Time: 3 hour and 15 minutes. (1 hour and 45 minutes car park to summit, 1 hour and 10 minutes summit to car park)
Distance: 6 km
Start: Lake Lyndon car park off the West Coast Road, State Highway 73
Finish: Same place (it's there and back)
Date: Friday 30th March 2023
Warning: If in cloud, maybe leave it for another day unless you are an experienced route finder.
Weather-wise, the stars finally aligned. After a week of storms and the first snow dump of the season, today it was a mild easterly with suns on all the forecast charts and a high predicted of 18 degrees. Nice. Chatting nineteen-to-the-dozen about pithy topics like politics, vitamin supplements and gender equality, we drove up the steep hill to Porters Pass and parked just on the other side at the Lake Lyndon car park. This is former glacier country and the crystal clear lake is a geological remnant.
Mount Lyndon (1489 m) sits just to the north of the lake and can be ascended via multiple spurs. Today we were climbing the eastern spur. There is no signage for a "track" to the top (technically more a "route"), but there is an obvious worn path along the fence-line, going up an obvious spur. The path starts just between the lake and a dryish "tarn" to the north. A fresh easterly was blowing and we donned hats and gloves and jackets but shed them quickly as we climbed up the fence line and warmed up.
It cannot be denied that this is a relentless climb. But the views are absolutely stunning - with the blue lake below and a 360 degree panorama of mountains that just keeps getting better and better the higher you go. After about 20 minutes from the bottom, the track levels out to an attractive grassy plateau but then winds on up up up through a ridiculously steep scree slope. A good stretch for your Achilles heel (not to mention your lungs). As you get higher and higher, the path sporadically diverges or even sometimes disappears altogether. It is all too easy to go off-piste. But it doesn't really matter as long as you generally follow the ridge.
At the top of the spur we came to a cairn where we turned westwards towards the summit. I paused here to remember the way back down. The steepness (and also the brisk easterly) eased and we could now see the full extent of the northern panorama. Snow dotted the mountains. Spectacular.
Happily, we gained the summit. Lake Coleridge and the Rakaia River Valley came into view with a backdrop of Ka Tiri Tiri o Te Moana - the beautiful Southern Alps. We took pics and ate apples and chocolate.
All too soon it was time for the descent. We found the cairn but at this point the spur of our ascent was not visible at all, and the track was not clear either, so the temptation was to continue straight ahead. We back-tracked to the cairn and headed to the right and down the hill until we could clearly see "our" spur.
We were now descending the ridiculously steep scree slope. This was actually easier than expected. The choices were to either go straight down at high speed (my preference) or to zig-zag slowly down (probably a wiser and safer choice). Soon we could soon see Kim up ahead, videoing alpine grasshoppers.
We were all back at the car around the same time and drove to the Fat Beagle Cafe in Darfield where they weren't super excited to see us (30 minutes until closing). We promised to eat super fast and so we wolfed down our salads and raw raspberry cakes and drank our coffees at double speed and were out the door by 3:02 pm.
