Across the Tasman to Begin
Mar 10–11 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌙 13 °C
The alarm cut through the quiet of early morning, a sound still foreign to lives shaped by the unhurried rhythms of nomadic existence. For two years now, we had woken to birdsong, to light filtering through bus windows, to the slow stirring of days that began without urgency. But this morning carried a different weight. This was another morning of departure.
Anth hugged Grammy goodbye in the softness of her home, the kind of farewell between mother and son that carries more beneath its surface than either one says aloud. Then he and Sal climbed into the bus and pulled out onto the road for the two-hour drive south to Brisbane airport. Fourteen years together, and this would be the longest stretch apart in all that time. The enormity of that sat somewhere between his ribs, not quite grief but close enough to borrow its shape. Neither of them said much about it directly, but it lived in the spaces between their words, in the way the familiar highway felt somehow different this morning, as though the road itself understood what was coming.
The Bruce Highway delivered its usual congestion heading into the city, that familiar crawl of brake lights and merging lanes that seems designed to test the patience of anyone carrying a timeline. Yet even through the traffic, there was time to spare. The bus pulled into the departures zone, that strange ritual of parking a home on wheels in a place built for brief goodbyes. They embraced, Anth and Sal, holding on in the way people do when they know the next weeks will be measured not in shared mornings but in distance. Then the sliding doors swallowed him into the noise and fluorescence of the terminal.
Through security, settled into the departure lounge, Anth busied himself with the small logistics that travel demands, organising a few things remotely, tying off loose ends from a life that was about to change shape entirely. Then the boarding call, the hum of the aircraft, and Australia falling away beneath cloud.
The flight to Auckland was a quick affair, barely two and a half hours across the Tasman. A shorter hop, remarkably, than some of the domestic flights between Hobart and Brisbane, or even Brisbane and Melbourne, that had once felt routine. New Zealand arrived with surprising speed, as though the land itself was eager to welcome what was coming. Anth collected his bags and walked the path connecting the international terminal to the domestic, the transition between countries compressed into a few hundred metres of concrete floor and directional signage.
The next leg was something different altogether, and it came late. A smaller, prop-driven plane, its engines thrumming with a more intimate frequency than the jet that had carried him across the Tasman, climbed out over water and farmland as the day surrendered its last light. By the time they reached cruising altitude, the sun had slipped below the horizon, bleeding amber and violet across the cloud line before darkness folded in completely. Somewhere below, the South Island was unfolding in all its rugged beauty, mountain ranges and river valleys and coastline, but the night kept it hidden, holding it back like a gift not yet ready to be opened. Anth pressed his face to the window and saw only his own reflection staring back, and the occasional lonely scatter of lights from towns he could not name. The land would have to wait until morning to reveal itself.
And then Nelson, its small terminal warm against the evening air, where Torrin was waiting and where everything was about to begin.
The moment Anth stepped through the arrivals gate, there he was. Torrin, unmistakable now with a massive red beard that had claimed most of his face and hair grown wild in the way that weeks on trail tend to encourage. We embraced, and the distance of weeks and oceans collapsed into something simple and whole. It was so good to see him again. That particular joy of reunion, the kind that sits in the chest and radiates outward, carried us through the rest of the evening.
Jumping back in the car, we drove to Annie's house, where Torrin had been staying with a trail angel family whose generosity defied anything Anth had encountered before. Trail angels, those quiet saints of long-distance hiking, offer their help freely to Te Araroa walkers, asking nothing in return. But Annie and her household had gone above and beyond: a bed, a hot shower, breakfast, coffee, conversation, and a warmth that made strangers feel like family. They had looked after Torrin for the past week while he waited, and now they folded Anth into the same unhesitating care as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
The next morning, we awoke and checked the weather service with the cautious optimism of hikers who know the mountains always have the final word. The news was not what we had hoped. A severe weather warning had been issued for the trail ahead, the kind of forecast that turns alpine passes from challenging to dangerous and leaves no room for stubbornness. We had to pivot.
The decision came quickly, born of the pragmatism that trail life demands. Rather than wait out the weather in Nelson, we would head north and walk the Abel Tasman Track, that celebrated coastal trail winding through golden sand beaches and turquoise bays along the top of the South Island. Once finished, we would rejoin the Te Araroa where it had been waiting for us.
Anth felt a quiet thread of relief weave through the disappointment. The Abel Tasman would not be alpine. It would offer five or so days of gentler terrain, a chance for legs and lungs and the sheer physical reality of carrying everything on your back to settle in before the real TA revealed its teeth. A kinder beginning, perhaps, than the mountains would have allowed. A grace period the weather had, in its own rough way, gifted them.
Simon, Annie's partner, drove us to the local Pak'n Save to stock up on groceries, the supermarket aisles becoming a careful calculation of calories against weight and what would sustain two bodies over the days ahead. Then he drove us onward, this last act of trail angel kindness.Read more
Thirteen Kilometres of Beginning
Mar 11–12 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C
Simon had delivered us to the start of something new, and now it was time to walk it.
Day one. Thirteen kilometres. Not far by any measure of long-distance hiking, but that was precisely the point. For Anth, whose legs had known nothing but airport terminals and bus seats for the past two days, it was a gentle invitation rather than a demand. For Torrin, eleven days of waiting in Nelson for his father to arrive had softened the hard-won fitness of the North Island, and even a body accustomed to trail life needs a few kilometres to remember itself. This was the distance for finding rhythms again, for settling pack straps into the grooves of shoulders, for letting feet rediscover the language of earth and root and stone.
We walked.
The Abel Tasman unfolded to our right in colours that felt almost implausible. The water sat in shades of turquoise so vivid they seemed borrowed from somewhere tropical, somewhere you would expect palm fronds and coral rather than the dense coastal bush of the South Island's northern edge. We stopped often, not because we needed to but because the beauty insisted upon it. There is a particular freedom in having nowhere urgent to be, in letting a thirteen-kilometre day stretch itself out like a long exhale, and we took full advantage of it. Each clearing in the canopy offered another angle on that impossible water, another bay curving away in a crescent of golden sand, and each time we paused to look, neither of us felt the need to say much. Some things are better absorbed in silence, standing shoulder to shoulder, packs creaking softly as weight shifted.
The trail wound through forest and along coastal edges, the salt air threading itself between the trees, sunlight falling in columns through the canopy above. It was gentle terrain, the kind that lets conversation happen easily, and we talked in the way that people do when they are catching up on the things that phone calls and messages across oceans can never quite carry. The small details. The stories that need footsteps and shared air to be properly told.
Eventually, the bush opened out and Anchorage Bay revealed itself ahead of us, a wide sweep of sand backed by forest, postcard-perfect and, as it turned out, enormously popular. The hut was heaving. The prospect of sharing a single room with twenty-four odd other trampers, their rustling, their snoring, their head torches flicking on in the small hours, held precisely zero appeal. We looked at each other and the decision made itself. We would pitch the tent.
It was here, while setting up camp amidst the bustle of Anchorage, that Torrin introduced Anth to the weka. A sturdy, brown, ground-dwelling bird with an expression of absolute confidence and an appetite for anything left unattended. Native to New Zealand, flightless, and utterly fearless, the weka operates with the bold conviction that whatever you have is rightfully theirs. They circled our campsite with the persistence of seasoned thieves, darting in whenever attention drifted, retreating only to regroup and try again from a different angle. Torrin watched Anth's amused disbelief with the knowing grin of someone who had already learned this lesson the hard way somewhere on the trail.
As the afternoon light began to soften and lengthen, we wandered down the beach to cook our first meal together on trail. The sand was still warm underfoot, and the bay had begun to empty of day visitors, leaving behind a quieter, more intimate version of itself. We set up the stove and unpacked our supplies, and it became immediately, comically apparent that we had overpacked at the Pak'n Save. Simon had driven us to that supermarket only the day before, and in the excitement of stocking up for the trail, enthusiasm had thoroughly outweighed any sensible calculation of what two people could reasonably carry and consume. But if the packs were heavier for it, the dinner was exceptional. We ate well, properly well, the kind of first-night feast that long-distance hikers rarely enjoy but always remember.
The sun dropped behind the headland and the bay dimmed to blues and silvers. We cleaned up carefully, mindful of our weka audience lurking in the fringe of the bush, and made our way back to the tent. Crawling inside, zipping the world out, the fabric walls catching the last of the light, there was a completeness to the moment that settled over everything. The first day of walking together. The first meal cooked on a beach in a country neither of us had explored on foot before. The first night sleeping side by side in a tent on the Abel Tasman, with the sound of small waves folding against the shore and the occasional indignant shuffle of a weka still patrolling for opportunities outside.
Day one, done.Read more
Turquoise and Trail Legs
Mar 12–13 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C
After a surprisingly good night's sleep, the kind that comes when fresh air and a first day's walking conspire to pull you under quickly and hold you there, we both awoke without urgency. There was no alarm this time, no schedule pressing down on the morning. Just the soft grey light of early day filtering through the tent walls and the distant murmur of waves on Anchorage Bay. We started slow, moving with the unhurried deliberateness of people who are learning to let the trail set the pace rather than the clock. Pack up the tent, roll the sleeping mats, compress the bags, shoulder the weight. The ritual was still new to Anth, but already beginning to feel like something his hands might one day do without thinking.
Before we had finished, a DOC warden approached Torrin to check whether we had paid our campsite fees. We had not, and not through any lack of intention. Reception out here was nonexistent, the kind of signal void that makes a smartphone little more than an expensive torch. But the warden, in that easy, practical manner that seemed to characterise so many of the people we were meeting in this country, simply loaned Torrin her Wi-Fi password so he could sort the payment. And since the connection was there, fleeting and precious as water in a desert, Torrin seized the moment. We spent five minutes on the beach while he downloaded his latest audiobook, a small luxury that would fill the solitary stretches of trail ahead with story and voice when conversation fell into comfortable silence.
We set off along the sand, the morning light catching the water in that same impossible turquoise that had stopped us in our tracks the day before. The beach curved ahead, and tucked into the rocky edges where the coastline met the bush, we discovered a series of cave sections carved into the sandstone by centuries of tide and weather. We explored them with the quiet thrill of children finding secret rooms, the cool stone overhead, the way sound changed inside, the drip of moisture catching light. They were beautiful in their own understated way, these small hollows the sea had made and then abandoned.
Heading inland, we came to the first of the Abel Tasman's tidal crossings, and luck was entirely on our side. The tide was out, the vast flat gleaming with a thin skin of water and wet sand that reflected the sky like hammered metal. We walked straight across, our boots leaving shallow prints that filled and vanished behind us, and in doing so saved ourselves nearly two hours of hiking that the longer route around would have demanded. There is something deeply satisfying about timing and tide aligning in your favour, a small gift from the ocean that felt like an endorsement of the day ahead.
The trail continued along the coast, and once again the views to our right were extraordinary. That endless interplay of bush and bay, of headlands reaching out into water so clear you could trace the sandy bottom far from shore. Anth, keeping one eye on his phone, grabbed a couple of geocaches along the way, nice and easy finds tucked into the margins of the trail, those small treasures hidden by strangers for strangers that add a quiet layer of discovery to any walk.
We fell into step with a German backpacker somewhere along this stretch, exchanging the usual pleasantries of trail life. Where are you from, how far today, where did you start. It was becoming apparent that German hikers were remarkably well represented on the Abel Tasman, their accents surfacing at rest stops and viewpoints with a frequency that suggested New Zealand held a particular gravity for that corner of Europe. Mixed in amongst the thru-hikers were heaps of day walkers too, clean-clothed and light on their feet, unburdened by the weeks of supplies that made our packs groan. The Abel Tasman was clearly a trail that belonged to many people in many different ways.
Shortly after the tidal flat, we passed through the small resort of Torrent Bay, a cluster of buildings nestled between bush and water that felt like a brief interruption of civilisation before the trail reclaimed us. We stopped at several viewpoints along the way, each one offering a slightly different composition of the same astonishing palette, before finally arriving at Bark Bay campground.
We rested first. Properly rested, packs dropped, bodies horizontal on the grass, letting the accumulated kilometres drain from legs and shoulders. Anth was certainly feeling it. Two days of walking with a full pack after months of nomadic bus life rather than trail life had made its position clear in his calves and lower back. Torrin, by contrast, was doing well, his body remembering its North Island fitness even after those eleven idle days in Nelson, moving with the easy looseness of someone for whom this was simply a return to normal.
Once camp was set up and the tent pitched, we wandered across another tidal flat, this one smaller and muddier, and climbed a tiny island that rose from its edge like a green fist. Another geocache waited there, and Anth found it with the quiet satisfaction that these miniature treasure hunts always provide. We walked along the beach afterward, the afternoon light growing golden and long, and paused to watch and photograph a small group of sandpipers working the waterline with their quick, mechanical steps, probing the wet sand with delicate bills, entirely indifferent to our presence.
Back at camp, we cooked another dinner. The Pak'n Save oversupply from two days earlier was proving to be both a burden on the shoulders and a blessing on the palate, and once again we ate well. But the weka of Bark Bay, it turned out, were even bolder than their cousins at Anchorage. While we ate, one particularly audacious bird made its move. Not on an unattended wrapper or an open bag, but on Anth's pack itself, working its beak into a zipped pocket with a dexterity that seemed frankly unreasonable for a creature without hands. Before Anth could react, the weka had extracted a protein bar and was already sprinting across the mud flat with the confidence of a thief who had done this a thousand times before. Torrin gave chase, boots slapping through the shallow mud, but the bird had the advantage of local knowledge and vanished into the bushes with its prize, leaving Torrin standing at the treeline, breathless and laughing, outwitted by a bird that weighed less than a kilogram.
We cleaned up with considerably more vigilance after that, every zip checked twice, every pocket secured. The weka had taught their lesson, and we were not keen to pay another protein bar for the privilege of a second one.
Before turning in, we checked the weather forecast. Tomorrow's outlook was rain. We looked at each other with the resigned acceptance that hikers develop quickly, that understanding that weather is not an obstacle but simply a condition, and that the trail continues regardless of what the sky decides to do. We zipped the tent closed against the cooling night air, the bush settling into its evening chorus around us, and let the sound of it carry us toward sleep.
Day two on the Abel Tasman, done. Day three would be wet.Read more
The Inlet Keeps Its Own Time
Mar 13–14 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 19 °C
As predicted, we awoke to rain.
Not the dramatic, hammering kind that announces itself and demands respect, but something quieter and in its own way more insidious. A light mist that hung in the air like gauze, barely visible but relentless in its reach, settling on everything it touched and turning the simple morning tasks of camp life into small exercises in frustration. Packing a wet tent, rolling damp sleeping bags, fumbling with zips that stuck and straps that slipped through fingers that had lost their warmth. Everything took just that little bit longer, required just that little bit more patience.
The night had delivered its own small sabotage. At some point in the dark hours, one of the tent pegs had surrendered its grip on the sandy ground and pulled free, allowing one side of the tent to sag inward like a deflated lung. The collapse was subtle enough not to wake us but sufficient to let the mist find its way in, leaving gear and clothing that bit wetter than they might have been. We discovered it in the grey half-light of morning with the weary acceptance of people who are learning that trail life is as much about managing small misfortunes as it is about conquering big distances.
Before setting off, Anth grabbed a few nearby geocaches, those quiet morning finds that add a small spark of purpose to an otherwise damp and reluctant start. Then we shouldered our packs and headed along the trail, the bush dripping steadily around us, every leaf and branch beaded with moisture.
