Photos here 

Saturday dawned sunny and hot, so after a leisurely breakfast about twelve trucks assembled in front of the town’s swimming baths to hear our trip leader (Lurch) tell us what we would be doing for the day, and introducing us to “Flag”, who would be guiding our group for the weekend, and hopefully keeping us out of trouble.  As the sheriff was not able to make this trip, Lurch appointed Tracy to the position, and poor old me for the trip report.

Time to go, and we all headed north from Westport, and up the hill towards Denniston.  At nearly the top of the hill, we all stopped and let the tyres down, ready to do battle.  Unfortunately for Don Garland, this is where the day started to go bad for him, as his truck decided that it wasn’t going to go anywhere, and refused to even turn over, let alone start. Don said for us to carry on, and he would try to fix the problem, and catch up to us later on.

Flag led us off the main road, and onto a track that had been pushed through with a bulldozer, and was really just solid rock, with lots of steep climbs, up steps and down again. We continued on through several similar types of track, which was a lot of fun, and with varying amounts of difficulty, when Don called to say that he was mobile again, and shortly after he rejoined the convoy just in time for us to find our first section of mud for the day. This was a loop section of track, which most of us did, and then stopped for a wee while to have a break. When we went to carry on, unfortunately Dons truck decided to pack another wobbly, and refused to start.  The rest of the group continued on, whilst Lurch and I stayed to see if we could get it to go, but no amount of swearing or tyre kicking was going to make it start.  The decision was made to try and tow him out to the road, so the Landrover was hooked onto the back of the Jeep, and away we went.  This must have too much for the poor old (new) Landrover to bear, as after about one kilometer, it decided to start!

On we continued, until we caught up with the rest of the group, which had stopped for lunch at the top of a rocky outcrop, where Peter Lowish had gotten into a spot of bother last year when we were there, however we were all able to get up without any dramas this time.

After lunch was finished, we continued on to a quarry, where we all had a wee playtime, taking on the steep climbs and descents etc.  This is where Kerry Smith got a little bit excited on one of the steep climbs that the Hilux found a little too difficult, and bounced up and down, and then bang, a CV had given up the ghost.  As this is obviously not a new experience for him, he pulled out a new one out from his toolbox and started to change it there and then. It would have been a nice change for him to be fixing his own truck, rather then someone else’s, which is usually the case.

Flag said that while Kerry was fixing his truck, the rest of the group would do another loop track, so Don Noble decided to come for a ride with me, much to the disgust of his son Jordan who had to stay behind.  After we had been going for a wee while, it started to become apparent to us that the loop track was not going to take us back to where we had left Dons truck, so we excused ourselves from the group and headed back to where Kerry was working on his truck, where we stayed until the job was completed.

We called up the rest of the group, and they said they were just starting to climb Mt Frederick, so we continued on and started the climb ourselves.  We had not gone very far when we came across Nigel on the side of the track, and he was busy changing a puncture, but he also had a worrying noise coming from his motor, so he was going to pull out and return to the camp and try to fix it. We continued to climb the hill, which is a very good track of solid rock up the mountain, and we were just about to catch up with the rest of the group, when Warwick got a puncture, so we had to change that and the carried on upwards until we got to a really steep section that had seen a lot of towing being done by the group ahead of us, and Warwick shot up like it wasn’t there, and then it was my turn.  You would have thought that I had never driven a 4WD before; I made such a hash of it.  Eventually I made it up under my own steam, and then Kerry and Don did it with varying degrees of difficulty, and we went on to the top and rejoined the rest of the group.

After a cup of tea, we all headed back down without incident, and back to camp to do a few repairs, including cutting off the end of my exhaust pipe, which had been flattened on a rock, and then having a look at Nigel’s truck.  After taking off all the fan belts, because we thought that the noise was coming from there, we discovered that his exhaust manifold had become loose, so tightened that up and put it all back together and that fixed the problem.  Warwick discovered that he now had three punctures, and this was on a brand new set of tyres that had only just been fitted. It turned out that the people who had fitted the tyres, had fitted the wrong tubes in them.  As it was now getting quite late in the day, we decided to leave them until the morning to fix them, so off to have a few beers and a bit of tea.

It was a really great days four wheel driving in weather that you don’t see very often on the West Coast, so thanks to Lurch for organizing it, and to Flag for guiding us on the day.