Episode 053

An 85-Day Southern Alps Traverse with Penzy Dinsdale

8 September 2023 40 min

Episode 053

0:00 / 40:37

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Penzy has wanted to traverse the Southern Alps since university, watching her friends head off on their own traverses and thinking, one day. And last summer she went and did it. Eighty-five days, mostly off track, much of it alpine, some of it solo.

She's a doctor based in Queenstown, and she quit full-time work to make it happen. So we get into how she planned it (she secretly loves logistics, and so do I), the huts and gear, going solo for the first time, and the scariest day on Pioneer Pass. Plus the day she nearly pulled the pin, the funniest moment of the whole trip (flaps of bread, you'll see), and her advice if you're dreaming up something big.

I haven't even done a solo overnight. So I think it's quite brave to plan something like this knowing you won't always have someone with you.

In this episode

From orienteering to the Otago tramping club
Quitting full time for the mountains
Planning an 85-day Southern Alps traverse
Huts, tents and gear for each section
Going solo and finding company
Pioneer Pass and the day six wobble
Highlights from the Lyell Glacier to Blue Lake Hut
Advice for your own traverse, and what's next

From orienteering to the Otago tramping club

Penzy grew up in Wellington, where orienteering was the sport of her childhood: a tramping trip squeezed into a couple of hours on a Sunday. It wasn't until she was a teenager that she got to go tramping properly, and she found it a lot more fun.

She chose the University of Otago specifically because she wanted to move to the South Island, and joined the Otago University Tramping Club. It was amazing: all these people who wanted to do the same thing as her. She enjoyed it so much that after a Bachelor of Science in zoology, she wasn't ready to leave, so she went back and did medical school.

Through uni, the mountains were a huge priority. If she wasn't away in the mountains, the weekend felt wasted. It was pure adventure, every weekend. And she kept seeing friends head off on Southern Alps traverses, and thought, one day I'm going to do that.

Quitting full time for the mountains

Penzy works as a doctor, and she's been lucky to work at Queenstown Hospital, a great place for adventures with a team who love adventure too.

She tried to take her uni attitude into work, and for the first couple of years it worked. Then came a year of 80-hour weeks, with no energy, let alone time, to get away. When she did, she was so exhausted she wanted to turn around and go home.

So she quit. She took a year off, did casual work as a doctor, locumed around, worked at the ski fields, did some travelling, and finished the year with this traverse. She doesn't think she'll ever go full time again.

She needs the mountains for her mental health, and she can't get the most out of them with no energy left. So her approach is to work hard but work smart, because medicine is classic for burnout.

Planning an 85-day Southern Alps traverse

The traverse came out of a near miss. Penzy had applied for jobs in Antarctica and for an expedition with the Antarctic Heritage Trust, traversing to the South Pole. She interviewed, but didn't get it. One thing they flagged was that she had no long expedition experience. She'd already mentally prepared to spend three months on some kind of expedition, so she planned her own.

While working at the ski field, she used the quiet times to whittle away at route planning and food, starting in about July or August. She took her dream list of trips, plotted it on a map and realised that wasn't very helpful. So she refined it into a more sensible line up the Southern Alps, taking in bits from the dream list and bits that looked really cool.

The original line ran all the way from the south coast of Fiordland to Farewell Spit. But she'd have had to rush Fiordland, and she needed to reach Mount Cook while there was still snow on some of the passes. So Fiordland became a future adventure of its own.

Then came the detail. She read the route descriptions and maps for each stage, worked out how long each section would take plus days for bad weather, and broke the food down day by day. She dehydrated a fair amount of her own food, because she likes doing it and it's slightly cheaper. Then there were food drops to arrange, friends to recruit for different sections, and gear to move around the country, like skis flown into Mount Cook to meet them.

She ended up with a couple of huge logistical planners that only make sense to her. She admits to secretly loving logistics, and this was the ultimate logistics challenge.

I'm a spreadsheet person too, and it drives my husband a bit crazy.

She set off at the end of October, about a week after the ski field closed, into some pretty hairy weather with low snow. She finished in late January with a job starting straight after, so she had a hard deadline.

Huts, tents and gear for each section

Penzy carried a two-person tent the whole way, because friends kept joining her and every section had a night or two that needed it. Over 85 days she spent 65 nights in huts and 20 in the tent. Looking back, that's a lot of hut time, and you can link them up if you want to.

The gear changed with the terrain, because the snow did:

Early sections: avalanche gear. They rerouted one section and dropped the rope, but kept the avalanche gear. She did the third section solo.
Fourth section: avalanche and mountaineering gear, though they turned around on a mountaineering objective because the avalanche danger was too high.
The Mount Cook section: full mountaineering gear, then skis picked up on day two, so full ski mountaineering kit for a long section.
Over the Gardens: the plan was to ski it, but with bad weather they left the skis in a remote backcountry hut. Zero Invasive Predators (ZIP), who run predator trapping over on the West Coast, pulled the skis out for them.
After the Rakaia River: the snow pretty much ran out. No more skis, ropes or avalanche gear. She carried crampons and an ice axe through to Arthur's Pass, reaching it around Christmas, and dropped them there.