The Abel Tasman had been generous with its beauty over the past two days, offering up turquoise waters and golden bays like postcards at every turn. Today it gave us grey. The views that undoubtedly existed beyond the tree line and around each headland were shrouded completely, the ocean and sky merging into a single pale wash that erased the horizon and left the imagination to fill in what the eyes could not. It was a different kind of walking, more internal, more rhythmic, the world contracted to the few metres of trail ahead and the steady percussion of rain on leaves overhead.
And then the hill arrived.
The first real climb of the Abel Tasman, the trail rearing upward through dripping bush, roots slick and treacherous underfoot, the gradient steep enough to shift breathing from easy conversation to concentrated effort. Torrin stepped back and let Anth lead, a small gesture that carried more kindness than it might have appeared. By going first, Anth set the pace. There was no one ahead pulling away from him, no gap widening between father and son that might turn encouragement into pressure. Instead, Torrin sat just behind, a steady presence at his shoulder, close enough to offer a word when the slope bit hardest, close enough for Anth to hear him say keep going, you've got this, without it feeling like instruction. It was the quiet wisdom of someone who had already learned what these trails demand and understood that the greatest gift he could give his father was not speed but patience.
Anth climbed with his head down, counting steps when the slope felt endless, feeling the weight of every gram of those overpacked Pak'n Save supplies pressing into his shoulders and hips. His legs burned with the kind of honest protest that comes from muscles being asked to do something they have not done in a very long time. But Torrin was there, right behind him, and that made the difference between endurance and defeat. At the top, breathing hard, hands on knees, Anth looked back down the trail they had just climbed and felt something shift inside him. Not triumph exactly, but proof. Torrin, barely winded, offered a grin that carried both pride and gentle warning. This, he said, was not really a hill. Not compared to what was coming on the real TA. The alpine passes of the South Island would make this feel like a garden path. Anth filed that information somewhere between motivation and mild dread.
The trail stretched out to about fourteen kilometres for the day, and beyond the hills, we found our rhythm. Both of us slipped into our audiobooks, that particular trail companionship where two people walk in comfortable proximity, each absorbed in their own story while sharing the same path. It is a strange intimacy, moving through landscape together in separate worlds of narrative, occasionally surfacing to point out a bird or a view or to navigate a tricky section, before sinking back into the voice in your ears. The rain continued its soft, persistent work around us, and the kilometres passed in that timeless way they do when the body finds its cadence and the mind is elsewhere.
Finally, the bush opened and Awaroa Inlet appeared ahead, a wide expanse of tidal sand and shallow water rimmed by forest. We made our way to the campground and pitched the tent with the practised efficiency of people who have now done this enough times to skip the hesitation. Every peg was driven deep this time, the lesson of last night's collapse still fresh. We cooked, we ate, and we retired early. Anth was still sore, his body conducting its slow and sometimes painful negotiation with the demands of trail life. Muscles that had been dormant were waking up with complaint. Joints that had known only the gentle rocking of bus travel were recalibrating to impact and incline. It would pass, he knew. The body would adjust. But tonight it wanted him to know it was not there yet.
The following morning brought a different kind of challenge. Not distance or weather but time itself. The trail ahead required us to cross the Awaroa Inlet on foot, and the inlet answered only to the tide. We could not continue until the water retreated far enough to make the crossing safe, so we found ourselves with hours to fill and nowhere to go. It was, unexpectedly, a gift.
We spread our gear across every available surface, draping damp clothing and sleeping bags over branches and tent lines, coaxing the moisture out of fabric and down with whatever warmth the day offered. The rain had eased, and patches of pale light moved across the inlet as the clouds thinned and shifted overhead. We sat and watched the water, talked and fell into comfortable silence, let our bodies do the quiet work of recovery that rest days allow. Anth felt the soreness in his legs begin to loosen, the tightness in his shoulders ease by small degrees. Torrin stretched out on the grass with the contented stillness of someone who understood that days like this were not lost time but borrowed time, the trail's way of giving back what it had taken.
There was no rush. The tide would tell us when it was time to move again.Read more
The Weka's Final Heist
Mar 14–15 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C
We wandered down to the DOC hut in the late morning to wait for the tide to surrender the inlet. We were not alone. A small collection of hikers had gathered with the same intention, packs propped against the hut walls, eyes fixed on the retreating waterline with the particular patience of people whose entire day hinges on the rhythm of the moon. Conversation came easily in that shared waiting, the quiet camaraderie of strangers bound by the same obstacle.
Even before the waters had fully receded, pairs of hikers began to venture out, wading into the Awaroa Inlet with packs hoisted high and legs pushing through thigh-deep water that still claimed the crossing. We watched them go, their figures growing smaller against the vast tidal flat, and decided to wait just a little longer. A few more minutes of patience for a few fewer inches of water seemed a reasonable exchange.
When we finally stepped out onto the inlet, we went in our camp shoes, a calculated decision to keep our hiking boots dry for the trail ahead. It worked, for a time. The first stretch was firm enough, the water cool around our ankles, the footing manageable. But the Awaroa Inlet had other ideas. Deeper in, where the tidal mud lay thick and glutinous beneath the shallow water, the sticky bottom began to claim our footwear with a slow, sucking grip that was almost comical in its persistence. One step, the shoe held. Next step, the foot came free but the shoe did not, swallowed into the grey ooze as though the inlet had decided to collect a toll. We wrestled them free, lost them again, and finally accepted what the mud had been trying to tell us from the start. Bare feet it would have to be. We stuffed the camp shoes into our packs and walked the rest of the crossing with nothing between our soles and the cold, silky mud, feeling every ripple and shell and stone with an intimacy that shoes would never have allowed.
We made it across to the other side, found a patch of grass at the water's edge, and washed and dried our feet as best we could before lacing our hiking boots back on. The inlet was behind us. The trail ahead.
With the rain of the previous day gone, the Abel Tasman had remembered what it did best. The coastal views returned in full glory, those turquoise bays appearing through gaps in the bush like windows into another world, the water so clear and vivid it seemed almost luminous against the deep green of the surrounding forest. And with the views came the hills, rising and falling along the coastline in that relentless rhythm the trail had established. But something had shifted. Anth was slowly getting the hang of them. The soreness was still present, lodged in his calves and the small of his back, but it had softened from sharp protest to dull conversation, his body adapting by degrees to the daily demands of pack and gradient. Torrin, meanwhile, could have been out for a Sunday stroll. He moved with the effortless fluidity of a body that had long since made its peace with uphills, his breathing barely changing on the climbs, still letting Anth lead the way up and offering quiet encouragement from behind when the legs complained loudest.
We stopped several times for short breaks, dropping packs and stretching out on whatever flat ground presented itself, sharing water and trail mix and the easy silence of two people who no longer need to fill every pause with words. The kilometres unfolded beneath us, and eventually the bush opened out onto the large camping area of Totaranui.
Totaranui was a different world from the quiet trail camps we had grown accustomed to over the past few days. Nestled at the head of a sweeping golden bay, this was one of the Abel Tasman's most accessible spots, reachable by road, and it showed. Vans and cars were parked along the edges, families spread across the grass with the comfortable sprawl of people who had driven their supplies in rather than carried them. Children ran between sites, the smell of barbecues drifted on the afternoon air, and the general atmosphere was one of holiday rather than hiking. It was pleasant enough, but after days of earning each campsite with blistered feet and aching shoulders, the energy felt jarring.
We would catch the ferry back from here tomorrow, but for now the afternoon was still young and the idea of spending the night amidst the bustle held little appeal. So we made the decision to walk an extra hour north to Anapai Bay, a smaller, more remote campsite tucked into its own sheltered cove that promised beachside camping and, crucially, quiet. It meant another tidal crossing, a shorter one this time, navigated at low tide with the confidence of people who had now learned what the mud could do. We kept our boots on and picked our line carefully, and the inlet let us pass without incident.
Anapai Bay proved our decision the correct one the moment we arrived. The campsite sat right on the beach, a crescent of sand backed by coastal bush, with only a handful of other tents dotting the clearing. After the bustle of Totaranui, the stillness here felt almost luxurious. The bay curved away in both directions, the water shifting through shades of green and blue as the afternoon light moved across it, and the bush behind us was alive with birdsong.
We set up the tent, then hung our packs in the trees, a precaution born of hard experience. The weka of the Abel Tasman had proven themselves relentless and inventive thieves across every campsite we had visited, from the protein bar heist at Bark Bay to their persistent patrols at Anchorage, and we were not about to offer them another opportunity. Packs aloft, zips secured, we walked along the beach to explore the area, the sand firm and cool underfoot, the headlands at each end of the bay rising like green sentinels above the water.
As the sun began its slow descent toward the horizon, the sandflies that had been our constant companions through the day quietly clocked off and handed their shift to the mosquitoes, who arrived with the fading light and a renewed enthusiasm for exposed skin. We retreated to the tent, zipping the mesh closed against the evening's tiny predators, and lay there listening as the ocean took over. The sound of waves folding against the shore, that ancient, unhurried rhythm, filled the small space around us and carried us gently toward sleep. It was the kind of night where the world outside the tent feels both vast and perfectly contained, and falling asleep to the voice of the sea felt like a privilege the trail had quietly arranged.
The next morning, Anth awoke just in time. Some instinct, perhaps the subtle change in light through the tent fabric, pulled him from sleep in that last breath before dawn. He unzipped the fly and stepped out onto the sand, and there it was. The sunrise, breaking over the ocean in a slow, spreading blaze of gold and pink, the water catching the light and scattering it across the bay in a thousand shifting fragments. The headlands stood in dark silhouette against the brightening sky, and for a few minutes the entire world seemed to hold still, as though the morning itself was pausing to admire what it had made. Anth stood alone on the beach and watched it happen, one of those moments that trail life delivers without warning and that no photograph ever quite captures. The kind of moment you carry in your chest long after the colours have faded.
The other campers slowly packed and departed through the morning, their tents disappearing one by one until the bay felt almost entirely ours. With the ferry booked for mid-afternoon back at Totaranui, we were in no hurry. We moved through the morning at the pace of people with nowhere pressing to be, savouring the last hours of the Abel Tasman in the way you savour the final pages of a book you are not ready to finish.
Finally packed and ready to leave, Anth reached for his wireless headphones. They had been right there, he was certain of it, tucked into the side pocket where they always lived. But the pocket was empty. He checked the tent site, the grass around it, the sand where he had sat watching the sunrise. Nothing. The realisation arrived with a mixture of disbelief and reluctant admiration. A weka. It had to be. Those bold, brown, endlessly opportunistic birds had struck again, this time with a theft so clean and silent it might have happened while we slept. After a thorough search of the campsite, turning over every possibility, we resigned ourselves to the truth. Nature had claimed them. Somewhere in the coastal bush of Anapai Bay, a weka was sitting on a pair of wireless headphones it would never learn to use, and there was nothing to be done about it but laugh.
We shouldered our packs and headed back along the trail to Totaranui to await the ferry, lighter by one pair of headphones and richer by one more story the weka had written for us.Read more
Rewinding the Abel Tasman
Mar 15–17 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C
As we left Anapai Bay for the last time, the coastal bush closing behind us like a curtain on the Abel Tasman chapter, Torrin sent a message to Annie. The trail angel who had welcomed us into her home with such unhesitating generosity before our first steps on the Abel Tasman, who had fed us and sheltered us and sent us off with Simon's kindness at the wheel, might she be willing to do it all again? Along the trail, her reply arrived. She would be more than happy to. With transport and accommodation assured in a single message, the weight of logistics lifted from the afternoon, and we walked the hour back to Totaranui quickly, packs feeling lighter for knowing what waited at the other end. Anth, this time, walked without the company of an audiobook. Somewhere in the bush behind them at Anapai Bay, a weka was presumably enjoying that particular luxury on his behalf.
Arriving at Totaranui with almost an hour and a half to spare before the ferry, we dropped our packs in the shade and settled into the grass. The large campground hummed with its usual holiday energy, families and day trippers moving between the beach and the car park, but we had stepped outside that rhythm now. We were in the quiet space between one thing ending and the next beginning. We finished off the last of our snacks, those final crumbs of trail food that had survived five days of careful rationing and occasional weka raids, and watched the bay do its slow work of changing colour as the afternoon light shifted.
The time passed quickly, and then the ferry was there, nosing into the shallows with the practised ease of a vessel that made this journey many times a day. We were right on the limit of its trip, among the last passengers to embark on this leg before it turned back for its collection run along the coast. We climbed aboard and made our way to the top deck, the wind catching our hair as the engines churned and Totaranui began to fall away behind us.
What followed was extraordinary. Over the course of the next ninety minutes, the Abel Tasman rewound itself before our eyes. From this new vantage point, elevated above the water and moving at a speed the trail would never allow, we watched the coastline slide past and picked out the places that had taken us days to traverse on foot. There was Bark Bay, where the protein bar heist had unfolded across the mud flat. The tidal crossings we had waded barefoot, the headlands we had climbed with burning legs, the turquoise bays that had stopped us in our tracks, all of it compressed into a single sweeping panorama viewed from the water. What had felt immense and hard-won on foot now appeared intimate and contained, the entire trail visible in a way that walking it never permits. It was a strange feeling, seeing five days of effort reduced to a ribbon of green coastline, and yet it only deepened the sense of what we had accomplished. We had walked every metre of that shore. We knew its mud and its hills and its thieving birds in a way that no ferry passenger ever could.
As the boat stopped at beaches along the return route, day trippers climbed aboard in clusters, sunburnt and salt-haired, carrying towels and day bags and the easy contentment of a day spent on golden sand. The ferry filled steadily until the deck was crowded with voices and laughter, and we sat amongst them with our heavy packs and trail-worn clothes, belonging to a different version of this coastline entirely.
At the final stop of Kaiteriteri, that popular beach resort town where the turquoise water meets a shore lined with kayak hire shops and ice cream stands, Annie was waiting for us. She stood on the beach with the kind of smile that makes you feel like arriving is the best thing that has happened to her all day, and whisked us into the car for the drive back to Nelson. Just at the edge of town, she spotted a figure walking the roadside with a heavy pack and a familiar weariness in his stride. A German hiker, Jonathan, heading back to Nelson. Without hesitation, she pulled over. Her generosity to help was instinctive, as natural as breathing, extended not just to us but to anyone the trail placed in her path. Jonathan climbed in with the grateful disbelief of someone who had resigned himself to a long walk and found kindness instead.
We dropped Jonathan at his accommodation and headed to Annie's, where Simon had already almost finished preparing dinner. The house smelled of home cooking, that warm, enveloping scent that hits you with unexpected force when you have spent days eating rehydrated meals on a camp stove. Anth dropped his pack in the hallway and began unpacking his bag, pulling out clothes and gear in search of something clean to wear, and there, squashed into the bottom of his main clothes bag, tangled amongst shirts and socks like stowaways, were his headphones. His wireless headphones. The ones he had been so certain a weka had stolen from Anapai Bay. The ones he had searched the campsite for, the ones he had mourned with reluctant admiration for the bird that had taken them. They had been in his pack the entire time, buried so deep in the chaos of a hastily stuffed bag that the morning search had never found them. He stood in Annie's hallway holding them, caught between relief and the sheepish realisation that he owed an apology to every weka on the Abel Tasman coast. Torrin's laughter, when he heard, was the kind that comes from deep in the belly and does not stop quickly.
Their hospitality was incredible, the kind that goes beyond mere generosity into something closer to vocation. They asked for nothing and gave everything, and sitting at their table that evening, clean and fed and resting in the comfort of their home, we understood why trail angels occupy an almost sacred place in the hearts of long-distance hikers. They are the people who make the impossible stretches possible, who restore not just bodies but belief.
