventure (see natureloverswalks.com/mt-inglis/).

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Emmett 2013 Sept

 Mt Emmett   28-9 September, 2013

Above Twisted Tarns
This trip was so very beautiful, we sounded like a pack of dogs going “Wow, wow, wow” all the time. I took an unconscionable number of photos, from which fourteen appear here. Even that number seems rather large, but having only just come back today, I find it hard to eliminate any more than that. I need a bit more distance to be more selective.

The track between Scott-Kilvert Hut and the Emmett-Cradle saddle was a major cascading waterfall with deep pools in it, and the bushes overhanging it were laden with water, so that we were sopping by the time we reached said saddle and its furious wind, having managed to somehow keep our boots dry the whole morning, despite the snow and rivulets on parts of the track.

From the saddle, we began a kind of goose-step march through thick snow over / around (bit of both) the nameless hump on the map, down to the Emmett-Hump saddle and then through the thick scrub of that next saddle where we had to fight closely packed bushes as well as deep snow. The wind was so strong and the going so tough (and the clouds so thick) that I didn’t take any photos in this section.

 

Climbing Hanson’s Peak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rocks on Emmett
In fact, this here is the first photo I took after leaving Scott-Kilvert Hut. This was, alas, our turning around point. It depicts the final few hundred metres before the summit. Maybe those boulders don’t look very big. They’re not as big as, say, those on Pelion West. However, the snow made them treacherous, and we knew that a slip in between rocks that wedged a foot, or a breakage would be disastrous. And daylight was running out. It was already way too late for any help to come, and to be out there overnight would be death. We were only 400 ms from the top, but it was time to say “goodbye” and try again another, hopefully rather less snowy, day.
We arrived back at the hut sopping wet, and cold from the icy blast that had raged on the exposed flanks of the back of Cradle. We had been planning to sleep in our tent, but changed our minds. Scott-Kilvert Hut was by this stage a kind of island in the middle of a flowing lake. A hot cup of soup and dinner were in order. We hung up our sodden gear, pretending that might help it dry, but knowing that we’d have to don it again in the morning.
My sleeping bag was warm and cosy. Every now and then I could hear the wind having a bit of a rage during the night, but mostly I slept warm and snug, despite the lack of real heat in the hut. (For European readers, and I see I have many [thanks], these huts are not like yours. They are shelters with floor to sleep on, and no electricity. You bring your own stove, food, mattress and sleeping bag, and if you want a shower, you go outside for five minutes and stand in the rain.)