Back in the world of domestic, electronic and commercial nonsense, I find it hard to adjust to sitting still in fine weather, so I decide to put fingers to keyboard and try and come to terms with the climb I have just returned from.

Mount Sefton had been on our to-do list for ages, and seeing as the university holidays were nearing their narrow end, and Dad had a week free before being pinned down by work, decisions needed to be made. As usual, thankfully, the weather made it for us. A big fat high had deposited itself over the Tasman sea, and was expanding, waiting for us.

Sunday morning saw us packing and at 1.30pm Dad and I were off, bound for the Wild West Coast. We planned to climb Sefton from sea level, as the East Face was home to a few too many ice and rock avalanches this time of year.

By nightfall we’d reached our accommodation- the carpark and longdrop at the end of the Copland Valley. We set up our tent while doing the anti-sandfly jig: waving hands and jumping around randomly, every so often running around in little circles and emitting foul language.

Warding off the beasties was a mission that night- thousands of them came out in full force as soon as we had opened the van doors and breathed our first lungfuls of West Coast air, that lovely bush and river smell you don’t find where I live. They must either swarm around in troops looking for me, or have a very efficient communication system: your arrival is sandfly free for all of 20 seconds, if you are lucky.

We ate dinner in a breezy spot by the river, then went to bed, falling asleep to a sunset through the mozzie net, the sound of the Karangahua River and a delightful “sandfly drizzle” on our tent fly, as dozens of them stuck between the tent and the fly kept crashing into its walls.

One good thing about the sandflies- yes, there is only the one- is that they speed up all the morning procrastinations and dawdlings and bring your estimated time of departure forward quite dramatically. We were packed up and ready to go in 45 minutes, and walking by quarter to 7.

Making our way past the DoC sign proclaiming a 7 hour day up to Welcome Flats Hut, I recalled walking down this track eight years before, when I’d done the Copland Pass with my family, and marveled at how long eight years seems but isn’t really.

Dad and I walked in running shoes to save time and keep our boots dry for the snowy parts, still 3000m above us. We unexpectedly disturbed two chamois at the river section, but there was otherwise a noticeable and sad lack of any other kind of life- the birds were either taking a day off or simply non-existent. We took a break three and half hours into it, to the great relief of my stomach, which was getting so hungry it was seriously considering eating itself. An hour later we reached the hut, but it was too early for lunch and there were too many patronizing Europeans so we kept going. Ok, only one patronizing European- a German or Swiss sounding guy who eyed our crampons and ice axes suspiciously before asking if we were doing the pass. When Dad replied, no, Sefton, he frowned at our equipment and said, “ In those boots?? And where is your rope?”Dad simply said he knew what he was doing. On our way back past the hut two days later I wrote in the hut book, ‘yes, we did do it in those boots’.

We stopped for lunch at the first creek with no sandflies, then carried on up to Scott Creek. By name it may be a creek, but benign and trickling and “creekly” it was most definitely not. My first thought when I saw the water pouring down a cliff, steep bushy bluffs either side and avalanche chutes framing a tiny hanging valley, was: we’re going up there??!! How, exactly?! The tops were shrouded in mist (just thermal fluff and nothing to worry about according to Dad) which made the whole scene seem even more unwelcoming. We reached the base of the waterfall and it dawned on me that Dad had only ever climbed down here, not up, and that was 24 years ago in 1979. I sat in the sun for an hour, worrying and drying my socks, while Dad disappeared into the undergrowth and looked for a route up. We ended up following the creek, sneaking up under a lumpy but hollowed congregation of old avalanche debris, through the dark drippy cold tunnel it formed, then climbing onto a ledge. Roping up, we bush-bashed and thrashed our way upwards through stubborn ribbonwoods and slippery flaxes. The waterfall was now dealt with, and the next three hours we occupied ourselves with finding a route through, between, over and around the haphazard arrangement of house-sized boulders we were surrounded by. The most wild-looking country I have ever been in stunned me whenever my eyes weren’t busy finding places for my feet to go; built either straight up or straight down, bushy fragments clinging to cliffs for dear life, huge towering rock turrets and spires above, waterfalls left and right, and limited options for human accessibility: steep scree and skinny bits of vegetation. I now understood why the weather had to be perfect for this, the ultimate nightmare would be being stuck here in the pelting rain with no escape from a runaway torrent being fed from every wall around us.