The next day, we took a zero day. In thru-hiking language, a day of no kilometres, no trail, no forward progress on the map. But zero days are never truly zero. They are the days when the body does its deepest repair, when muscles that have been torn and rebuilt find their new architecture, when blisters dry and joints stop their quiet complaining. We rested and recovered, but beneath the stillness there was preparation. What we had come here for was waiting.
The Te Araroa.
The Abel Tasman had been beautiful, a gift the weather had inadvertently given us, five days of coastal walking that had allowed Anth to find his trail legs and father and son to find their rhythm together. But it was not the TA. The next section would be eight days long, pushing through the Waiau and into terrain that was, by all reports, the second hardest section of the entire Te Araroa trail. Alpine passes, remote valleys, river crossings, and the kind of sustained physical demand that the gentle coastal paths of the Abel Tasman had only hinted at. The weather window looked promising, a stretch of days clear enough to attempt what the severe warning had denied us when we first arrived in Nelson. This time, the mountains might let us through.
Simon drove us into town for final preparations. We visited the Centre of New Zealand, that modest hilltop landmark above Nelson where a monument marks the geographical centre of the country, a small pilgrimage that felt fitting before setting off into its wild interior. Then it was back to the Pak'n Save, those familiar aisles where our journey had begun with overstuffed packs and more food than two people could reasonably carry. We had learned our lesson. This time, we chose lighter options, calculating with more discipline, balancing the need for eight days of fuel against the reality of carrying every gram of it over mountain passes. Every tin was weighed against its dehydrated alternative. Every luxury was measured against the cost of an extra few hundred grams on a steep climb.
One more night under Annie and Simon's roof. One more evening of their warmth and generosity, of conversation and home-cooked food and the quiet comfort of sleeping in a real bed before the mountains claimed us. In the morning, Annie drove us toward St Arnaud, the small lakeside settlement on the edge of Nelson Lakes National Park where the TA waited. True to form, Annie had organised a lift for another TA hiker heading to the same town without a second thought, adding one more act of trail angel grace to a list that had already grown long.
The road climbed through farmland and into the foothills, the landscape shifting from the gentle greens of the coast to something wilder and more vertical. Anth sat in the back seat and watched the mountains grow larger through the windscreen, their peaks still carrying snow, their flanks dark with beech forest. He felt both excited and nervous about the trail to come. The Abel Tasman had been a prologue, beautiful and necessary, but a prologue nonetheless. What lay ahead was the story itself, and it would ask more of him than anything he had attempted before. Eight days. The second hardest section. Alpine terrain. And Torrin beside him, steady and sure, the son who had already walked so far and was now waiting for his father to walk with him into the mountains.
The road wound on toward St Arnaud, and the TA drew closer with every kilometre.Read more
Wind, Ridge and Broken Lines
Mar 17–18 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
Annie dropped Sorcha at her accommodation in St Arnaud. She was nobo, northbound, walking the Te Araroa in the opposite direction to the southbound hikers who made up most of the trail traffic at this time of year, her own story unfolding in reverse along the same paths we were about to follow south. We continued on, the car climbing the narrow road that wound away from the lakeside settlement and into the mountains, until Annie pulled into the Robert Ridge car park and the road could take us no further.
We said farewell to Annie. This woman who had opened her home to Torrin for a week, who had then welcomed Anth without hesitation, who had driven us to supermarkets and ferry terminals and now deep into the mountains, who had picked up strangers on roadsides simply because they needed help. Standing in that car park at the edge of the wilderness, packs at our feet and the mountains rising above us, the gratitude felt almost too large for words. Some people you meet briefly and forget. Others leave an imprint so deep that every step you take afterward carries something of their kindness with it. Annie was the latter. We watched her car disappear back down the road, and then it was just us and the trail.
The route we were taking was not the official Te Araroa, but it may as well have been. The Robert Ridge track to Angelus Hut had become the alternate of choice for most TA hikers, a route so widely walked by thru-hikers that it had earned an almost official status through sheer collective preference. And it was easy to understand why. Where the official trail followed a valley route, this alternate climbed above the treeline and along an exposed alpine ridge that offered some of the most spectacular scenery in the entire Nelson Lakes region. It was harder, certainly. But on a trail like the TA, where the journey is measured as much in what you see and feel as in the kilometres you cover, the ridge was the path that called.
The track began in the forest, and it began steeply. The path climbed through dense mountain beech, that ancient, gnarled woodland that cloaks the lower slopes of the Nelson Lakes ranges in a canopy so thick it filters the world into shades of green and shadow. Red beech and silver beech crowded the trail, their trunks twisted by centuries of wind and snow, mosses and lichens draping every surface in soft, damp layers that spoke of rainfall and time. The air beneath the canopy was cool and earthy, rich with the scent of decomposing leaf litter and the faint sweetness of bush flowers we could smell but not see. Bellbirds called from somewhere above, their song liquid and cascading, filling the green cathedral of the forest with a music that felt older than anything human.
The track rose through a series of switchbacks, those zigzagging traverses that mountain trails use to tame impossible gradients into something merely punishing. Each turn revealed the same view of dense bush and the trail continuing upward, a visual repetition that plays tricks on the mind and makes the climb feel endless. Our packs were heavy, loaded with eight days of food for the section ahead, and every gram made itself known on the steeper pitches. Anth felt the weight settle into his hips and shoulders with a familiar ache, his breathing deepening as the altitude and gradient conspired to remind him that the gentle coastal paths of the Abel Tasman were now a memory belonging to a different kind of trail entirely.
And then, gradually, the forest began to thin. The beech trees grew smaller and more windswept, their canopy lowering until we were walking through a corridor of stunted subalpine scrub, and then suddenly, magnificently, we were above the treeline.
The world opened.
Robert Ridge stretched out before us like the spine of some vast sleeping creature, a narrow, undulating crest of tussock and rock suspended between sky and valley. To the west, the land fell away in sweeping folds of beech forest down to the shores of Lake Rotoiti, its surface a deep, luminous blue that seemed to hold the entire sky within it. The lake, one of Nelson Lakes National Park's twin jewels, lay cradled between mountains that rose steeply from its edges, their upper slopes bare rock and scree, their summits still streaked with the last remnants of winter snow. To the east, the view plunged into the valleys beyond, ridge after ridge receding into a blue haze that made it impossible to tell where mountain ended and atmosphere began. The scale of it was staggering. After days of walking through coastal bush where the world was measured in the distance to the next bay, here the horizon had been torn wide open, and everything we could see belonged to wilderness.
The ridge track itself was exposed and demanding. Rocky in places, the path picked its way along the crest through sections where the ground fell away steeply on both sides and the wind, unobstructed by any tree or slope, pushed against us with a force that required deliberate footing. Tussock grass rippled in golden waves across the broader sections of the ridge, and mountain daisies clung to the rocky outcrops in defiant clusters of white and yellow. The sky above was enormous, that particular high-country sky of the South Island that seems closer and more vivid than anywhere else, as though the altitude has peeled away a layer between you and the blue.
It was out of Anth's comfort zone. The exposure, the steepness, the way the trail sometimes narrowed to a rocky ledge with nothing but air on either side, all of it asked questions his body and mind had not been asked before. The Abel Tasman's hills had been a prelude, just as Torrin had warned, and this was the first true movement of the symphony the mountains intended to play. But Torrin was extraordinary. He stayed close, letting Anth set the pace as he had done from the beginning, but here on the ridge his support deepened into something more active and instinctive. He pointed out the safest foot placements on the rockier sections, offered a steadying hand where the exposure was greatest, talked Anth through the moments where the drop on either side threatened to tighten the chest and shorten the breath. There was no impatience in him, no sense that he was being held back. Only a son walking with his father through difficult terrain, giving him exactly what he needed to keep moving forward. The quiet encouragement, the calm reassurance, the unspoken message that said I am right here, we are doing this together. It was, in its own way, one of the most profound expressions of love Anth had ever received, delivered not in words but in footsteps, patience, and presence on a mountain ridge high above a lake that shone like something sacred below.
We took it slow. There was no other way to take it, not with packs this heavy and terrain this demanding and a body still calibrating itself to the realities of alpine hiking. But slow does not mean defeated. It means deliberate. It means each step is chosen rather than automatic, each rest stop earned rather than surrendered to. And the views, those impossible, soul-expanding views, rewarded every laboured breath and burning muscle with something that no flat trail could ever offer.
We arrived at Angelus Hut as the last hikers to make it in that day. The hut sits at 1,650 metres above sea level, perched on the shores of Lake Angelus in a basin surrounded by spectacular mountain scenery in every direction. It is one of New Zealand's most iconic backcountry huts, a place that rewards the considerable effort required to reach it with a setting so beautiful it borders on the surreal. Lake Angelus itself lay before us, a tarn of extraordinary clarity cradled in its alpine basin, the surrounding peaks reflected on its still surface with a precision that doubled the mountains and made the sky feel twice as deep. In winter, the lake freezes solid and snow buries the hut to its windowsills, but now, in the warmer months, it shimmered in the late afternoon light, a mirror held up to the heavens at the top of the world.
The 28-bunk hut was full, other trampers having claimed their spots through the afternoon, their gear spread across bunks and their voices carrying the warm, tired contentment of people who had earned their shelter. But we had our tent, and what waited outside was better than any bunk. We pitched camp on the edge of the lake itself, the water lapping gently just metres from our door, the mountains rising on all sides in a 360-degree amphitheatre of rock and tussock and sky. It was the kind of campsite that makes you fall quiet, that renders conversation unnecessary because the landscape is saying everything that needs to be said. We cooked and ate watching the light change across the basin, the peaks shifting from gold to pink to violet as the sun dropped behind the western ridgeline, the first stars appearing above Angelus Peak as darkness gathered in the valleys below.
Then the wind came.
It arrived after dark, not gradually but in sudden, violent gusts that slammed into the tent like something with intent. The fabric snapped and shuddered, the poles flexing under the pressure, and the noise, that relentless flapping and cracking, made sleep something to be fought for rather than fallen into. Lake Angelus, so serene at sunset, was now invisible in the darkness but audible, waves slapping against the shore with an urgency that had not been there before. The gusts came in unpredictable surges, each one a held breath followed by an explosion of force that pressed the tent walls inward and rattled every stake and guyline. The basin that had felt so sheltered and protective in the evening light had become a funnel for the wind, the surrounding peaks channelling every current down into the hollow where we lay. Neither of us slept well. We lay in our sleeping bags listening to the mountain throw its weight around, dozing in the lulls and waking with each new assault, the tent our only thin barrier between warmth and the wild night outside.
In the early hours of the morning, as we were packing up in the grey pre-dawn light, still groggy and stiff from a night of broken sleep, a gust more ferocious than the rest tore through the campsite. One of the dyneema guylines, that ultra-strong, ultra-light cord that is supposed to withstand forces far beyond what a mountain wind should deliver, snapped clean. The tension that had been holding the tent's shape vanished in an instant, and the whole structure collapsed around us in a tangle of fabric and poles, swallowing our half-packed gear in its folds. We sat there for a moment in the wreckage of our shelter, the wind still howling across the lake, and there was nothing to do but look at each other and accept it. The mountains were making their introductions, and they wanted us to know that out here, nothing could be taken for granted.Read more
First Steps on the TA
Mar 18–19 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 11 °C
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
The Hut Before the Saddle
Mar 19–20 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 14 °C
We left John Tait Hut with the particular gratitude that comes from a night spent under a solid roof. There is a difference between tent sleep and hut sleep that only thru-hikers truly understand. The tent offers intimacy with the landscape, the sound of rain and wind and river inches from your ears, but the hut offers something the tent cannot: the deep, unguarded rest that comes from knowing the walls will hold and the floor will not shift beneath you. Anth had slept better than any night since arriving in New Zealand, his body sinking into the thin hut mattress as though it were the finest bed he had ever known. But better does not mean restored. The eighteen kilometres of the day before, the Cascade Track's relentless descent, the cumulative toll of every day since the Abel Tasman, all of it still lived in his legs. He was more refreshed, certainly. But tired remained the baseline from which the day would begin.
Our destination was Upper Travers Hut, a shorter day's walk deeper into the valley, and beyond that, waiting like a question not yet asked, the first of two alpine passes we would need to cross. Travers Saddle, sitting at 1,787 metres between the Travers and Sabine valleys, is one of the defining challenges of this section of the trail. It would come tomorrow. Today was about getting into position, conserving what energy remained, and letting the valley carry us gently toward the mountains that would demand everything.
The trail followed the Travers River for most of the way, and the river was magnificent company. It ran beside us through the beech forest like a living thing with its own voice and vocabulary, its crystal-clear waters tumbling over river rocks in a ceaseless, turbulent conversation with the valley floor. The water was so transparent that every stone on the riverbed was visible, grey and amber and pale green, polished smooth by millennia of current, the light refracting through the shallows in shifting patterns that hypnotised the eye. In the deeper pools, the water turned from clear to a luminous blue-green, the colour of glacial melt and mountain purity, and where the current quickened over drops and ledges it broke into white foam that caught the sunlight and scattered it like handfuls of diamonds tossed into the air.
We listened to it as we walked. The sound of the Travers River is not a single note but a symphony, the deep bass rumble of water moving heavy stones along the riverbed, the higher chatter of current splitting around boulders, the soft hiss of foam dissolving in the eddies, and beneath it all a constant, resonant hum that seems to come from the valley itself, as though the mountains are vibrating at a frequency only the river can translate. It filled the forest around us, drowning out our footsteps, drowning out thought, offering the mind a place to rest while the body did its work.
The Travers Valley narrowed as we moved deeper into it, the mountains pressing closer on either side, their flanks steeper and more imposing than the gentler slopes near John Tait. The beech forest remained dense and ancient, the trees draped in mosses that hung from branches like green curtains, the understory thick with ferns and the delicate, heart-shaped leaves of bush plants that thrived in the perpetual shade. The trail was well-maintained but undulating, rising over root systems and dropping into small gullies where side streams crossed the path, each one requiring a careful step across wet rocks. It was not difficult terrain by the standards of what we had already covered, and certainly not by the standards of what lay ahead, but Anth's legs were operating on reserves that had been drawn down further than he had known possible. Each gentle rise felt steeper than it was. Each kilometre stretched itself out longer than the map suggested.
Torrin walked with the quiet attentiveness that had become his signature on this journey. He did not push. He did not suggest they speed up or slow down. He simply matched Anth's pace and stayed present, offering words when words were needed and silence when they were not. There is an art to walking with someone who is struggling, a balance between encouragement and pressure that requires empathy and restraint in equal measure, and Torrin had mastered it completely. He carried it like a second pack, this responsibility of care, and he bore it lightly.
The valley floor rose gradually as they approached the upper reaches, the river beside them growing narrower and faster, its voice changing pitch as the gradient steepened and the water ran with greater urgency over the rocks. The beech forest began to show the first signs of altitude, the trees shorter, their trunks more gnarled, gaps appearing in the canopy where avalanche paths had swept the slopes clean and left corridors of tussock and scrub running from the ridgeline to the valley floor. Through these gaps, the mountains above were visible, their upper slopes bare rock and scree, and somewhere up there, hidden behind the nearer ridges, Travers Saddle waited.
