Today the Harris clan took to North Canterbury to rike up Mt Oxford.  It’s a 13km return trip, with a total elevation of 1371m.

The weather was forecast to be near perfect, and Graham and I both found a slot in our respective training diaries to knock it off.  We were supposed to have done Mt Oxford back on my birthday in February, but the weather was crap that day and it’s taken us six months to get back to it!

Despite Graham trying to talk me out of going seeing as I wasn’t feeling very flash, I convinced him otherwise.  He had to get a 90 minute cycle done today, so he left home before 7am and we picked him up near the Waimak Gorge Bridge on our way through.  I had rejigged my programme so I’d be doing a 90 minute hill run today.  Well, today’s outing was a tad longer than 90 minutes as it turned out but close enough!

We started from the Coopers Creek Carpark.  The route goes in a short way on farmland, before it starts rising steadily.  But it was all runnable which was a bonus.  Around half way up the track, it starts rising pretty steeply – comparable to Mt Somers at the Sharplin Falls carpark end, however we didn’t have to walk up that way at Mt Somers so we developed an appreciation today of how tough that direction is!

Ella and I pretty much left Graham to look after Louis, although we did stop every so often to make sure they were okay.  Where the track rises steeply, it goes from a mixture of bush with tree roots, to bush with rocks, to tussock and rocks, to tussock and slippery shale pieces.  We came into snow around three quarters of the way up, and it didn’t take too long before the navigation got pretty dodgy.  You could see the poled route, but where the actual track was to get between the poles was anyone’s guess!

It was a real grunt up to the top, and I ended up leaving Ella to go at her pace while I went off ahead.  That didn’t stop the little tike from running past me at the last minute to get to the trig before me.  Cheat.  We stopped for lunch at the top and took in the views, which were gorgeous.

It took Ella and me 1.42 hours to get to the top.  The recommended time to the top is four hours, or 7-8 hours return.  Ella and I did the return trip in just over an hour, for a total of 2.47 hours.  That quite surprised me – it was around 3.5km shorter than Mt Somers, but it was only around eight minutes quicker time-wise, which I think shows how tough it was.  Mt Somers had a lot more runnable sections whereas today was slower going, even going down.

Tonight Graham is wanting to know when we’re going to attempt his Four Peaks Challenge – Mts Grey, Thomas, Richardson and Oxford in one day.  I suggested that would be tougher than Goat Pass, to which he nodded and grinned like a madman.

Here are the pics.