Mount Cardrona

Descargada 0 veces

 -44.87385588, 168.94992733

Si
438 m	1937 m
443 m	1643 m

			Total
	3.41 km	3.96 km	7.37 km
	50min 10s	56min 15s	1h 46min 25s
	4.08 km/h	4.22 km/h	4.15 km/h

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Easy ascent to Mount Cardrona (1936 m) from the base of the Cardrona Ski Resort.
To get to the car park of the Cardrona Ski Resort you have to drive the 14 Km of ascent on the private gravel road that starts from the Cardrona Valley Road. Notice that this gravel road is private, the whole mountain and ski resort is private, and there is a gate at the beginning of the gravel road that you may find closed. Check on their website the opening times in summer although the resort usually opens from 10 am to 5 pm, not every day though.
I was expecting to find almost no one there, but got quite surprised to see how many people go up there in summer, mainly for mountain biking and also descending the slopes with carts. The day I was there was a Saturday and the main parking lot was almost full.

The ascent starts from the parking lot where you need to go around on the left-hand side of the resort to get the gravel road that goes all the way up to Soho Express, the highest of the chair lifts. At the point where you get out of this chair lift you will find a red signpost indicating to Mount Cardrona summit to the left. You go across the mountain a bit and then a few metres of descent and from that point you face the last 600 metres of ascent that end at the Mount Cardrona summit at 1936 meters of elevation.

On our way down we decide to visit the two other summits, marked as 1894 and 1891 in the New Zealand Topo Map and named here as Tic (1891 m) and Toc (1894 m).
Getting to these two summits is quite easy. We get to summit Toc at 1894 m first. At this summit we find an iron stick on the ground.
After going down to the Soho Express and then to Captain's express we start ascending to Tic (1891 m). At this summit we find a little building, some antennas and also a Trig point. From here all the way down on a track until getting back to the gravel road that will take us back to the car park where we started.

The views on this hike are quite nice. You can identify nearby mountains like Mount Sale and Crown Peak and also Wakatipu lake and Queenstown far in the distance.