When Upper Travers Hut finally came into view, nestled in a clearing where the valley began its final steepening toward the pass, Anth felt something close to salvation. The hut was smaller than John Tait, a more intimate 28-bunk shelter built to serve trampers staging for or recovering from the saddle crossing. He walked up the wooden stairs to the porch and stopped, his legs like lead, every muscle from hip to ankle announcing that they had given what they had to give and would appreciate not being asked for anything more today. But beneath the exhaustion, beneath the heaviness that had settled into his bones like wet concrete, there was happiness. A genuine, uncomplicated happiness at being here, in this valley, in these mountains, with Torrin. The tiredness was real but so was the joy, and the two existed side by side without contradiction, because that is what the trail teaches you. That you can be simultaneously at your physical limit and more alive than you have ever been.
Inside the hut, we met Heidi. She was the DOC warden for the week, a volunteer from the United Kingdom who had travelled to the other side of the world to spend her time looking after a backcountry hut in the mountains of the South Island. She greeted us with a warmth and enthusiasm that went well beyond the requirements of the role, the kind of welcome that makes weary hikers feel not just tolerated but genuinely celebrated for having made it this far. She asked about our journey, offered advice about the conditions on Travers Saddle, checked that we had what we needed, and did it all with a brightness and sincerity that lit up the hut like a second fire. Torrin, who had met dozens of DOC wardens across the length of the North Island and now into the South, said she was probably the friendliest he had encountered on the entire TA. It was not a small compliment. The backcountry hut wardens of New Zealand are, as a breed, a welcoming and dedicated group, volunteers who give their time to maintain these remote shelters and assist the trampers who pass through them. But Heidi had something extra, a genuine delight in the people who walked through her door, and it made Upper Travers Hut feel less like a waystation and more like a home at the edge of the alpine world.
We settled in for the evening, cooking and eating and talking with Heidi and the other trampers who had gathered in the hut for the night. Outside, the valley darkened and the river continued its endless song, and somewhere above us, beyond the treeline and the tussock and the scree, Travers Saddle waited in the cold mountain air for tomorrow.Read more
Twenty Steps and Breathe
Mar 20–21 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
From Upper Travers Hut, the trail abandoned any pretence of gentleness and simply went up.
There was no easing into it, no gradual warm-up through rolling terrain to prepare the body for what was being asked. The track climbed directly from the hut clearing toward Travers Saddle, 1,787 metres above sea level, and it did so with a steepness that turned walking into something closer to climbing. The forest fell away quickly, the beech trees thinning and shrinking until they were little more than twisted shrubs clinging to the mountainside, and then they were gone entirely, replaced by tussock and rock and the vast, exposed openness of the alpine zone.
Anth's legs were at their limit. Not approaching it, not flirting with it, but pressed hard against the boundary of what they could do. Every step upward required a negotiation between will and muscle, a conscious decision to lift, place, push, and repeat that left no room for anything else. The lactic acid burned through thighs and calves with a persistence that rest stops could dull but not extinguish. We stopped every twenty metres or so to catch our breath, these small pauses becoming a rhythm of their own, twenty steps and stop, hands on knees, lungs heaving in the thinner mountain air, heart hammering against ribs, and then twenty more. The Abel Tasman, with its coastal hills that had once seemed challenging, had not in any way prepared Anth for this. Those hills belonged to a different vocabulary entirely. This was the trail speaking in its native tongue, and the dialect was vertical.
But the views. The views more than made up for every burning muscle and every ragged breath.
As the altitude increased, the world below unfolded in a panorama of staggering beauty. The Travers Valley stretched back the way we had come, a deep green corridor of beech forest bisected by the silver thread of the river we had followed for two days, its course visible now in its entirety from this height, winding between the mountains like a vein carrying the lifeblood of the landscape. The peaks of Nelson Lakes National Park rose on every side, their ridgelines sharp against a sky so blue it seemed to vibrate, snow still clinging to the shadowed southern faces in patches of brilliant white that caught the sun and threw it back. To the north, the ranges rolled away in wave after wave of diminishing blue, each ridge paler than the last until the most distant ones dissolved into the sky entirely. And ahead, the saddle itself was visible now, that narrow dip in the ridgeline where the mountains parted just enough to allow passage from one valley to the next, a gateway between worlds that had been drawing trampers through for generations.
Torrin stayed close, as he always did on the climbs, letting Anth set the pace, offering quiet words during the rest stops that carried more strength than their simplicity suggested. Nearly there. You are doing amazing. Look at that view. He pointed out landmarks in the distance, identified peaks, gave us things to look at that were not the trail immediately ahead, small acts of distraction that lifted the mind out of the body's complaints and reminded us why we were here. The bond between us on these steep sections had deepened into something that went beyond father and son, beyond hiking partners. It was trust made physical, patience made into footsteps, love expressed in the willingness to move at the speed of the one who needs it most.
Eventually, mercifully, the ground began to flatten. The gradient eased, the tussock levelled out, and we stepped onto the broad, windswept col of Travers Saddle. We had made it. The saddle sits at the junction of two worlds, the Travers Valley behind and the Sabine Valley ahead, and standing on that exposed ridge with the wind pushing against us and the mountains spread out in every direction, the sense of achievement was physical, a warmth that radiated from somewhere deeper than tired muscles could reach. We dropped our packs and sat down for lunch, eating in the company of that immense view, letting the food and the rest and the sheer improbability of being here seep into bodies that had earned every calorie and every moment of stillness.
But what goes up must come down, and the descent into the Sabine Valley would be every bit as demanding as the climb had been. We pulled on our neoprene knee sleeves, those faithful allies that had proven their worth on the Cascade Track days earlier, and began the long journey downward. The western side of Travers Saddle drops steeply through alpine tussock and scree before plunging into the forest below, and once again every foot placement demanded concentration. Our knees absorbed the impact of each downward step, the poles took what weight they could, and the brain maintained its exhausting vigilance over terrain that punished inattention. Loose rock shifted underfoot, scree slid beneath boot soles, and the gradient was relentless in its insistence that gravity would be the dominant force of the afternoon.
As we descended into the treeline, the rocks gave way to roots, that familiar exchange of one treacherous surface for another that the beech forests of the South Island specialise in. The gnarled root systems of silver beech spread across the trail like a web designed to catch tired feet, wet and polished and offering no grip to boots that were already sliding on the steep ground. The going was slow and careful, each step a decision, each root assessed for stability before weight was committed. The forest closed around us, dense and green and dripping with moisture, the light filtering through the canopy in that soft, diffused glow that makes the bush feel like the inside of something living.
Somewhere along the descent, we passed a couple of solo female hikers heading northbound, nobo, climbing toward the saddle we had just crossed. They were breathing hard but smiling, that particular expression of determined joy that thru-hikers wear on the big climbs, and we stopped to exchange the brief, essential information that hikers share when they meet on trail. How is the track ahead? What are the conditions like? They told us about a feature further down the valley that we should watch for, a bottomless canyon spanned by a bridge, where the river had carved so deep into the rock that the bottom was invisible. Their eyes widened as they described it, and we thanked them and continued on, the promise of something extraordinary pulling us forward through the tired kilometres.
The trail wound deeper into the Sabine Valley, following the river as it cut its way through the beech forest, and then we came upon it. The canyon. A narrow, vertical chasm carved into the bedrock by the Sabine River over millennia of patient, relentless erosion. The bridge crossed over it, a simple structure of wood and wire that spanned the gap between the rock walls, and we stopped in the middle and looked down.
Bottomless was the right word. The walls of the canyon dropped away beneath us in sheer, dark faces of polished rock, narrowing as they descended until the gap between them was barely wide enough for the water to pass through. And somewhere far below, invisible in the darkness, the river roared. The sound came up from the depths like the voice of the earth itself, a deep, resonant thunder that vibrated through the bridge timbers and into the soles of our boots, amplified by the narrow stone walls into something felt as much as heard. The water that produced that sound was hidden entirely, swallowed by the darkness of the chasm, and the effect was both mesmerising and unsettling. To stand above a river you can hear but cannot see, to feel its power transmitted through stone and air and timber, is to understand something about the forces that shape landscapes over timescales the human mind can barely comprehend. We stood on that bridge for a long time, looking down into the dark, listening to the roar, feeling very small and very alive.
The final stretch to West Sabine Hut passed through quiet forest, the trail gentler now, the valley floor levelling out as the river widened and slowed beside us. The hut appeared through the trees in the late afternoon light, a shelter sitting in a clearing near the river, surrounded by beech forest and backed by the mountains we had crossed that morning. .
There were nine of us in total that night, a small, intimate group of trampers gathered from both directions, some having crossed the saddle as we had, others heading the opposite way and staging for their own attempt in the morning. The hut felt companionable in a way that only small numbers allow, conversations flowing easily between strangers who share the common language of tired legs and trail stories, the gas burners hissing as dinners were prepared, the warmth of the hut slowly replacing the chill of the mountain air that had followed us down from the saddle. There is something particular about the atmosphere of a backcountry hut when the numbers are right, not so few that the space feels lonely, not so many that it loses its intimacy, but just enough for the kind of easy, unforced connection that the mountains seem to encourage. Stories were exchanged about the trail in both directions, conditions compared, advice offered with the generosity of people who understand that out here, information shared freely might be the difference between a good day and a dangerous one.Read more
TravelerWOW! You are both awesome! Anth I am so in awe of you doing this with Torrin. Love you both 💚💚
TravelerAnth and Torrin ,what an incredible journey for Father and Son . Absolutely magnificent. Reading your entry had pictures in my mind,. My emotions of empathy and awe were feeling fully for both of you as I was reading . Just Amazing, Safe journey and continued peace for both of you.
Dice, Massage and Zero Days
Mar 21–23 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 13 °C
The next section was planned shorter, maybe less than five hours of walking, a gentler day by the standards of what the trail had already asked of us. Torrin could have double-hutted it easily, covering the distance to Blue Lake Hut and continuing on to the next shelter without breaking stride, and one of the other trampers at West Sabine did exactly that, slipping out of the hut before the sun was up and disappearing into the forest while the rest of us were still coaxing warmth back into stiff limbs. But for Anth, even a shorter day was still tough. The cumulative toll of the past week, the Cascade Track, the Travers Valley, the saddle crossing, all of it lived in muscles and joints that were operating on borrowed reserves, and every kilometre still demanded its due.
We wound through ancient beech forest, the kind that makes you feel as though you have stepped backward through centuries into a world that existed long before human feet ever marked a trail through it. The trees here were immense, their trunks thick and gnarled, their branches reaching across the path to form a canopy so dense that the light beneath was perpetual twilight, green and soft and cathedral-quiet. Every surface was draped in moss, thick, luxuriant carpets of it that covered the trunks and branches and fallen logs in layers so deep the forest seemed upholstered in emerald velvet. Ferns unfurled from every crevice, their fronds catching the filtered light and glowing with a luminosity that seemed to come from within. The air was heavy with moisture and the rich, earthy scent of decomposition and growth, the twin engines of the forest floor turning death into life in an endless, unhurried cycle.
The roar of the river was our almost constant companion, the Sabine running alongside the trail through the valley, its voice rising and falling with the terrain but never quite disappearing. In the quieter stretches, where the river widened and slowed, it murmured. Where it narrowed and dropped over ledges, it thundered. And in between, it provided that steady, white-noise backdrop that fills the forest and gives the walking mind somewhere to rest, a sound so constant it becomes almost indistinguishable from silence until the moment it stops.
We arrived at Blue Lake Hut in the early afternoon, dropping our packs on the porch with the particular relief of people who know they will not need to pick them up again today. The hut sits near the shores of Blue Lake, or Rotomairewhenua as it is known in te reo Māori, and after settling in, we walked down to see it for ourselves.
What we found stopped us both in our tracks.
Blue Lake is recognised as having the clearest natural fresh water in the world, with visibility measured at up to eighty metres, a clarity that rivals distilled water. It is a taonga, a treasure, to the local iwi of Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, and it is considered a wāhi tapu, a sacred place. We approached it with the respect it demanded, exploring both the outlet where the water spills away toward the Sabine and the source where it wells up from the ground, fed by the waters of neighbouring Lake Constance filtering through a glacial moraine over a period of years, emerging purified to an almost supernatural degree. The clearness of the water astounded us both. It was not simply transparent. It was as though the water itself had been removed and replaced with nothing, the stones on the lake bed visible in perfect detail at depths that should have rendered them invisible, the colours of the rock, grey and ochre and pale green, as vivid ten metres down as they would have been in the palm of your hand. The lake seemed to exist outside the normal rules of water, a place where the element had been distilled to its purest possible expression, and standing on its shore felt less like looking at a body of water and more like looking through a window into the earth itself.
We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying much, because some places do not ask for words. They ask only for presence, for the willingness to be still and let the beauty of what you are seeing settle into you at its own pace. Blue Lake was one of those places.
Back at the hut, Anth made the decision to take a zero day. The legs needed it. The Waiau Pass lay ahead, the second alpine crossing of this section, and by all accounts it would be every bit as demanding as Travers Saddle had been. Attempting it on legs that were already running on empty would be foolish rather than brave, and the trail had been teaching us the difference between those two things since the first day on Robert Ridge. Better to rest, to let the muscles repair and the energy reserves rebuild, and to approach the pass with something left to give rather than nothing.
The afternoon settled into the unhurried rhythm of a zero day in the backcountry. We found a set of dice in the hut and played Zilch, that addictive game of risk and reward that Annie and Simon had taught Torrin during those days of waiting in Nelson, and that Torrin had then taught Anth. The game filled the hours with laughter and the small, satisfying drama of deciding whether to bank your points or push your luck, a metaphor for trail life that was not lost on either of us. The dice clattered across the hut table, and outside the forest stood patient and still, and for a few hours the only thing that mattered was whether the next roll would deliver or betray.
Torrin, ever attentive to the practical realities of keeping Anth's body on the trail, gave his calves a good hard massage. It was not gentle. It was the kind of deep-tissue work that makes you wince and breathe through your teeth while it is happening but leaves the muscles feeling looser and more alive afterward, the knots and adhesions that days of climbing had built up slowly yielding under Torrin's firm, patient hands. It was another of those quiet acts of care that defined our journey together, the son tending to the father so that the father could continue walking beside the son.
We checked our food reserves with the careful accounting that the backcountry demands. Eight days of supplies bought at the Pak'n Save in Nelson, lighter this time than the Abel Tasman oversupply, had been steadily diminishing through each day's meals. We counted what remained, calculated what was needed, and concluded that we would have just enough to make it through to Boyle Village and the end of this section. Just enough. Not comfortably, not with surplus, but enough. It would mean disciplined portions and no waste, but we would not go hungry. The maths of food and distance, that constant background equation of long-distance hiking, had worked out in our favour, barely.
The following morning brought a new arrival. Graham walked into Blue Lake Hut with the quiet confidence of a man who had been doing this for longer than most of the other hikers on the trail had been alive. He was seventy-seven years old. Seventy-seven, and here he was, deep in the backcountry of Nelson Lakes, carrying a full pack through terrain that had pushed Anth to his limits at more than a quarter of a century less than Graham's age. He settled into the hut with the easy manner of someone entirely comfortable in the mountains, and over conversation we learned that he planned to cross the Waiau Pass on the same day as us. There was something deeply humbling about sharing a hut with a man who, at an age when society expects you to have long since traded adventure for armchairs, was still climbing alpine passes in the South Island backcountry. Graham was living proof that the mountains do not belong exclusively to the young, and his presence in the hut that evening was a quiet, powerful reminder that the only thing that truly stops you is the decision to stop.
We spent the rest of our zero day exploring Blue Lake more thoroughly, walking its margins with the reverence the place deserved, watching the light change across its surface as the afternoon deepened and the shadows of the surrounding mountains crept across the water. The clarity never ceased to amaze. Every angle offered a new perspective on that impossible transparency, a new depth revealed, a new colour emerging from the stones below. It was the kind of place that recalibrates your understanding of what nature is capable of, that makes you realise how much of the world you have seen through a filter of sediment and turbidity without ever knowing it.
