Cascade Saddle Walk

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This morning we headed off around 9am after breakfast to conquer the mighty cascade saddle route! To start with it’s a fairly easy upward climb for the first 2hours, in the tree line – and we were starting to wonder what everybody was making a fuss about, it being such a hard climb! As soon as we are above the tree line however it turns into a serious climb – with longer sections of rock to scramble up and very steep sections, so yes, it is harder than the walk yesterday. At 1pm we reach the top and absorb the stunning scenery, at 1840m we are surrounded by mountains covered in snow, and we settle town and eat our lunch of very yummy veg and rice with tuna and extra hot Nandos sauce (SPICEY!) for some flavour! The ground underfoot at the top is quite bizarre, it is grey and very loose fragmented shale like rock – no idea where or how it came to be!

Today the walk down was a bit more challenging than yesterdays, as the rock sections we came up were more exposed and no tree branches to hold on to etc, but we managed just fine, and then we were soon back in the trees and zoomed down the mountain, stopping only to refill our bottles from the waterfall we had to cross. We reached the bottom, fairly exhausted from the last few days of intense walking at 4.30pm, picked up all of our stuff from the hut and walked the supposed 2.5hr walk along the flat valley back to the car park. My feet were really aching by this point, but Anna was really struggling so I had to be super motivated to get her back, so it was good to focus on something else other than my feet. We made it back to the car with a cereal bar and water stop on the way by 6pm and it was SO nice to take my boots off and put my flip flops on!

It felt like a long drive from the car park back to Wanaka, taking over an hour but it was so nice to go back to a house rather than a hostel! Put some washing on, had an amazing shower, took an expected phone call due to the fact someone thought I was missing, and then between Anna and I we rustled up a lovely dinner of spaghetti with prawns, peppers, olives etc (as you may have twigged Anna is a very good cook!) and then for dessert banana and ice cream. It was super yummy, and before long I was collapsed in bed, absolutely shattered after two very intense days of walking.

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