On the weekend we headed into the South Temple valley, near Lake Ohau, to climb a rock route on Steeple Peak. We had originally planned to climb a route called ‘Zoe Alpine’, but weren’t too confident on its location or line, so we decided instead to climb Weta Prowl. From what I can tell, we followed the original line for the most part, with a few minor deviations along the way. We spent saturday wandering up the South Temple and, in the afternoon, gained 90 minutes of invaluable gardening experience levelling out a camp site at about 1850 metres (spot the tent in the last photo!).

Up at 5:30am and on the rock at 7, we soloed the first 80 or so metres and then roped up for the remainder of the route. The air temperature wasn’t too bad, but the wind was brutal; my partner was near hypothermic for most of the climb and, whilst I have a reputation for bleeding a lot on climbs, the chill factor made my skin ridiculously brittle; I’ve been assured that I left a bright red trail on the pitches that I led.

Due to the cold and wind, I found this climb quite intense, more so than the description and grade would suggest. The wind picked up dramatically at one point while I was traversing into the large corner system near the top; not a nice experience when you’re on a near vertical face, 10 metres above your last piece of gear. Despite the weather, most of the climbing was straightforward, although we had a difficult moment about 50 metres below the summit, with a sketchy traverse underneath an overhang on the south side of the ridge that I would have given about grade 17. It’s hard to be definitive about the grade though as, being on the south side out of the sun, our hands were completely numb through this section.

But we got up without incident, spent a minute or so admiring the view, and then raced down the blissfully short south ridge to a scree slope and back down to camp. The climb took us around 7 hours return from our campsite.