As evening settled over the hut and we prepared for the next day's crossing, there was a quiet sense of readiness in the air. The rest had done its work. The legs felt better, not perfect, but better. The food would last. And tomorrow, with Graham and Torrin and whatever the mountains chose to give us, we would climb the Waiau Pass and continue south.Read more
Over the Waiau Pass
Mar 23–24 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C
The three of us set off from Blue Lake Hut into a morning that seemed to understand the significance of what lay ahead. The trail climbed gently at first through the beech forest before opening out to reveal Lake Constance below, a stunning alpine tarn cradled in its basin of rock and tussock, its waters reflecting the surrounding peaks with a mirror-like stillness that made the mountains appear twice as tall. The views were extraordinary, the kind that demand you stop walking and simply stand, letting the scale of what surrounds you recalibrate everything you thought you knew about beauty. Lake Constance sits above Blue Lake in the same interconnected system, its waters slowly filtering through the glacial moraine over years before emerging as the supernaturally clear water we had marvelled at the day before. Knowing that, seeing the source and understanding the journey the water takes, added a layer of wonder to an already breathtaking scene.
We continued on, and then the Waiau Pass revealed itself.
The bottom of the pass rose before us in a steep wall of rock and scree and tussock, climbing toward a notch in the ridgeline high above that seemed, from this angle, almost impossibly far away. It was intimidating, there was no pretending otherwise. We stood at the base and looked up, each of us conducting our own private assessment of what was being asked, and the mountain looked back with the patient indifference of something that has watched thousands of hikers stand in this exact spot and feel this exact uncertainty. We stopped for snacks, fuelling bodies that would need every calorie in the hours ahead, and mentally prepared ourselves for the climb. Graham was quiet and focused. Torrin was calm and ready. Anth breathed deeply and told his legs what was coming.
We started up.
Just after the climb began, Anth sat down on a rock to retie a shoelace, one of those mundane, unremarkable trail moments that should have lasted ten seconds and been forgotten. But the rock moved. It shifted beneath his weight without warning, tipping sideways and taking Anth with it. He fell, catching himself awkwardly, and in the scramble his hand struck the rock with the full force of the impact concentrated on his little finger. The same little finger where the nail matrix had been damaged years ago, an old injury that had left the nail bed permanently sensitive, a place where even mild pressure could send sharp signals of complaint. This was not mild pressure. Pain exploded through the finger and up through his hand, that white-hot, nauseating kind that fills the entire body for a moment and makes the world go bright at the edges. He sat on the treacherous rock and cradled his hand and breathed through it, waiting for the initial wave to recede into something manageable.
Some ibuprofen and a few minutes of still, focused breathing while the pain settled from a scream to a shout. Torrin waited beside Anth without fuss, offering water and quiet reassurance, understanding that what was needed most in that moment was simply time. As we sat there regrouping, a female sobo tramper appeared above us on the pass, descending. Her pace was astonishing. She was not technically running, but the speed at which she moved down that slope made it appear as though she was, her feet finding the rocks with an instinctive precision that turned the treacherous terrain into something effortless. What we knew would take us at least a couple of hours to climb, she covered in the descent in roughly thirty minutes. It was poetry to watch. Pure, fluid poetry. The kind of movement that makes you realise the gap between what the human body is capable of and what most of us ask of it. We watched her disappear down the valley with something close to awe, and then we turned back to the mountain and began our own very different ascent.
The climb was slow and careful. Every step was chosen, tested, committed to. The terrain was loose rock and scree interspersed with sections of more solid ground, and the gradient was unrelenting, the kind of steep that forces you into a rhythm of small steps and frequent pauses because the alternative is simply stopping altogether. Anth was pushed to new limits, both physically and mentally. Physically, because the legs that had been given a zero day to recover were now being asked to do the hardest thing they had done since Travers Saddle, and the throbbing finger added a constant undercurrent of pain to every handhold and pole placement. Mentally, because the exposure and the steepness and the loose footing conspired to create moments where the mind wanted to say no, where the voice inside suggested that perhaps this was too much, perhaps this was beyond what could reasonably be asked. But Torrin was there, steady and patient, and the twenty-metre rhythm they had established on Travers Saddle returned, those small increments of progress that turn an impossible climb into a series of possible steps.
Graham, at seventy-seven, climbed with a measured, methodical pace that spoke of decades of mountain experience, his breathing controlled, his foot placements deliberate, his progress unhurried but constant. He did it well, remarkably well, and watching him move upward with such quiet competence was its own kind of inspiration. For Torrin, the pass was a breeze, his trail-hardened legs carrying him up with an ease that he wore lightly, never allowing the gap between his ability and Anth's struggle to become anything other than an opportunity to encourage.
And then the ground levelled and we crested the pass.
The Waiau Pass. 1,870 metres above sea level. The highest point on this section of the trail, and the second of the two great alpine crossings that had been waiting for us since we left St Arnaud. We stood on top and the views were extraordinary. The world opened in every direction, mountains and valleys and distant ranges stretching away to horizons that seemed to belong to a different, larger planet. Behind us, the way we had come, the Nelson Lakes region spread out in a tapestry of blue lakes and green valleys and grey-white peaks. Ahead, the trail descended into the Waiau Valley, a new landscape waiting to be walked, new forest and new rivers leading south toward Boyle Village and the end of this section. The wind pushed against us on the exposed saddle, cold and clean and carrying the scent of snow from the higher peaks, and we stood in it and let it wash over us, feeling the achievement settle into our bones alongside the exhaustion.
We stopped for lunch on the pass, eating with the slow, grateful deliberateness of people who have earned every mouthful. The food tasted better up here, as trail food always does when consumed at altitude after a hard climb, the simple calories transformed by effort and elevation into something approaching feast.
Then the descent. We pulled on our knee sleeves and began the slow, careful journey down the southern side of the Waiau Pass. The rocks on this side were different from the loose scree of the northern approach. They were solid, embedded in the mountainside, but arranged in steep, blocky formations that required us to essentially rock-climb down in places, lowering ourselves from ledge to ledge, finding handholds and footholds in the stone, packs pulling at our balance with every move. It was technical and demanding, the kind of terrain where concentration cannot lapse for a single moment, where every limb placement matters and the consequence of a mistake is measured in more than bruises. The throbbing in Anth's finger made every handhold a negotiation with pain, but the rock was solid and trustworthy beneath his grip, and step by step, ledge by ledge, the altitude surrendered.
The descent eventually gentled as we dropped below the bushline and into the valley, the trail winding through forest and alongside the upper reaches of the river that would lead us south. Our destination was Waiau Forks, an informal camping spot where the river branched, not a DOC hut with bunks and a gas stove but a simple clearing in the bush with a fire pit and enough flat ground to pitch a tent. After the alpine grandeur of the pass, there was something appealing about the rawness of it, the stripped-back simplicity of camping at a place that offered nothing but ground and sky and the sound of the river.
We found the spot and set up camp, and since there was a fire pit, we got a fire going. The wood was dry enough to catch quickly, and soon the flames were crackling and popping in the gathering dusk, throwing warm light across the clearing and our tired faces. There is something primal and deeply comforting about a campfire after a hard day on the trail, the way it draws you in and holds you, the way the warmth seeps into muscles that have been clenched against cold and effort for hours, the way the flickering light makes the surrounding darkness feel less like a void and more like a blanket. We sat close to it and cooked and ate and watched the flames and said very little, because the day had said enough.
As the darkness deepened and the stars began to appear above the clearing, two nobo hikers arrived, emerging from the trail with head torches cutting through the gloom, their packs heavy and their faces carrying the particular expression of people who have been walking longer than they planned. They joined us by the fire, and the small camp grew a little warmer for their presence, another of those trail encounters where strangers become companions simply by sharing the same patch of ground at the end of a long day.
Anth sat by the fire and let the realisation settle over him quietly, without fanfare, like the warmth of the flames themselves. The Waiau Pass was behind us. The second hardest section of the Te Araroa, conquered. Not with grace, not with the fluid poetry of the NOBO runner on the scree slope, but with determination and ibuprofen and twenty-metre increments and a son who never once let his father believe he could not do it. That was enough. That was more than enough.Read more
The Hunter's Gift
Mar 24–25 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 12 °C
The morning began with a reminder that the mountains, even on their gentler days, do not let you forget where you are. The first stretch from Waiau Forks led us across rock landslides, fields of tumbled stone where the mountainside had at some point surrendered to gravity and deposited itself across the valley floor. We picked our way through carefully, stepping from boulder to boulder, reading the terrain for stability before committing weight, packs swaying with each uneven step. It was slow, deliberate work, the kind of hiking that occupies the entire mind and leaves no room for daydreaming or audiobooks.
But then the rocks released us, and the valley opened up.
The landscape transformed as though someone had turned a page. The tumbled stone gave way to broad, rolling grasslands that swept across the valley floor in waves of green and gold, the tussock rippling in the breeze like the surface of a slow-moving sea. After days of dense beech forest and steep alpine terrain, the openness was startling, almost disorienting. The sky felt enormous above us, uninterrupted by canopy or ridgeline, and the valley stretched ahead in a wide, gentle corridor that seemed to breathe with a different kind of beauty than the mountains had offered. It was softer here, more pastoral, the kind of landscape that slows the heart rate and loosens the shoulders and lets the eyes rest on distant horizons instead of the next foothold.
We followed the river downstream this time, and there was a quiet pleasure in that simple reversal. For days we had been walking upriver, climbing toward saddles and passes, fighting gravity with every step. Now the water flowed in our direction, and we flowed with it, the gentle downhill gradient a kindness to legs that had earned every metre of easy ground the trail was willing to give. The river ran beside us through the grasslands, its voice softer here than in the steep-sided valleys above, a murmur rather than a roar, its waters spreading wide and shallow over beds of pale stone.
Along the way, we passed a hunter who was packing up his camp and preparing to leave, his rifle cased and his gear stacked with the practised efficiency of someone who knew this valley well. We exchanged brief greetings, the easy nod of acknowledgement between people who share the backcountry for different reasons but with the same respect for the land, and continued on.
Waiau Hut appeared not long after, a smaller but newer shelter sitting in the valley with the quiet confidence of a well-built thing in the right place. It was compact and clean, the kind of backcountry hut that feels looked after, its timber still carrying a warmth of colour that older huts lose to decades of weather and wood smoke. We were the only ones there, and the solitude after days of sharing huts with other trampers felt like an unexpected luxury. The three of us, Anth, Torrin, and Graham, spread out across the bunks with the contentment of people who have an entire hut to themselves and nowhere else they need to be.
But there was a problem, and it lived in our food bags. The zero day at Blue Lake, necessary as it had been for Anth's recovery, had cost us a day's worth of meals from supplies calculated to last exactly as long as the section demanded. We were going to come up a day short. The maths was simple and unforgiving, and no amount of creative rationing was going to stretch what remained across the kilometres still to come.
Torrin had a solution. He headed back along the trail to find the hunter we had passed earlier, and returned with a grin and a generous portion of fresh venison. The hunter had been more than willing to share, another act of backcountry generosity from a stranger who understood that out here, you help the people you meet because the mountains are big enough to humble everyone eventually. Back at the hut, Torrin set to work. His skills as a chef, honed through years of cooking in professional kitchens before the trail had claimed him, came into their own in the most unlikely of settings. With the venison and whatever remained in his pack, a handful of dried ingredients, some seasoning, the odds and ends that accumulate at the bottom of a food bag, he produced a meal that had no business being as good as it was. The hut filled with the smell of seared meat and herbs, and we ate like kings in our little shelter in the valley, the fresh protein a gift to bodies that had been running on dehydrated meals and trail mix for days. It was one of those trail meals that transcends its ingredients, elevated by hunger and effort and the simple miracle of fresh food in the backcountry.
The sandflies, however, were appalling. They descended on us in clouds, those tiny, silent, relentless creatures that are the one true plague of the New Zealand backcountry, finding every inch of exposed skin and leaving behind an itch that outlasts the memory of whatever view you were admiring when they struck. We retreated inside the hut and battened down what we could, but they found their way through gaps and vents with the determination of creatures whose entire existence is organised around the pursuit of blood. Both Torrin and Graham, drawing on their respective reservoirs of trail experience, agreed that as bad as the sandflies were here, they were worse in the Richmond Ranges. Somewhere up in those northern mountains, they said, there was a hut where the sandflies reached a level of ferocity that made this feel like a mild inconvenience. It was not a comforting thought, but it did offer the strange consolation of knowing that things could, apparently, always be worse.
As dusk fell and the light softened across the valley, painting the grasslands in shades of amber and violet, the deer appeared. Several of them, emerging from the bush fringe at the edge of the clearing to graze in the open ground, their movements cautious but unhurried, their ears turning like radar dishes at every small sound. We watched them from the hut in silence, barely breathing, not wanting to disturb the scene unfolding before us. There is something profoundly calming about watching wild animals go about their business at the end of a long day, something that reconnects you to the simplicity of the world beyond human concerns. The deer moved through the golden grass with a grace that made the valley feel like their living room and us the privileged guests, and we watched until the last of the light faded and the animals dissolved into the gathering dark like ghosts returning to the forest that had made them.
We turned in for the night, full of venison and gratitude, the hut quiet around us, the valley holding its breath outside. Tomorrow we would walk on toward Boyle Village and the end of this section. But tonight, the deer and the fire and the meal that Torrin had conjured from almost nothing were enough to make the world feel complete.Read more
Crocs Through the Valley
Mar 25–26 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C
We left before the sun had made its appearance on the mountain tops, stepping out of Waiau Hut into the grey half-light of a valley still waiting for dawn. There is something particular about sunrise in the mountains that flat-landers never experience. On open plains or coastal horizons, dawn is a gradual affair, a slow brightening that eases the world from dark to light through a long, gentle spectrum of colour and shadow. In the mountains, it is different. The peaks hold the sun hostage behind their ridgelines, and the valleys remain in a cool, blue twilight long after the sky above has begun to glow. One moment we were walking in that muted, shadowless half-world where everything is the same tone of grey and depth perception plays tricks on tired eyes. The next, the sun cleared the mountain tops and the valley was flooded with light, sudden and complete, as though someone had thrown a switch. The tussock ignited from dull brown to blazing gold, the river caught fire with reflected light, and shadows that had not existed a moment before stretched long and sharp across the ground. It was dramatic and instantaneous, a daily miracle that the mountains stage without audience or applause, and we happened to be walking through it.
Twenty-six kilometres lay ahead. The longest day Anth had attempted since arriving in New Zealand, and by a considerable margin. But the valley was kind. The terrain was mostly flat, the trail following the river downstream through broad, open country where the walking was rhythmic and undemanding, the sort of ground that lets the body find its cadence and hold it for hours without the interruptions of steep climbs or technical descents. After the alpine crossings of Travers Saddle and the Waiau Pass, after the rock scrambles and the scree slopes and the twenty-metre rest stops, flat ground felt like a gift the trail had been saving for exactly the right moment.
Graham was still hiking with us, his steady, unhurried presence a constant through the days since Blue Lake. At seventy-seven, he matched the pace without complaint, his decades of mountain experience evident in the economy of his movement, never wasting energy, never rushing, simply covering ground with the quiet persistence of someone who understood that distance is conquered not by speed but by consistency. The three of us moved through the valley together, a small procession of packs and poles and purpose, the river our guide and the mountains our walls.
