Legs and Borders

Challenging day walking up the Goats Pass, jumping the boulders and crossing the Deception river all the way to the top. Many river crossings happened today, and you would have thought that if you are walking up the river they get progressively easier. But not in this case. As it turned out Deception river doesn't have much space while flowing down from the Goats Pass, so it gets quite deep and the current is very strong. So much so that after a day of rain, this area is impassable. At the top of the pass there's a hut you can find here a CB radio where you can contact Doc about the river levels. Some people got stuck in this hut for three days during wet weather, waiting for the water level to drop. Many turned back and skipped this area completely. I was lucky enough to arrive here in good weather conditions and could climb this fairly challenging and quirky section of TA. Goats Pass is all about walking and climbing on boulders...

"Natural things are by their definition wild, unkempt and more often than not crawling with bugs. Quite obviously, then, natural things are just the kind of things that one does not strive to acquire" Fran Lebowitz Second day of walking along the river today it was Taramakau river. It 'only' had two crossings but they were quite sizeable and of course there was tons of smaller stream crossings thrown into the mix. First thing in the morning I went over Harper's Pass and met a huge bubble of Northbound hikers on the descent. It looked like I was going past the main bulk of people who started in Bluff this summer. After the pass trail was mostly easy going and following the river, except when it would briefly disappear into the forest and.. disappear. Most hikers at this point learned that going on the river bed itself was way easier than manoeuvring around the forest so those parts of the trail were overgrown and hard to navigate. ...