Another steep grunt, another pool and it looks like we are almost into the main basin. About six more false basins later I finally see the snow and alpine plants, on steep ravines leading down from less steep ridges; the main ‘basin’ I had been expecting.

At about 6.30 I ease my pack off my shoulders and sit down at our bivvy site. A couple of keas are wheeling around and loudly heralding their status as the rangers of this breathtaking place. There is nothing to do but sip my soup and watch the sun basting the snowy tops across the valley in orange then violet then night colours. My stuff is ready for tomorrow, and I settle down into my cocoon of sleeping and bivvy bags for a night of “peace, ease and comfort” before whatever the next day may bring. Or so I think. It’s my first night out like this and I spend most of it battling with the bivvy bag, which is too short to enclose me lying flat, so I either lie sideways or scrunched up. It is sealed by domes and a drawcord, rather ineffective at keeping my warmth in, and the cold glacier- breath breeze drifting down the valley, out. I manage to get warm just before I have to get up.

We leave a little late, at 7.30am, and continue up the ridge dividing the basin we arrived at the night before. The gradient is easy but near the snowline the rocks collapse into crumbling flakes, brittle like stale pastry. We stuff some of our overnight gear under a rock to collect on our way down, to make our packs lighter. We pack rocks around it to deter the keas, and soon after the rotten rock get to the snowline. Remembering there is no water from here on, too much time is spent looking for some before we finally put crampons on and sail upwards on the crispy snow, towards the sun and the views and maybe the summit. We come out on the wrong saddle for a start, so sidle around a ridge before we get to the last flattish place before Welcome Pass. A view new to me stretches away, showing off Mt Cook, La Perouse and Copland Pass with its cloud wave, gleaming in the sunlight of our third fine day in a row. The slope on our left falls down to the Copland Valley, now far below, where I know Douglas Rock Hut is, nestled somewhere in the bush.

The traverse around and up to Welcome Pass looks manageable and I reckon it will take about an hour. It takes us two. I am stuffed buy the time I catch up to Dad who somehow got quite far ahead.The heat is sweltering and my water is a relief to have, but I have a feeling it won’t last me the rest of the day. It is already 11.30, but now the top of Sefton is in sight, and that always makes a difference! The Douglas Neve still needs to be crossed though, and now I am roped to Dad so will have to move at the same pace as him. He reckons one hour to the next saddle, but my legs know it’ll be two. My progress is slow and Dad has to wait when he changes direction, as the rope goes tight and he has to stop until I make the corner. My feet start complaining on the hard snow and each vies for the prize of which hurts most, angled against the slope. Left foot uphill hurts my right ankle and the left heel; right foot uphill hurts the ball of my right foot and the left ankle. I’m thankful we’re not patronizing Europeans, who would no doubt have worn plastics. I decide it’s been too long since I’ve been in the mountains, I’m getting soft, and what is the point of miserating with my feet when I have this view to look at, which I catch glimpses of as we weave in and out of crevasses: the Landsborough Valley, which we looked up on the drive over, stretches away southwards, but what fascinates me is what I see straight at the bottom of the Neve. The crevasses proliferate and get more concentrated further down the slope until they look like they’ll form an icefall. But there is a huge cliff all around the head of the valley, and at the edge of it all the ice just stops. It’s like a giant who was bored one day thought he’d massacre the nice gentle gradient of the glacier and stuck a spade in halfway down, digging a hole like you would if scooping yourself some trifle. Bits of Neve thunder off the edge every so often, and Dad tells me the glacier completely reforms at the bottom from all the debris.

