Son of a Beach wrote:I've also been on Shelf Camp (next to Mt Anne) in mid-March (ie, the end of Summer) on what started off as a perfectly calm evening, but during the night a wind storm came up which caused the large pole on my old tunnel-tent to hit me in the face repeatedly during the night while trying to sleep (it kept springing back and didn't break, thankfully). When I got up in the morning, I had one foot in the tent, and one foot out of the tent when it blew away, thankfully I caught it with the one foot still in the tent, but it did tear along one of the seams in the process.
There's a coincidence... The one walk that sticks in my mind for extremes in weather was on Mt Anne as well. We were planning on walking for 3 days, camping for 2 nights at the shelf camp. On the drive in the weather wasn't looking brilliant, with cloud over the peaks and frequent rain, but it was starting to clear up by the time we reached Condominium Creek.
By the time we were half way to High Camp Hut, the sun was out, and it was looking like we were going to have brilliant weather for the whole walk. On our first night we ended up camping in a sheltered spot on the Eliza plateau, as we ran out of time to make it to shelf camp. The wind picked up overnight, but the next day was still fantastic weather, except for the wind. The next night we camped in what we thought was a fantastic sheltered spot near Mt Eliza, and indeed, we were out of the worst of the wind, which had picked up considerably during the day. Until the wind changed direction, of course.
That night would have to be, without a doubt, the worst night I have spent in a tent. The tent that I was using at the time should never have been used in those conditions. It was coping fairly well with the high wind, until the wind direction changed. Once the wind started to hit it from the side, it just collapsed. Being woken up by your tent roof hitting you in the face is bad enough (I spent several hours with my hands and feet bracing the four corners of my tent to stop that happening), but it's nothing compared to being woken up as your tent lifts of the ground (with you still in it...) when half the pegs have come out of the ground.