Franklin to Frenchmans

The weather was incredible – warm and sunny for both days of our paddling leg.
So much so that even though we arrived at the Irenabyss relatively early in the day we thought the 30deg day was better spent swimming and relaxing by the water rather than trudging up the hill. Based on the long daylight hours and the times we’d been quoted for the walk to Tahune this was a no brainer.

We started walking at 4:30 and arrived at Tahune just before 2am – turns out a group of 6 carrying ridiculous weights 1000m vertically then a long quite technical ridge for a fair distance is never going to match the times of a very fit bloke with a packraft.

The warm weather of the previous days ended abruptly in a magnificent sunset as we picked our way along the quartzite ridge, skirting steep gullies that dropped off from either side and huge outcrops of rock. The wind picked up, we could see heavy showers and even lightning materializing from the western horizon. We ended up leaving a few things on the ridge to retrieve the next morning to keep things moving.

We had a slow start the next morning after our late-night antics. We retrieved our abandoned gear from the now thick low clouds that covered our path from the previous day and slowly made our way onwards to Lake Vera after lunch then headed for the cars the next day.

This trip was definitely an ‘epic’ and is often the first that comes to mind if I get asked something along the lines of most memorable, toughest, etc. Memorable for the physical demands but also the excellent conditions and the top notch group of people that I shared it with!

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