At our lunch stop, a filled-in crevasse, it’s one o’clock and I’m not feeling so well, perhaps it’s nerves or the subconscious worrying about time. I manage a lame lunch of a few crackers, a muesli bar and some scroggin then nearly lose my precious parka to the sneaky breeze. I wail uselessly then go and retrieve it when it thankfully stops. At 1.30 we leave again and I depress myself with trying to figure out how long it will take, based on how many metres we have been climbing per hour. It’s hot, I’m tired, and the top is still 400 vertical metres away. Before I know it we are on the saddle, and on our way up the last steep part. Things are looking up. We meet the strangest sight- more climbers! I’d almost forgotten other humans come here. As it turns out, one of them recognizes me; he used to be a ski patroller at Mt Dobson, our local ski field. Small world up here! They continue down, while we continue up…how easy it must be for them!

The ascent gets steeper and I concentrate on not looking up too often. I don’t understand people’s problems with looking down, for me it’s fine, you can marvel at how far you’ve come. But once you look up your chances of grimacing, at the distance or steepness or rocks and ice still to come, are fairly high. I realize now that I will actually get to the top, that it’s just a matter of gritting my teeth a bit, and wonder what I’ll do when I get there. Will I be sentimental or just relieved? I look forward to ringing Mum and looking down into the Hooker Valley, get the view from the top of the mountain I’ve always craned my neck to look at from Mount Cook Village.

It gets steeper still until I’m ramming the toe of one boot into the ice and ungracefully standing sideways on the other. My calves start grumbling, the whimpering, the screaming until I sheepishly have to ask Dad to slow down. “We are almost out of the steep stuff” he replies cheerfully. That word- almost- frustrates me, just when you need to be there it reminds you that are just… not….quite. The last few iced up rocks appear, finally, and as we climb past them a helicopter circles us quite closely, and although it pisses me off I wave and hope the people in it are admiring our efforts. Here we are, there’s the view, and Dad takes pictures before I ring Mum and send some text messages. I can’t help thinking, how stupidly civilized of me, we’re in the mountains for crying out loud, the whole idea is to get away from these things! (I promised to though, and this is the first time we’ve had reception…) Mum is pleased and of course worried, it’s 3.15pm and aren’t we tired after yesterday? That’s not the point really, we’re on the top, there is a big expanse of nothing in front of me, then the Mueller Glacier far below; Mount Cook is just a few wingflaps away and the Main Divide is a stupendous zigzag, running left and right and straight through me. I can nearly see Lake Tekapo. In the other direction, the Tasman sea glimmers and twinkles and it doesn’t seem like yesterday that we drove next to it.

We climb down and onto the other high point in case it’s higher than the one we were just on, only to find the other one looks higher after all. It’s time to go down, the long way back to the saddle where I finish my water, across the Neve, to Welcome Pass where we retrieve our ski poles and take a GPS bearing. 5 o’clock suddenly- this will turn into another 12 hour day, but we did it, we did!

The snow on the traverse to the flattish place is the worst kind of porridgey, postholey, energy-sapping, bucket-of-fish snow you can imagine. I’m grateful we are going downhill through it, especially when we meet two more climbers toiling upwards, hoping to stay at Welcome Pass. Dad chats, just someone else who knows him, what did I say about this being a small world. I wait where I stopped, with an entire leg gracefully submerged in the glop. Eventually we slither on downwards to the flattish place where there is sweet cold water flowing off the rocks. Harnesses and crampons come off for the long glissade down. It’s draining but fun, and very definitely the best way to get downhill quickly, and reasonably safely. We even try a few ski turns on the way, and what took us an hour going up takes us 10 minutes to descend.

The snow stops, just like that, and we make the transition from ice axe- wielding climbers to Leki poled- trekkers again, for the way down the ridge to our stashed gear. Luckily the keas had left it all alone, most importantly the thankfully still intact sleeping bags and thermarests. A quick and disorganized re-pack followed, and all that was left to do was find a new bivvy site and cook dinner.

