Tag - New Zealand

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Thursday ,19 February 2015

From Sea to Summit, New Zealand again - Summer 2013/2014

By Gaetan on Thursday ,19 February 2015, 21:23 - photo

During summer 2013-2014 I went back to New Zealand. As you probably gathered by now, I love New Zealand, it's such a beautiful country and it has proper mountains.

The first part of the trip was spent in the north island. We went to Bay of Island to do some sailing for a week. Back to my roots, sailing is probably one of the first sport I took part in, perks of being born by the sea in a land with lots of sailors. I never invested too much time into sailing but it has always been something I enjoy doing. It was great fun, and we got to do a bit snorkelling as well.

Check the photos : sailing


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Capitain G ! Alistair doesn't seem to trust me though ...


After that, I flew to the south island for my second season of mountaineering. I met up with some friends who did a mountaineering course while I was at sea. We then flew to Chancellor hut for a week. I wasn't a really successful trip, we seemed to turn around more than getting to the top of things. To be honest the weather wasn't helping, but we did manage a traverse of Aurora and a run to the top of Aigrette. There was a lot of snow this year, I think we could have climb the egg memorial route as snow route !


Some photos : Mountaineering


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On top of Aigrette, Aoraki/Mt Cool in the back ground

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Sunday , 3 February 2013

More photos !

By Gaetan on Sunday , 3 February 2013, 11:37 - Travel

I have been a bit lazy lately with the blog and the website, it looks like I am spending too much time climbing. Well, I finally found a bit of time to get the dust off the website. I am slowly trying to get through my backlog of a year and half of photos, so keep an eye on http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo , there will be more coming.

First a few old one from 2011, they have been online for a while but didn't get much attention :

A road trip from Alice Spring to Melbourne with my friend Raph: http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo/index.php?/category/93

Bushwalking along the Great Ocean Road : http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo/index.php?/category/81

A visit to the Victorian Alps, the Fainters : http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo/index.php?/category/91

One of my early visit to Mount Arapiles : http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo/index.php?/category/92

Some new ones now, from my trip to New Zealand last year : http://www.mrgaetan.eu/photo/index.php?/category/98

A bit of background story for those ones:

Last year I attend an alpine course with MUMC, to get my first taste of Mountaineering. This was run by Stuart Holloway (Check his page :https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vertical-World-Mountain-Guiding/416729598349262?fref=ts ), MUMC life member and mountaineering guide. Luke and Nathan were also on the s course, so we went and explores Franz-joseph glacier for the first 10 days. There we were taught all you need to know to safely travel and climb in the mountains, from walking to crampons, building snow anchor to weather reading and terrain awareness. Stuart believes in learning by doing, so we had first hand experience. We managed to climb the Minarets and put a first ascent on alpine rock, the Egg Memorial rout ( more on that in a later post).

After a few days of rest, Luke and I caught up with Mitch who did the same course before us. We headed back in the hills, on the upper Tasman glacier this time. We are all by ourselves, a great way to apply those new learned skills. We mostly did some easy peak to get some mileage, but still manage to get up Mount Green. That was an interesting one , we had to bivi in the snow before doing a quick ascent in the morning.

That's all for now, I mostly wanted to get the New Zealand pictures online before heading off to a new adventure.

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