Once again the 24 hour peak bagging happened with an unknown number of people checking out some of the hills around town.
This year, town increased in size with the addition of a new category; the Send It category. The rules are a bit complicated but in essence, if you start over 150km as the crow flies from Emerson’s carpark, you could have up to 1 hour in a car. It could only be once in the 24 hours and you still had to stick to the speed limit.
Of course, Dave McLean took up the challenge for the Send It category. No one else did but no one would have beaten him anyway.
Dave, with support from daughter, Lydia, started midday Saturday at Mt Pisa (1963m high, 152km from Emerson’s carpark) and then biked the Cromwell Gorge and then to Oturehua, before jumping in a car and trying to up the 4WD track to Mt Kyeburn. He had to push up to the summit and then rocketed back to Dunedin with nearly 1 hour to spare. 283km travelled (not counting the 1 hour car journey). No one quite believed it was true. It didn’t really matter but Dave scored a whopping 209 points.
Ross Davies once again took out the purist (foot only) category with 121 points. Lydia and Bas were way back with 102 and 101 but as they drove to Emerson’s for the wrap up they were disqualified.
It was lucky there were 3 categories this year as it gave the under 70s a chance (Dave and Ross are both 72).
Kate Hearn took out the multi sport category with 50 points. She smashed the next competitor – Chris Taylor, who spent a long time trying to collect all the trigs and peaks in Dunedin that scored zero. Chris and Kate, who joined him in the morning, came in with a grand total of 1 point.
There were plenty of others out there… and a few weird stories. Theo saw a giant earthworm at 3am. In response to my, “yeah right,” he showed me the photo. Sebastian had a surreal encounter in the mist with Ross and Michael. A few more rocks got hauled up Mt Cargill.
Inch Events 