Fast forward 6 years, and I had started to realise what is possible in the mountains in light trail running shoes. I was sure Aspiring's NW ridge could be climbed comfortably in a day from the carpark, although I had not heard of anyone doing it. I teamed up with Hamish Fleming and Rose Pearson one weekend in late February 2020. We met up for dinner in Wanaka on the Saturday night planning to start early on Sunday hoping to be back in time for dinner, and drive back to Christchurch for work the next day.
In total the day is 57km with 3600m vertical gain. 18km of this can be done on a mountain bike to and from the Aspiring Hut from Raspberry carpark. The NW ridge is about 3km long with 1200m of height gain. So a lot of the gain and distance is covered on the approach. See the Strava route map here.
After the first 9km of biking on moderately rough farm tracks, you reach Aspiring Hut. This took about 45 minutes. From there we stashed the bikes just after the hut in the bush. From here there is a lot of runnable trail between Aspiring Hut and the base of Bevan Col waterfall slabs, great running. Its steeply uphill to Bevan Col for 850m height gain. The key to avoiding unnecessary scrambling is to stay low on the waterfall rock slabs, sticking close to the stream that runs down the gut. Higher up you'll need to traverse far enough right (east) to gain the slabs up to Bevan Col. You don't want to get blocked by firm snow in one of the troughs. 3:40 to Bevan Col from the Car.
Once over Bevan Col, in late summer the lower Bonar glacier is all white ice and incredibly grippy without crampons. We didn't think a rope was necessary as all crevasses are visible, just don't fall into one. It's fun hopping across the mellow ridges of white ice.
Colin Todd hut was bypassed to gain the Shipowner Ridge more expediently. This leads to Pt 2151m. Carefully traverse off the left side of this buttress about 50m below the top of the ridge that tops out at 2151m, sidling onto the top of the Therma Glacier. Here you can cut across the snow and gain the NW ridge proper. It's fun easy scrambling all the way up on the left side avoiding the major buttress.
Once we gained the top of the buttress it was bare rock slabs with faint avoidable snow patches all the way to the summit at an easy angle. Hands on knees grinding for 500m to the top. It was late February and we only took 3 steps on snow to reach the very top of Aspiring. We had carried an ice axe (Petzl Gully) and crampons (Petzl Leopard) but had not used them by this point. 6:40 to the summit.
It's still advisable to bring them in case you encounter more snow than anticipated. Climbing soft snow with the Leopard crampons in the midday sun softening the snow would be perfectly fine as its barely more than 30 or 35 degrees.
Below the Buttress on the descent, we used the Kangaroo snowpatch as a quick way to get back down to the Bonar. This is a snow field below the ridge which allows you to skip the time consuming route around Shipowner ridge, and bee-line it directly for Bevan Col, which was reached after 9 hours.
We started to hustle at this point hoping to finish in less than 12 hours (we all need an arbitrary time goal don't we?). After a hot run back down to Aspiring Hut we picked up the bikes and flew back down the hill to finish in 11 hours 51 minutes feeling pleased with a great day up and down one of the classic peaks.
We made it back to Christchurch at about 3am on Monday morning after a well spent weekend away.