Going solo and finding company

Going solo was a big step for Penzy. She'd always seen going with people as an important safety thing, and it's fun. Before this trip she'd done a couple of very tame solo overnighters on tracks. Now there were big, long sections off track by herself.

She loved the challenge of that. There were moments when something felt scary and she wished she had people with her, then realised nothing would be different: she'd be solo scrambling it either way, and people would only be a psychological boost.

But she really loved the times friends joined her. One of her big takeaways was how much fun being in the hills with people is.

She also opened the trip up, posting in a few Facebook groups for anyone who wanted to join. Four people she'd never done anything with came along, including one man she'd literally only met on Facebook, who showed up at a remote hut just before they went over the Gardens.

Since getting back to solid work, Penzy has noticed how much her phone and social media invade her time. So on days she's not away, she now turns her phone off for the whole day.

Pioneer Pass and the day six wobble

Pioneer Pass

The most technically challenging section was Pioneer Pass, in the Mount Cook section, and it compounded on itself. They hadn't factored a couple of things into their start time, so they ended up late on a very exposed slope that was melting and dropping rocks on them. They sheltered in a corner of a glacier hoping nothing would fall from above, waited for it to go cold again, then sprinted. Even then, an avalanche crossed their tracks ahead of them. At the top of the pass, right at sunset, Penzy burst into tears.

Day six at Dart Hut

The hardest day was day six. It was the first really sunny day, an easy walk up the Dart Valley. But at Dart Hut she started freaking out about the next day, the first technical one, after fresh snow had pushed the first section onto tracks. It was well within what she could do. But suddenly she was seeing the entire adventure at once, every technical challenge and every chance to fall.

She texted a few people on her inReach who'd offered support, including a friend who'd done a traverse and found it psychologically hard, and understood exactly. Then:

"I basically just shrunk my mission at that point"

The mission became: get over the hill tomorrow, finish the section, go back to Wānaka, where she was living, and decide then. Nothing was riding on it. Day seven was the really technical day. It didn't go smoothly, but they got there. Then she started up the Landsborough solo, which was daunting, and that's when she decided she was going to finish.

She says stopping would have been the right decision too. Every time she's ignored that voice, she's ended up in trouble in the mountains:

"always listen to the little internal voice. It knows."

I think it's good to have those hesitations. Your body is trying to look after you, and it's about telling real fear apart from a mental block.

Highlights from the Lyell Glacier to Blue Lake Hut

Flaps of bread

Her favourite stage was the one where they couldn't go over the Gardens. There were four of them: Penzy, a friend who'd come through the Mount Cook section with her, the man from Facebook, and another friend.

At the end of the Lyell Glacier, taking their crampons off to start moraine bashing (which she hates), one friend couldn't find the words "slices of bread" and called them flaps of bread. All four of them cracked up for about five minutes.

The next day, the others walked out down the Rakaia and Penzy headed on alone towards the West Coast. It was daunting and hard to part with them, but it felt like her achievement point of the whole trip.

Half a day on Te Araroa

Te Araroa was always her backup: if she wasn't feeling it, she could join the trail and walk it all the way. In the end she followed it for half a day.

At Nelson Lakes, she came over Thompson Pass and joined Te Araroa at the base of the Waiau Pass. After days of seeing no one, there were people trickling up the pass. She went over to Blue Lake Hut, which was packed with walkers who hadn't crossed that day because of the weather, so people were sleeping on the floor. The next day she branched off over Moss Pass into an empty valley right next to the Te Araroa highway.

She'd been to Blue Lake Hut before Te Araroa got so big, and the whole area has changed. The huts aren't built for those numbers, and the question is how to protect those pristine lakes while keeping them open for people to see.

Farewell Spit

She finished off the Dragon's Teeth traverse at Boulder Lake, biked round to Farewell Spit, and walked out onto it as far as you're allowed to go.

Advice for your own traverse, and what's next

Penzy's advice: do what you want to do. Look at a map and pick out what interests you:

"make it ambitious figure out you know what would be really cool if you could do that"

Then be flexible. Whole sections of her A route didn't happen, so have a B and a C, and carry maps so you can reroute last minute. She has sections of her A route that she and her friends are determined to go back for.

Fiordland will definitely happen at some point, though not that summer, because she was about to travel overseas for seven weeks. She's also been applying for jobs in Antarctica, with lots of positive feedback, and reckons persistence is key.

I had Chris Long on talking about Antarctica, and it turns out Penzy has met him.