First Steps on the TA

We packed what remained of our campsite into our bags with cold fingers and stiff limbs, the wind still prowling across Lake Angelus as though reluctant to let us leave without one final reminder of its authority. The broken dyneema guyline was repaired as best we could manage, the tent stuffed away, and we turned our backs on that extraordinary alpine basin and its shimmering tarn to face what lay ahead. The Cascade Track. Even the name carried a warning.

The descent began immediately and it began without mercy. The Cascade Track drops nearly a thousand metres from the alpine heights of Angelus Hut down into the Travers Valley below, and it does so with a directness that borders on hostility. This is not a trail that believes in switchbacks or gentle gradients. It falls, steeply and relentlessly, through a landscape of loose rock and exposed stone that demands absolute concentration with every step. The track surface was a jumble of boulders, scree, and uneven rock shelves, each one slick with morning moisture, each one requiring a deliberate decision about where to place a foot and how much weight to commit before trusting it. One careless step, one moment of inattention, and the consequences on terrain this steep would be immediate and unforgiving.

We had put on neoprene knee sleeves before starting the descent, a small act of preparation that proved worth its weight many times over. The sustained downhill pounded the joints with a repetitive, jarring force that accumulates over hundreds of steps into something genuinely debilitating if left unprotected. The sleeves offered compression and warmth to the ligaments and tendons doing the hardest work, and our knees thanked us for it with every rocky step. Anth moved with careful deliberation, planting his trekking poles ahead of each footfall, testing the rock before committing, his world contracted to the two square metres of trail immediately in front of him. Torrin stayed close behind, patient and watchful, calling out the more treacherous sections before Anth reached them, pointing out the stable footholds amongst the loose stone, his voice a constant reassurance threading through the concentration.

The upper section of the Cascade Track was above the bushline, and the exposure added a psychological dimension to the physical challenge. The valley floor was visible far below, impossibly distant, and the steepness of the terrain between here and there made the descent feel less like walking and more like controlled falling. But step by step, handhold by handhold, the altitude surrendered. The tussock gave way to subalpine scrub, the scrub thickened into stunted beech, and then gradually, gratefully, the forest swallowed us.

But the forest brought its own challenges. The rocks that had dominated the upper track were replaced by roots, a labyrinth of beech tree roots that snaked across the trail in every direction, wet and polished smooth by the passage of countless boots. They were treacherous in a different way to the rocks above, less obviously dangerous but equally capable of sending a tired hiker sprawling. The roots grabbed at boot edges, hid in shadows, and created an uneven surface that required the same painstaking attention to foot placement that the rocky descent had demanded. The going was almost as slow. The forest, for all its shelter from the wind and its welcome shade, was not offering any shortcuts.

The beech forest of the Travers Valley is ancient and dense, a cathedral of silver beech and red beech whose canopy filters the light into a green, aqueous glow. Mosses and ferns carpet every surface, draping fallen logs and climbing trunks in layers so thick the forest floor seems upholstered in velvet. The air was different down here, heavier and richer, saturated with the scent of damp earth and decomposition and the sweet, faintly medicinal smell of beech sap. After the exposed, wind-scoured world of Robert Ridge and Lake Angelus, the forest felt like being held. The trees closed around us and the sky disappeared, and there was a comfort in that enclosure, a sense of protection that the mountains had withheld.

And then, somewhere in the depths of that forest, the trail we had been following merged with another, and a marker confirmed what the map had promised. We had joined the Te Araroa. The official route. The actual trail that stretches over three thousand kilometres from Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island to Bluff at the bottom of the South. Anth's first step along the route. It was a moment that deserved more ceremony than it received, just two tired hikers pausing at a trail junction in the bush, packs heavy, legs aching, reading a sign. But beneath the exhaustion, something shifted. Everything before this, the Abel Tasman, the Robert Ridge alternate, the wind-blasted night at Angelus, had been prologue. This was the beginning of the real thing. Anth stood on the trail and felt the weight of all the kilometres that lay ahead, stretching south through mountain passes and river valleys and beech forest and tussock plains, all the way to the bottom of the country. It was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.

The Travers Valley track followed the true right of the Travers River as it wound its way through the valley floor, the river a constant companion to our left, its water running clear and cold over a bed of grey and amber stones. The valley is one of the great tramping corridors of Nelson Lakes National Park, a broad, U-shaped passage carved by ancient glaciers and now cloaked in some of the most magnificent beech forest in the South Island. The trail here was gentler than what we had descended, but after the Cascade Track and the sleepless night at Angelus, gentle was a relative term. The kilometres accumulated with a weight that went beyond the physical. Eighteen kilometres all up for the day, the longest Anth had walked since arriving in New Zealand, and his body knew every one of them. His legs had passed through soreness into a deeper, more fundamental fatigue, the kind that lives in the bones rather than the muscles, and each step required a conscious act of will that the earlier kilometres had not demanded. Torrin was ever supportive, matching his pace to Anth's without comment, offering encouragement in the moments when the trail felt longest, carrying the conversation when Anth had no energy for words and walking in comfortable silence when even listening felt like effort.

The Travers River kept us company through the final stretch, its voice a constant rush and murmur that filled the forest and gave the tired mind something to rest upon. Sunlight broke through the canopy in shifting columns, illuminating patches of the river where the water ran so clear it seemed to magnify the stones beneath. Fantails darted between the trees, those tiny, hyperactive birds with their fanned tails and fearless curiosity, swooping close to our heads to catch the insects our footsteps disturbed. The forest was alive around us, indifferent to our fatigue, continuing its ancient business of growth and decay and renewal regardless of the two weary figures moving through it.

And then, through the trees, a clearing. A roof. The warm brown timber of a backcountry hut emerging from the bush like an answer to a question the body had been asking for hours.

John Tait Hut.

Anth's first hut on the Te Araroa. Named after one of Nelson's early conservationists, the hut sits in a clearing beside the Travers River in the heart of the valley, a 26-bunk shelter that has welcomed generations of trampers passing through Nelson Lakes National Park. It is a simple structure, as all backcountry huts are, built for function rather than comfort, with wooden bunks, a gas cooking area, and a long drop toilet somewhere in the trees behind. But to a hiker arriving after eighteen kilometres of steep descent and valley walking on legs that have nothing left to give, it is a palace. It is warmth and shelter and the promise of rest, and the sight of it through the trees is one of the great reliefs that trail life offers.

We dropped our packs on the hut porch and Anth lowered himself onto the bench outside with the slow, careful movements of someone whose body has been pushed to a new limit and is now taking stock of what that cost. The river murmured nearby. The forest stood tall and still around the clearing. Torrin sat beside him, tired but not broken, and the silence between them was the kind that needs no filling. They had made it. Down from the ridge, through the cascade, into the valley, and onto the TA itself. Eighteen kilometres. Anth's longest day. His first hut.

The mountains had asked their first real question, and they had answered it together.Read more