We passed just one nobo couple heading north through the valley, their packs heavy with the supplies needed for the section we were finishing. We stopped briefly to exchange trail information, that ritual of shared intelligence that hikers perform whenever they meet someone walking the opposite direction, and then they were gone, swallowed by the valley behind us. The trail was certainly coming to its season end. The great southbound wave of TA hikers that floods the South Island each summer was thinning now, the days growing shorter, the weather windows narrower, and the gaps between encounters with other trampers stretching longer. The trail was emptying, returning to the solitude that is its natural state for most of the year, and there was something both melancholy and beautiful about walking through it in these final weeks, as though we were among the last guests at a party that was quietly winding down.
The kilometres passed beneath us through the long morning and into the afternoon, the valley gradually widening, the river growing broader and lazier as it collected tributaries from the side valleys. We crossed several creeks along the way, those shin-deep fords where the water runs cold and fast over smooth stones and the choice is between wet boots or wet feet. Somewhere around the eighteen-kilometre mark, Anth made a decision that would have seemed absurd a week ago but felt entirely logical now. He took off his hiking boots and put on his crocs. The relief was immediate and almost euphoric, the weight and constriction of boots replaced by the lightness and freedom of foam soles and open air, the blisters and pressure points suddenly liberated from the relentless friction of leather and lace. Torrin, never one to be outdone and possessing feet that the trail had toughened into something approaching leather themselves, went one step further and simply went barefoot. Father and son, walking the final eight kilometres of a twenty-six-kilometre day through the New Zealand backcountry in crocs and bare feet respectively, splashing through creek crossings with the carefree abandon of children on a summer holiday. It was ridiculous and wonderful and exactly the kind of moment that long-distance hiking produces when the body is tired enough to abandon dignity and the spirit is light enough to laugh about it.
Anne Hut appeared in the late afternoon, sitting in its clearing with the quiet patience of a shelter that has been waiting all day for someone to arrive. It was empty when we got there, the bunks bare, the hut carrying that particular stillness of a space that has been unoccupied for hours, the air cool and undisturbed. We dropped our packs with the ceremonial finality of people who have walked twenty-six kilometres and intend to walk precisely zero more today. The bunks received our tired bodies with the same indifference they offered everyone, but to us they felt like the finest beds in the world.
Later, another couple arrived, filling the hut with fresh voices and the familiar sounds of packs being unpacked and stoves being lit. The small community of the evening assembled itself around the cooking area, and stories were shared in the easy, unhurried way that backcountry huts encourage, each person's day laid out alongside the others like maps compared over a shared table.
Outside, the valley settled into its evening colours, the mountains holding the last of the light long after the valley floor had fallen into shadow, their peaks glowing amber and pink against a sky that deepened from blue to indigo as the stars emerged one by one. Twenty-six kilometres. The longest day. And tomorrow, Boyle Flat Hut, the last shelter before Boyle Village, where this section that had asked more of us than anything we had imagined when Annie first dropped us at the Robert Ridge car park all those days ago would finally reach its end.Read more
Walking Through the Grey
Mar 26–27 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌧 11 °C
Well, it finally arrived. A wet day.
The rain had been patient with us through this section, offering grey skies and mist on the Abel Tasman but largely holding back its full force during the alpine crossings where it would have made dangerous terrain genuinely treacherous. We had been lucky, and we knew it. But luck has its limits, and today the weather collected what it was owed. The rain came down steadily from a sky that had no texture, no variation, just a uniform grey ceiling pressed low against the mountain tops, erasing the peaks and filling the valley with a cold, persistent downpour that found every gap in clothing and every seam in resolve.
Seventeen kilometres to cover. Not the longest day we had walked, but distance measured in rain feels different from distance measured in sunshine. Every kilometre stretches itself out, every rest stop becomes a negotiation between the need to pause and the knowledge that stopping means getting colder, and the trail underfoot transforms from firm ground into a series of puddles and mud and small streams that have no business being where a path should be.
Graham headed off early, as had become his habit, slipping out of Anne Hut while the morning was still dark and the rain was drumming steadily on the roof. His quiet, methodical approach to the trail meant he preferred the solitude of an early start, covering ground at his own measured pace, and we had learned to trust that we would find him at the other end, already settled in, probably with a cup of tea in hand. We followed a bit later, pulling on rain jackets and pack covers with the resigned acceptance of people who know they are about to spend the next several hours wet and cold and that no amount of waterproof technology will entirely prevent it.
The trail wound through the valley, the river beside us swollen and discoloured with the runoff from the hills above, its voice louder and more urgent than it had been the day before. The rain drove into our faces on the exposed stretches and dripped from every branch and leaf on the forested sections, creating a constant percussion that filled the world from every direction. The beauty of the valley was still there, we could sense it in the shapes of the mountains and the sweep of the grasslands, but it was hidden behind veils of grey, like a painting viewed through frosted glass.
We stopped in at Rokeby Hut for a quick break from the wind and rain. The small shelter offered four walls and a roof and the simple mercy of being out of the weather for a few minutes, and we took it gratefully. We were both cold, that deep, damp cold that settles into the core when wet clothing presses against skin and the wind strips away whatever warmth the body tries to generate. We stood inside the hut and let the shivering ease, wringing water from gloves and adjusting layers, eating a few mouthfuls of trail food for the calories our bodies were burning just to stay warm. It was a brief stop, not long enough to truly dry out or warm up, but enough to reset the mind and remind the legs that there was a destination ahead and a fire waiting at the end of it.
We continued our push on through the rain, heads down, hoods up, the world reduced to the few metres of muddy trail ahead and the sound of water in all its forms, falling from the sky, running across the ground, dripping from the canopy, rushing in the river beside us. Conversation was minimal, each of us retreating into the private endurance that wet-weather hiking demands, the internal monologue of one foot then the next, the quiet bargaining with discomfort that gets you through the kilometres when the joy of the landscape has been temporarily washed away.
And then Boyle Flat Hut appeared through the rain, and even before we reached the door, we could smell it. Wood smoke. Someone had a fire going. We stepped inside and the warmth hit us like an embrace, that glorious, enveloping heat of a backcountry hut with a fire burning in its belly, and the relief was so immediate and so complete it was almost dizzying. Graham was there, settled in with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had once again arrived first and made himself useful, the fire crackling in the grate, the hut already warm and welcoming.
We hung our gear up to dry as best it could, draping wet jackets and socks and shirts over every available surface near the fire, the hut quickly taking on the appearance of a laundry and the smell of damp fabric slowly steaming in the heat. The fire hissed and popped as droplets fell from hanging clothes onto the hot metal, and the windows fogged with condensation, sealing us inside a small, warm world while the rain continued its work outside.
We knew that tomorrow's final walk out to Boyle Village would also be in the rain. The forecast offered no reprieve, no last-day sunshine to send us off in glory. We would finish this section as we had walked today, wet and cold and determined, and there was a certain honesty in that. The trail does not arrange its weather for dramatic effect or narrative satisfaction. It gives what it gives, and the walker's only choice is how to meet it. We had met it today with our heads down and our feet moving, and tomorrow we would do the same.
The fire burned on, the rain fell, and the last night of this section settled around us in the warmth of Boyle Flat Hut. One more day. One more walk. And then the first chapter of the Te Araroa would be behind us.Read more
Pizza, Pools and Parmigianas
Mar 27–30 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C
Graham offered us a lift into Hanmer Springs if we could make it to Boyle Village by one o'clock. It was the kind of offer that turns a wet morning's walk into something with purpose and urgency, a deadline that the trail rarely imposes but that transforms the rhythm of hiking entirely when it arrives.
He left before us, as was his way, and we set a fast pace in the hopes of catching him. The rain was still falling, the forest dripping and grey around us, the trail winding through beech woodland that offered shelter from the worst of it but could not prevent the steady accumulation of damp that had become our constant companion over the past two days. We moved quickly, packs bouncing, poles striking the mud with a tempo that spoke of motivation rather than leisure, and we caught Graham at a swing bridge, the three of us converging on that swaying structure over the river with grins and the shared satisfaction of a plan coming together.
We passed a couple of hunters heading in and a few nobo hikers along the way, those brief trail encounters that were becoming rarer as the season wound down, each one a reminder that the window for walking was slowly closing.
We arrived at Boyle Village just in time to meet Graham's wife, Jan, who was waiting with the car and the particular warmth of someone who has spent enough years married to a mountain lover to understand exactly what tired hikers need. But before we climbed in, there was the matter of the Boyle Outdoor Centre and its pizza. We filled up with the single-minded focus of bodies that had been running on dehydrated meals and rationed trail food for over a week, the hot cheese and dough tasting like the finest meal either of us had eaten in days, because it was.
Then the drive to Hanmer Springs, that beloved alpine spa town nestled in its valley, where hot water rises from the earth and tired bodies go to be restored. There was some event on in town, and finding accommodation proved unexpectedly difficult, the usual ease of walking in and booking a room replaced by phone calls and searching and the mild panic of hikers who have been dreaming of a real bed for days and are now being told there are none available. We managed eventually, one night at one place and two nights at another, a patchwork of lodging that served its purpose even if it lacked the simplicity we craved.
We bought a two-day pass to the hot springs and made the most of it, visiting the warm waters on several occasions, sinking into the thermal pools with the slow, groaning gratitude of bodies that had been battered by alpine passes and soaked by rain and pushed further than they had ever been pushed before. The heat seeped into muscles and joints and the deep, aching places that rest alone cannot reach, and for long stretches we simply sat in the water and said nothing, letting the springs do their ancient work. We even hit the water slides, the two of us hurtling down chutes and splashing into pools with the breathless, laughing abandon of children, and it struck us both that this was the first time we had done that together in over fifteen years. Father and son on a water slide, the years between then and now dissolved as completely as the aches in our legs.
Torrin had been on a quest since arriving in New Zealand to find a chicken parmigiana, that beloved Australian pub classic that he had been craving with an intensity only distance and deprivation can produce. The local pub, packed to the walls with whatever event had descended on the town, had chicken schnitzel on the menu. Close, but not quite the same. And not quite as good as the Australian ones, Torrin noted with the gentle disappointment of a man whose standards in this particular matter were non-negotiable. The search would continue.
We stocked up on food for the next section, repacked our packs with the improved efficiency of hikers who now understood exactly what they needed and what was dead weight, and bought possum merino beanies for the cooler weather ahead. The days were getting shorter, the temperatures dropping, and the trail south would ask us to be better prepared for the cold than this first section had required.
On the last morning, we awoke, checked our packs one final time, and set off to hitch back to Boyle Village and the waiting trail. Hanmer Springs had given us rest and hot water and pizza and water slides and the simple luxury of clean clothes and dry beds. Now it was time to walk again.Read more
Green Corridors South
Mar 30–31 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 13 °C
We stood at the end of our street in Hanmer Springs with our thumbs out, packs at our feet, watching cars pass with that particular blend of hope and patience that hitching demands. Half an hour. In town, half an hour is nothing, a coffee, a phone call, a few pages of a book. On the roadside with a full pack and a trail waiting, it stretches. But the trail teaches patience if it teaches nothing else, and eventually a bloke named Paul pulled over with the easy generosity that seemed to define so many of the people we were meeting in this country. He drove us out to Windy Bridge, where the alternate route began, and we thanked him, shouldered our packs, and stepped back onto the trail.
The Hope-Kiwi Track stretched ahead of us, a route that follows the river valleys through some of the most remote country in the eastern ranges of the South Island. This section traces the Hope River before crossing into the Kiwi River valley, a corridor carved by water and time through mountains that give way to broad, open grasslands as the valleys widen and the rivers slow. It is quieter country than the Nelson Lakes section we had just completed, less dramatic in its alpine ambitions but no less beautiful, the kind of landscape that reveals itself slowly and rewards attention rather than demanding awe.
The first half of the day belonged to the forest. Dense stands of red beech and silver beech crowded the trail, their trunks wrapped in moss so thick it softened every edge and filled every hollow with green. The understory was a tangle of ferns and crown ferns and the delicate, reaching fingers of climbing plants that used the older trees as ladders toward whatever light the canopy allowed through. The air beneath the trees was still and cool and heavy with moisture, rich with the earthy perfume of leaf litter and the sweet, damp scent of moss that seems to intensify after rain. Shafts of light broke through gaps in the canopy in pale, dusty columns, illuminating small circles of the forest floor where insects drifted lazily through the warmth. It was walking of a meditative quality, the trail winding through this green, muffled world where sound was absorbed by the soft surfaces and the loudest thing was the rhythm of our own breathing.
At one point, the sound of fast footsteps behind us broke the forest quiet, and another sobo tramper appeared, moving with the long, efficient stride of someone carrying a lighter pack and a faster pace. Liam introduced himself as he passed, exchanging the quick pleasantries of hikers meeting on trail, and then he was gone, disappearing around a bend in the track with the kind of speed that made us both glance at each other and smile. We had been constantly thinking we were the last southbound hikers on the trail, the final stragglers of the season, and Liam's appearance was a reassuring reminder that we were not quite alone in our direction. The season was winding down, the gaps between sobo encounters growing longer with each passing week, but there were still a few of us out here, moving south through the shortening days.
The trail crossed numerous small side streams, those shin-deep fords where the water runs quick and cold over mossy stones, each one a brief interruption to the rhythm of walking that requires boots to be assessed, crossings to be read, and balance to be trusted. At one of these crossings, Torrin stepped onto a large boulder that appeared solid and stable, the kind of rock that looks like it has been sitting in the same spot since the river first carved its bed. It had not. The boulder rolled slightly beneath his weight, that sickening, slow-motion shift of something you trusted suddenly betraying you, and before he could adjust, gravity made its claim. Torrin sat down unceremoniously in the water, the cold stream rushing around him as his pack pulled him backward and his expression shifted from surprise to resignation to laughter in the space of about two seconds. He sat there in the creek, water soaking through everything from the waist down, and the forest absorbed the sound of our laughter the way it absorbed everything else, softly and completely. He hauled himself up, wrung out what he could, and walked on. The trail giveth and the trail dunketh. There was nothing to do but keep moving and let the walking dry what the river had soaked.
We stopped briefly at Halfway Hut, a small shelter sitting in its clearing where a father and his children were camped, their gear spread across the grass with the cheerful disorder of a family enjoying the bush together. Liam had also stopped here for lunch, and we found him eating on the porch with the contented efficiency of a hiker who knew exactly how long he intended to rest before moving on. We chatted briefly, swapping notes on the trail ahead and the trail behind, that constant exchange of intelligence that keeps the hiking community connected across the distances that separate them. But we pressed on after a short break, the afternoon still young and our destination still some hours ahead.
Gradually, the forest began to thin and release its hold. The beech trees grew sparser, the canopy lifted and broke apart, and the world opened into the broad, rolling grasslands of the valley floor. It was a slow transformation, the bush retreating to the margins as the valley widened, and in its place came tussock and open sky and a sense of space that felt almost startling after hours enclosed by trees. The river ran beside us through the grasslands, no longer hidden by forest but visible in its full, wandering course, its waters catching the light as they spread wide and shallow over beds of pale stone. The mountains stood back at a respectful distance on either side, their flanks still forested but their hold on the valley floor surrendered to grass and wind and the long, uninterrupted views that open country allows.
The trail followed the riverside through this gentler landscape, the walking easier on tired legs, the ground softer underfoot. One brief spot of rain passed through, a shower that lasted barely fifteen minutes but served as a reminder that the weather out here operates on its own schedule and answers to no one. We passed a couple of hunters heading in and a few nobo hikers along the way, those brief trail encounters that were becoming rarer as the season wound down, each one a reminder that the window for walking was slowly closing.