Dad went to fetch water after we found a nice flat mossy patch. Later, I have a swim to wash the combined grime of sweat and suncream off, put fresh plasters on my elbows (injured from a trip the week before) and decide there is no other place in the world I’d rather be. We get to watch the sun’s last few rays highlighting the ruggedness of the mountains across the valley as we eat dinner, unbothered by sandflies, no noise but the streams and keas and the stove doing its thing. That night I slept much better but still fitfully, though I did manage to handle the confines of the bivvy bag with more co-ordination. I was under the impression I had to close the bag with me completely inside it, like a letter in an envelope, to keep the breeze out and the dew off my face. It turned out to be a warm dry night and Dad, who slept with his head outside, said the stars were magnificent. I missed them all!

Dad’s cheery “good morning” invaded my dreams at 10 to 6, and grumbling a little I stuck my head out into a still dim but flawless morning. I took even longer than usual to get organized and we left our bivvy spot of all bivvy spots behind at about 7. I wondered, somewhat gloomily, if tonight we would be back in civilization, and spent a while figuring out what time we would get home. It seemed far off and unlikely, but I couldn’t entertain the thought of us spending the night at the road end with the sandflies again.

On the way down my feet took turns with my shoulders this time for the pain trophy: quite handy really, when one got too bad I would just focus on the other. Down and around the rocks and waterfalls we skirted, leaving behind the cornered wonderland we’d climbed into the day before yesterday, as it turned back into the small basins then the ledge before the waterfall. I looked back to see the snow one last time, to make it seem real that we’d climbed there, and higher, less than a day ago. We down-climbed the bush next to the waterfall carefully, then it was back through the drippy tunnel to where we’d left our running shoes. The socks I’d left balled up in mine smelt quite unappetizing so I hung them on the outside of my pack to stop any infestations growing inside them and keep my crampons and ice axe company. More boulder hopping until we finally reached the valley floor, where the flatness, and efficiency of moving forwards quickly, felt strange indeed.

Soon we met the hut warden buzzing away grass by the side of the track, making a neat suburbian footpath, wide enough for three people, for us to follow. Around a few more corners the swing bridge appeared, and there was Welcome Flats. Dad mentioned the hot pools but it was too hot already, and I was paranoid about the sandflies, although there were none, yet. Also it would have soaked up the time, it was midday and there were still at least 4 and a half hours of walking to the road end. So we sat in the sun and the breeze, talked to the hut warden who was friendly, looked in the hut book and had lunch.

At one we left for the last long haul. Uphill climbs seemed to me unfair, didn’t they realize we were officially on our way downhill now? The feet edged ahead in the pain stakes, as my little toes definitely hurt the most. The bush was lovely and cool and green though, with the sun speckling through in patches. A couple of hours later we stop for 10 minutes then we carry on, me letting my legs go on the downhill bits and shoving myself up the uphills with my poles. Somehow Dad gets the idea I am going fast and goes in front to keep my speed in check. I reckoned two hours from the last stop, dad thought one and a half. I knew I’d be right.

Eventually I could see the road bridge through the trees, though it was still too far away for my liking. My legs had turned leaden a while ago, I was dehydrated and beginning to succumb to the bad attitude the annoying uphill sections brought. Tired? No. If you took knackered, stuffed, exhausted, wasted and fatigued, screwed them all up in a ball, kneaded the mixture then jumped on it a few times for good measure, and strung the fragments out in a line you would come close to describing how I felt.

We got there like I knew we would. I dumped my pack, determined not to sit and wait for the sandflies to gather. I filled up the water bottles, got the tools and boots off my pack, then we threw everything into the van, got changed and drove off. I watched happily as a long-limbed girl hobbled around miserably outside, the sandflies loving her bare legs. Squishing the bloodsuckers against the windows, we left, trying to understand how we could move so fast without effort. A 6 hour drive was the next task, and finally we walked in the door at home at 11.15pm. I spent the next day writing most of this story and levitating a bit.