Hope Kiwi Lodge appeared as the valley grasslands opened further, a solid, well-maintained DOC hut sitting in a clearing beside the river. Liam was already there, settled in with his gear unpacked and that particular air of relaxation that fast hikers achieve by arriving early and having the luxury of unhurried evenings. A couple of hunters had been in the hut when Liam arrived, he told us, but had headed out not long after, their rifles shouldered and the valley swallowing them into the bush beyond.
We unpacked and settled in, hanging Torrin's still-damp clothing near whatever warmth the hut offered, cooking dinner with the renewed enthusiasm of fresh supplies from Hanmer Springs. It was a great first day back on trail. The legs had remembered what was being asked of them, the packs felt familiar on our shoulders again, and the valley grasslands stretching away from the hut offered a different kind of beauty from the forest we had walked through that morning. The hot springs and pizza and water slides of Hanmer Springs already felt like they belonged to a different lifetime, replaced by the simpler rhythms of walking and eating and sleeping in huts with strangers who were becoming less strange with every passing day.
Later, just as we were settling into our bunks for the night, the hunters returned in good spirits. We chatted as they unpacked and stowed their gear, and they had had success out there in the bush. There is a particular satisfaction that hunters carry when they return with something to show for their effort, not dissimilar to the quiet pride of hikers arriving at a hut after a hard day, and their energy added a warmth to the hut that lingered as we finally drifted off to sleep.
It was good to be back. The trail had been waiting, and we had returned to it rested and ready for whatever it intended to ask next.Read more
A Hut of Our Own
Mar 31–Apr 1 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C
Our goal today was Hurunui Hut Number 3, a longer hike that would put us back on schedule and set up the days ahead. The valley grasslands carried us forward as we left Hope Kiwi Lodge in the early morning light, the river still our companion, the open country stretching wide and easy beneath a sky that had, for now at least, decided to behave.
But the valley floor does not last forever, and before long the forest reclaimed us. The beech woodland closed in once more, the canopy sealing overhead, and the trail entered a stretch that tested patience more than fitness. The terrain was a relentless series of small ups and downs, those undulations that never amount to a proper climb or descent but accumulate over hours into something surprisingly exhausting, each rise just enough to engage the legs, each dip just enough to jar the knees, the rhythm of it never allowing the body to settle into a comfortable cadence. And then there were the blowdowns. Fallen trees lay across the trail in various states of decay, some recent enough to still carry their leaves, others moss-covered and soft, all of them requiring either climbing over, crawling under, or navigating around through the dense understory. Each one cost time and energy out of all proportion to the obstacle itself, and together they turned what should have been straightforward forest walking into slow, frustrating work.
Somewhere through the trees, Lake Sumner revealed itself, though revealed is generous. We caught only a glimpse of it through the dense bush, a flash of water in the distance, the lake's surface visible in fragments between trunks and branches like a painting viewed through a keyhole. Lake Sumner is one of the larger backcountry lakes in Canterbury, sitting in its broad valley surrounded by beech-clad mountains, a place of considerable beauty that the trail seemed determined to keep from us. We walked on, carrying the knowledge that something lovely was out there beyond the trees, close enough to sense but too far from the trail to properly see.
When the opportunity arose to leave the frustrating forest trail and drop onto the riverbed, we took it gratefully. Anth donned his crocs once again, those faithful foam companions that had served so well on the twenty-six-kilometre day into Anne Hut, and the relief of being free from boots on the flat, open gravel was immediate. There was, however, a complication. Anth's second pair of socks was missing, seemingly left behind at one of the hotels in Hanmer Springs, a small casualty of moving between two different accommodations over three nights. It was the kind of loss that barely registers in normal life but takes on genuine significance on the trail, where every item of clothing earns its place through daily use and where a missing pair of socks means fewer options for dry feet in the days ahead.
The riverbed gave way to creek crossings, and these were not the gentle, ankle-deep fords of the previous day. The water was cold, properly cold, the kind that bites at the skin and numbs the feet within seconds, and the current ran quick and strong over the stony bottom, pushing against our legs with a force that demanded careful, deliberate steps. We crossed at several spots, each time reading the water for the safest line, each time bracing against the current and feeling the river test our balance and our nerve. The cold crept upward from our feet into our calves and stayed there, a persistent ache that lingered long after we had climbed back onto dry ground.
Then the valley opened once more, but this time into a different kind of landscape. The wild tussock grasslands of the backcountry gave way to grazing land, the unmistakable green of managed pasture replacing the natural browns and golds of the valley floor. Cattle stood in loose groups across the paddocks, watching our approach with the heavy-lidded indifference that only cows can truly achieve, their jaws working steadily at the grass beneath them. It was a strange transition, the sudden intrusion of agriculture into what had felt like genuine wilderness, a reminder that even here, deep in the South Island backcountry, the hand of farming reaches into the valleys and claims what the mountains will allow.
We spotted the swing bridge in the distance, that unmistakable silhouette of cables and timber stretching across the river, and made a beeline for it. There is something about a swing bridge on a long day that acts as a psychological marker, a visible milestone that draws the eye and the feet toward it with renewed purpose. We crossed the river swaying gently above the current, the cables singing under our weight, and Anth swapped his crocs for trail runners for the last forest push of the day.
But it would not be a push to Hurunui Hut Number 3 as we had planned. The afternoon was now late, the light already beginning its slow retreat from the valley, and the honest accounting of distance and time told us what neither of us particularly wanted to hear. Number 3 was still at least four hours away. Anth was still moving slower than the schedule demanded, his body giving what it could but unable to manufacture the speed that the original plan required. There was no shame in it, only the reality of a body still adapting to the relentless daily demands of the trail, but it meant the goal had to shift.
We arrived at Hurunui Hut instead, a shelter sitting in its clearing in the forest, and made the decision to stop. Tomorrow we would try for a big push to get back on schedule, and the reason for that urgency went beyond mere planning. Rain was forecast toward the end of this section, and if it arrived before we reached a particular stretch of the trail, Deception Gorge would become impassable. The gorge, true to its name, is a narrow, walled river passage that transforms from challenging to dangerous when water levels rise, and hiking up through it in heavy rain was not a risk worth taking. The weather window was shrinking, and we needed to be through the gorge before it closed.
But that was tomorrow's problem. Tonight, the hut was just ours. No other hikers, no hunters, no nobo trampers passing through. Just the two of us in the quiet shelter, the forest standing still and dark outside, the river murmuring somewhere beyond the trees. We cooked and ate in the peaceful solitude of an empty hut, the kind of evening that trail life offers occasionally as a counterpoint to the shared bunks and communal cooking of busier nights. The silence was not lonely but restful, the absence of other voices creating a space that was ours alone to fill or leave empty as we chose.
We talked about the plan for tomorrow, about the gorge, about the weather, about the kilometres that needed to be covered. And then we let the conversation go and let the quiet take its place, two people in a hut in the forest, resting before the push that would come with the morning light.Read more
Wet Boots Over Harper Pass
Apr 1–2 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌙 11 °C
Twenty-five kilometres lay between Hurunui Hut and Locke Stream Hut, and the urgency of the weather window demanded an early start. The forest was dark and quiet around us as we stepped into a morning that was still more shadow than light, the longest day we had attempted since the walk into Anne Hut pressing ahead of us like a promise that would take every hour of daylight to keep. Every kilometre covered today was a kilometre banked against the rain forecast for the days ahead, a kilometre closer to Deception Gorge before the water could rise and close it against us.
Not long after leaving the hut, we came to a three-wire emergency swing bridge. Three wires, one for the feet and two for the hands, strung across the river in a triangle of tension that swayed and bounced with every step. We looked at the river below it. It was not deep. We could have easily forded it, waded across with barely wet knees, and continued on without breaking stride. But the bridge looked like fun. There is something irresistible about a three-wire bridge when you are deep in the backcountry and the day is young and the part of you that is still a child refuses to walk past something that looks like a playground. We crossed it, one at a time, shuffling along the lower wire with hands gripping the upper cables, the whole structure swaying and dipping with each movement, the river sliding past below our feet. Torrin moved across with the casual confidence of someone who had crossed dozens of these on the North Island. Anth followed with considerably more concentration and considerably less grace, but he made it, and the grin on his face when he stepped off the far side was worth every wobbling step.
The track led us into the forest and kept us there for much of the day. Dense beech woodland closed around us once more, that familiar green cathedral of moss-wrapped trunks and fern-choked understory that had become the signature landscape of this section of the trail. But the forest walking was broken by stretches of riverbed, those sections where the trail simply ceases to exist and the route becomes the river itself, a braided corridor of grey stones and shallow channels that must be read and navigated in real time. There are no orange trail markers on a riverbed, no worn path to follow. There is only the water and the stones and the far bank, and the decision of where to cross is made fresh each time.
Our shoes were wet within the first hour and stayed that way. Creek crossing followed creek crossing, each one delivering another surge of cold water into boots that had barely begun to drain from the last, until the distinction between wet and dry ceased to exist and we simply accepted that our feet would be swimming for the duration. In places, the track disappeared entirely, swallowed by flood damage or overgrowth or the simple reality that in this remote country, maintenance is a battle fought against forces that always eventually win. We navigated by instinct and trail markers where they existed, by map and common sense where they did not, pushing through sections of bush where the undergrowth grabbed at our legs and the trail was more suggestion than path.
The Hurunui River valley has been a thoroughfare through these mountains for centuries. Long before European boots marked the ground, Māori travellers used this corridor as a route between Canterbury and the West Coast, carrying pounamu back from the grey, wild rivers of Westland. The trail we were walking followed in those ancient footsteps, a path worn by generations of feet moving through the same beech forest, fording the same rivers, climbing toward the same gap in the mountains that had drawn people through for hundreds of years.
We stopped at the thermal pools, a natural hot spring where geothermally heated water rises to the surface and collects in pools beside the river. We soaked our feet, lowering them into the warm water with the slow, groaning gratitude of hikers who have been walking in cold, wet boots since dawn. The heat seeped into aching arches and swollen toes and the tight, bruised muscles of the sole, and for a few blissful minutes the trail ceased to exist and there was only warmth and relief and the steam rising from the water into the cool forest air. It was a brief indulgence, not long enough to truly restore what the kilometres were taking, but enough to remind our feet that comfort still existed somewhere in the world.
We pressed on to Hurunui Hut No. 3 for a quick break, dropping our packs on the porch and stretching out the tightness that accumulates in shoulders and lower back after hours of walking. A nobo hiker joined us there, arriving from the opposite direction with trail notes and weather reports from the country ahead, and we exchanged information with the practised efficiency of people who understand that in the backcountry, shared knowledge is shared survival. A brief chat, a few mouthfuls of trail food, and we were moving again. The day was not yet done with us, and the pass was still waiting.
Harper Pass. Kura Tāwhiti. At 962 metres, it is not the highest crossing on the Te Araroa, but what it lacks in altitude it compensates for in history and reputation. This is one of the great historic passes of the Southern Alps, the primary route used by Māori for centuries to cross between Canterbury and the West Coast, the corridor along which pounamu was carried from the wild rivers of Westland to the communities of the eastern plains. Leonard Harper, for whom the pass was later named, crossed it in 1857, but the gap in the mountains had been old and well-known long before any European set foot near it. Walking through it felt like moving through a corridor of time as much as geography, the beech forest pressing close on either side, the ground rising steadily beneath our feet, the air cooling as the altitude increased.
The climb was manageable, the gradient steady rather than savage, and we crested the pass without the twenty-metre rest stops that Travers Saddle and the Waiau Pass had demanded. But the descent on the western side was a different matter entirely. The trail dropped through forest that was wet and slippery, the ground saturated from recent rain, every root and rock and patch of earth offering a surface that could not be trusted. Our already soaked boots found no purchase on the greasy terrain, and progress slowed to a careful, deliberate crawl, each step tested before weight was committed, poles planted firmly as a third and fourth point of contact on the steeper sections.
Anth went down at least once, feet sliding out from beneath on a section of muddy trail that offered no warning and no grip. The fall was fast and graceless, pack momentum carrying everything backward, and the landing was squarely on his backside with a force that sent a jolt through the spine. There would be bruises, that much was certain, the kind that appear the following morning in colours the body has no business producing and linger for days as a reminder that gravity has no favourites. There is no dignity in falling on a wet trail. There is only the cold shock of mud through clothing, the brief inventory of limbs to check nothing is broken, and the slow process of getting back up with a heavy pack and continuing as though the mountain had not just reminded you who is in charge.
The descent continued, wet and demanding, the forest dripping steadily around us, the trail a channel of mud and running water in the steeper sections. The western side of Harper Pass feeds into the headwaters of the Taramakau River system, the landscape shifting from the drier eastern valleys into the wetter, wilder country of the West Coast where rainfall is measured in metres rather than millimetres and the bush grows with a density that reflects its constant saturation.
Finally, through the trees, a roof. Locke Stream Hut. We arrived with the particular relief of hikers who have covered twenty-five kilometres through wet forest and over a mountain pass and have nothing left to give. The hut was a modest affair, functional and weathertight but small and simple, the kind of backcountry shelter that offers exactly what is needed and nothing more. We searched for firewood with the hopeful desperation of people whose every piece of clothing from the waist down was saturated, but the bush had offered up nothing dry enough to burn. There would be no fire tonight. No warmth radiating from a crackling grate, no steam rising from socks and boots hung hopefully nearby. Our wet shoes and socks would remain wet, and tomorrow we would push our feet back into them and walk on regardless.
Again it was just the two of us in the hut, that quiet solitude that had become unexpectedly precious over these past days. The empty bunks and still air created a space that belonged entirely to us, father and son in a small shelter on the western side of the mountains, the forest dripping into darkness outside, the stream that gave the hut its name singing softly somewhere beyond the trees. We cooked and ate and talked about the days ahead, about Deception Gorge and the weather and the kilometres still between us and the end of this section. And then we let the silence settle around us like another blanket, and let the long day's weariness carry us toward sleep.Read more
Eight Easy Kilometres
Apr 2–3 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C
We checked the weather forecast that morning with the careful attention of hikers whose plans depended entirely on what the sky intended to do. The news was not what we had hoped. Rain had been forecast for the weekend, not the brief, passing showers that the trail shrugs off, but sustained, heavy rain of the kind that the West Coast delivers with a generosity the rest of the country cannot match. And sustained heavy rain meant one thing for the trail ahead. Deception Gorge would be too dangerous to pass through.
The Deception River gorge is one of the most notorious sections of the Te Araroa on the South Island, a narrow, walled canyon where the river fills the entire valley floor and the only way through is the river itself. In normal flows, it is challenging but manageable, a series of crossings and scrambles through a dramatic corridor of rock where the walls rise high on either side and the water runs cold and fast around your legs. But when rain falls in the mountains above, the Deception lives up to its name. The river rises quickly, sometimes within hours, transforming from thigh-deep crossings into a torrent that fills the gorge wall to wall with a force that no hiker can safely stand against. People have died in Deception Gorge. It is not a place that forgives poor decisions about weather windows, and the forecast left no room for ambiguity. The rain was coming, and we would not be in the gorge when it arrived.
We made the decision to head out at a point where we could restock on food and wait for the waters to drop. It was the right call, the only call, but it carried the quiet frustration of plans being rewritten by forces beyond our control. The trail teaches this lesson repeatedly, that your schedule is a suggestion and the weather is the authority, but accepting it never becomes entirely comfortable for people who like to move forward.
The silver lining was that today could be short. Kiwi Hut was only eight kilometres away, and with nowhere else we needed to be and nothing to prove to the rain that had not yet arrived, we gave ourselves the luxury of a relaxed start. We packed without urgency, ate a leisurely breakfast, and left just before lunch, stepping out of Locke Stream Hut into a day that felt, for once, unhurried.
For almost the entire walk, the trail kept us out of the forest and in the open. Riverbed and valley grassland alternated beneath our feet, the broad, braided channels of the Taramakau giving way to stretches of tussock and flats where the walking was easy and the views unobstructed. The pace was good, the best we had managed in days, our legs moving freely across the flat ground without the constant interruption of roots and blowdowns and slippery descents that the forest sections demanded. The mountains stood on either side of the valley, their upper slopes hidden in the cloud that was already building ahead of the forecast rain, but down here on the valley floor the air was still and the walking was a pleasure.
We passed some hunters on quad bikes not far from the hut, their machines idling on the riverbed as they stopped for a chat. They had the easy, weather-beaten confidence of men who knew this valley intimately, who came here season after season and read its moods the way we read trail markers. We talked for a few minutes, exchanging the kind of information that flows naturally between people who share the backcountry, and then they rumbled off across the stones and we walked on toward the hut.
Kiwi Hut appeared in its clearing and we arrived to find it empty, the bunks bare, the silence of a space that had been waiting for someone to fill it. We dropped our packs with the satisfaction of an eight-kilometre day that felt almost indulgent after the twenty-five we had covered the day before, and turned our attention to the fireplace. There was wood, but the West Coast had done what the West Coast does to anything left outside for more than a day, and it was thoroughly damp. We coaxed and cursed and blew on reluctant embers and fed it scraps of the driest material we could find, and persistence eventually paid off. The fire caught, tentatively at first, smoking and hissing its complaints, then with growing confidence until proper flames were licking at the wood and warmth was radiating into the hut. We hung our still-wet socks and boots near the heat with the reverent hope of people who have been walking in damp footwear for days and are willing to believe in miracles.
Then the hut filled. Five nobo hikers arrived in quick succession, a mix of nationalities whose presence spoke to the way the Te Araroa draws people from across the world to walk the length of this country. In the backcountry huts they converge, bringing with them different languages and different stories but the same blisters and the same tired legs and the same fundamental love of putting one foot in front of the other through wild places. We went from an empty hut to a full one in no time, and the fire that we had fought so hard to start now served a full audience, its warmth shared among the many rather than hoarded by the few.
But there was no great evening of storytelling or laughter. Every one of them was exhausted. Stoves were lit, dinners cooked and eaten with the focused, wordless efficiency of bodies that needed fuel more than conversation. Packs were repacked and prepped for the following day, gear laid out in the particular order that each hiker had developed through their own weeks on the trail, boots positioned near the fire for whatever drying the night might offer. And then, one by one, the bunks claimed their occupants. The hut fell silent before the last of the twilight had even disappeared from the valley outside, the soft sounds of breathing replacing the brief clatter of cooking, the fire settling into its embers as the people it warmed slipped into the deep, unquestioning sleep of those who have walked as far as their bodies will carry them and need nothing more from the day than its ending.Read more
River Road to Greymouth
Apr 3–8 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C
The others left first. Most thru-hikers walk their own trail at their own pace, alone with their thoughts for the hours between huts, but the rhythm of the trail gathers them together each evening under the same roof like a current depositing stones on the same stretch of bank. The five nobo hikers who had filled Kiwi Hut the night before filed out one by one at their own intervals, each setting off independently into the morning, packs shouldered, farewells exchanged with the casual brevity of people who know they will likely never see each other again but who shared a roof and a fire and the quiet solidarity of a single night in the bush. As the last of them disappeared down the track, we were just a few minutes behind, stepping out into the morning and turning our feet downstream.
This section of the trail was almost entirely on the riverbed, the track abandoning any pretence of a formed path and handing navigation over to the river itself. The braided channels of the Taramakau spread across the valley floor in a shifting maze of grey stone and shallow water, and we crossed and recrossed the river more times than either of us bothered to count. Each ford was a fresh reading of the current, a quick assessment of depth and speed and footing, boots already so permanently wet that the crossings had lost their power to dismay and become simply the way we moved through this landscape. The river was the trail, and the trail was the river, and the distinction between walking and wading had dissolved entirely.
In sections, the riverbed was obstructed by large trees swept down by previous flood waters, enormous trunks and tangled root systems deposited across the stones by forces that must have been terrifying to witness. These flood-carried giants lay where the water had abandoned them, stripped of bark and bleached grey by the sun, their size a testament to the power of a river in full rage. We navigated around them, scrambling over root balls and ducking under branches, each obstruction a reminder that the river we were casually fording today was capable of carrying entire trees like matchsticks when the rain came down hard enough from the mountains above.
At the point where the track swung south to continue its journey toward Deception Gorge, we faced the fork we had known was coming. South lay the gorge, the dramatic river passage that we had been racing the weather to reach, now closed to us by the rain that was already falling in the mountains and would only intensify over the weekend. Instead, we took the Aitken Track, a side route that led west to the highway, our exit from the backcountry and the beginning of the journey to town. One final water crossing stood between us and the track, the deepest ford of the day, the river running waist-high and fast enough to demand careful, sideways steps with poles braced against the current. We waded through with the resigned acceptance of hikers who could not possibly get any wetter than they already were, and climbed out on the far side to begin the walk to the road.
The Aitken Track delivered us to the highway, that abrupt transition from wilderness to tarmac that always feels slightly surreal, the sudden appearance of road markings and power lines and the distant sound of engines after days of hearing nothing but river and wind and birdsong. We stood on the roadside and put our thumbs out, packs at our feet, the familiar ritual of the hitch beginning again.
It was not too long before a hire van pulled over, and two female French backpackers, waved us in with the cheerful generosity of travellers who understood what it meant to be standing on a remote highway hoping for a ride. Their destination was different than ours, but they were happy to take us as far as they could. Anth folded himself into the back seat with his pack, Torrin in the front, and we headed west toward Greymouth, the van carrying us through the lush, rain-soaked landscape of the West Coast, past dense stands of podocarp and rimu forest, the Tasman Sea somewhere ahead of us beyond the hills. Almost an hour later, they dropped us at the turnoff and we thanked them with the warmth of people who know that a hitch on a quiet highway is never guaranteed and always appreciated.
We wandered across the road hoping that the next ride would not be too far away, and before we had even taken off our packs, a motorhome pulled over. Torrin said it was his shortest wait time yet, and given the number of hitches he had accumulated across the length of the North Island, that was saying something. The driver took us the rest of the way, and we were dropped off about a kilometre from the Greymouth town centre.
Greymouth. The largest town on the West Coast, sitting where the Grey River meets the Tasman Sea, a place built on gold and coal and timber and the stubborn resilience of people who choose to live on one of the wettest, wildest coastlines in the country. It is not a glamorous town, nor does it pretend to be. It wears its history in its weathered buildings and its wide, wind-scoured streets, and it offers what thru-hikers need most, food, shelter, resupply, and the simple luxury of being still for a while.
We walked the final kilometre into town and had lunch at McDonald's, that universal trail-town ritual where the menu matters less than the speed and volume at which calories can be consumed. Sitting in the plastic seats with our packs piled beside us, trail-dirty and river-soaked, eating burgers with the single-minded focus of bodies running on a deficit that polite portions could never address. While we ate, Anth booked us a few nights at the local hostel, securing a private room, that precious upgrade from dormitory bunks and shared spaces that feels like extraordinary luxury after weeks of hut living.
Over the next few days, Greymouth became our base for rest and resupply. We restocked on food for the next section, replacing what had been consumed and adjusting quantities with the improved wisdom of hikers who now understood exactly how much they ate per day and how much was dead weight. Anth recovered. His feet, his legs, his bruised backside from the Harper Pass descent, all of it was given the time and stillness it needed to repair. Torrin, in peak hiking condition after months on the trail, needed no recovery. His body had long since adapted to the daily demands of thru-hiking, the muscles and joints and cardiovascular system all operating at a level of efficiency that only sustained, unbroken weeks of walking can produce. He waited for Anth with the same patience he showed on the trail, understanding that rest days were not wasted days but the investment that made the walking days possible.
Anth booked the return to Arthur's Pass on the TranzAlpine, one of the great railway journeys of the world. The train runs between Christchurch and Greymouth, crossing the Southern Alps through the Otira Tunnel and the Waimakariri Gorge, a journey of stunning mountain scenery that draws tourists from around the globe. For us, it would serve a more practical purpose, carrying us back east across the mountains to Arthur's Pass, where the trail continued south. It was a bittersweet decision. Deception Gorge, that dramatic, dangerous river passage that had shaped our planning for days, would have to be skipped entirely. There was no let-up in the rain. The river would be running high and wild, the gorge impassable, and no amount of waiting in Greymouth was going to change what the mountains had decided. The gorge would keep its secrets from us this time.Read more
The Train Through Our Footsteps
Apr 8–9 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 10 °C
The TranzAlpine pulled out of Greymouth and began its climb east toward the mountains. It is one of the most celebrated rail journeys in the world, a scenic passage through the heart of the Southern Alps that draws tourists from every corner of the globe to press their faces against the glass and marvel at the gorges and river valleys and snow-capped peaks that slide past the windows. For most passengers, every vista is new, every tunnel a surprise, every bridge over a churning river a moment to reach for a camera. For us, the scenery carried a different weight entirely. We had just hiked this country. The valleys the train carved through were valleys we had walked. The rivers it crossed were rivers we had forded. The mountains framed in the carriage windows were mountains we had climbed over and cursed at and been humbled by. At one point, the train passed just metres from the spot where we had hitched out days earlier, and we stared through the glass at a stretch of highway we had stood on with our thumbs out, wet and tired and hoping for a ride. Seeing it from the warm, dry comfort of a train seat was surreal, like watching a film of your own life from a seat you never expected to occupy.
The train burrowed into the Otira Tunnel, 8.5 kilometres of darkness through the heart of the mountains, the longest tunnel in New Zealand, bored through the rock beneath Arthur's Pass to connect the West Coast to Canterbury. The carriage lights flickered on and the world outside the windows disappeared, replaced by the close, rushing blackness of stone and the rhythmic clatter of wheels on track amplified by the tunnel walls. For eight and a half kilometres, the mountains existed above and around us in every direction, an unimaginable weight of rock pressing in from all sides, and then the light returned and we emerged on the eastern side, blinking, into the township of Arthur's Pass.
It was raining. Of course it was raining. Arthur's Pass sits at the junction of two weather systems, the wet westerlies from the Tasman and the drier air from the Canterbury Plains, and rain is less an event here than a state of being. The township is small, a handful of buildings clustered along the highway beneath the mountains, and we stepped off the train into cold, wet air that immediately found its way through every layer and settled against the skin with the familiar chill of the backcountry.
We checked for accommodation. There was nothing. Not a room at the lodge, not a bunk at the hostel, nothing. The small township was full, and the options had run out before we had even begun to explore them. The trailhead at Cora Lynn car park was only a fifteen-minute drive down the road, but on foot, in the rain, in the gathering dark, that fifteen minutes became a three-hour hike along a highway with no footpath and diminishing visibility. It was not a prospect that appealed to bodies that had been sitting on a train all afternoon and were now standing in the rain contemplating their options.
We attempted to hitch, thumbs out on the roadside in the fading light, but the traffic was sparse and the cars that did pass were not stopping. The darkness was closing in, the rain was not easing, and the reality of a three-hour road walk in those conditions was beginning to feel less like a backup plan and more like an inevitability. Then Anth had an idea. He walked across to the hostel and knocked on the door, not to ask for a room they did not have, but to ask if anyone inside was free to drive two hikers down to the trailhead. It was the kind of request that requires a particular blend of desperation and optimism, the willingness to ask strangers for help and the faith that someone will say yes.
A couple of girls volunteered without hesitation, that same instinctive generosity we had encountered again and again in this country, the willingness of people to go out of their way for strangers simply because the strangers needed help and helping was the obvious thing to do. We piled into their car with our packs and set off down the road toward Cora Lynn, the headlights cutting through the rain and the dark, the kilometres that would have taken three hours on foot disappearing beneath the wheels in minutes. We arrived in no time, thanked them with the deep, genuine gratitude of people who understood exactly what they had been saved from, and watched their tail lights disappear back up the road toward Arthur's Pass.
Then we turned and headed up the path. The last of the daylight was fading fast, the sky above the canopy a deepening grey that would not hold much longer, and we moved quickly through the wet bush with the urgency of hikers who knew that the margin between reaching the hut in the light and reaching for head torches was measured in minutes rather than hours. The forest was loud with water, rain on leaves, rain on earth, the sound of streams running full and fast somewhere in the gathering gloom beyond the trail. Every step carried the quiet arithmetic of fading light and remaining distance, and the relief when the hut appeared through the trees was sharpened by the knowledge of how close it had been.
Bealey Hut. A simple affair sitting in its clearing, basic and functional and exactly what we needed. We pushed open the door and stepped inside, the sudden absence of rain on our faces feeling like a small act of grace. The hut was empty. Just us, our wet packs, and the quiet shelter of four walls and a roof on a night that offered nothing kind to anyone still outside. We unpacked what we needed with the efficient, practised movements of hikers who had done this dozens of times now, ate quickly, and crawled into our sleeping bags with the bone-deep weariness of a day that had covered more emotional distance than physical.
We fell asleep to the sound of rain on the old tin roof, that ancient, elemental percussion that has been lulling people to sleep since the first human thought to put something over their head and lie down beneath it. The rain drummed its steady rhythm above us, each drop a small announcement of the weather that would shape the days ahead, and beneath it we slept the deep, surrendered sleep of people who had made it to shelter and needed nothing more from the world until morning.Read more
A Different Kind of Beautiful
Apr 9–10 in New Zealand ⋅ ☀️ 10 °C
From Bealey Hut there was only one direction, and that was up.
Lagoon Saddle is the high point of this section, and unlike the gradual valley approaches that had preceded Travers Saddle and the Waiau Pass, it makes no attempt to ease you in. The climb begins almost immediately from the hut, the trail rising steeply through the bush, legs that were still waking up suddenly being asked to perform at full capacity before the morning had properly announced itself. But the weather, that relentless companion that had dogged us since Harper Pass, had finally begun to relent. The rain from yesterday was almost gone, reduced to the occasional half-hearted drizzle that the wind carried more than the clouds delivered, and as we climbed, the sky began to open in patches of blue that widened and joined until the grey was the exception rather than the rule.
As we cleared the treeline, we stopped and turned around.
The views back up the valley into Arthur's Pass and down along the river were almost breathtaking. Different to anything we had seen previously on the trail. The Nelson Lakes section had given us the drama of alpine passes and the intimate beauty of beech forest valleys. The West Coast had offered wild rivers and dense, saturated bush. But this was something else entirely. The Canterbury high country stretched out in a landscape of tussock-covered ridgelines and broad, braided river flats, the mountains rising in shapes that were more angular and exposed than the rounded, forested ranges further north. The rock here was different, paler, sharper, the geological bones of the land more visible beneath thinner skin, and the light that fell across it had a clarity that made every ridge and shadow stand out with an almost photographic precision. The river wound through the valley below like a silver thread laid across a tapestry of brown and gold and green, and beyond it the peaks of the Arthur's Pass region stood in a jagged line against the clearing sky, still carrying snow on their upper faces that caught the emerging sun and burned white against the blue.
Once we crested the top of Lagoon Saddle, the descent began. Gradual and steady, the kind of downhill that should have been a gift to tired legs after the morning's climb. But New Zealand trails being what they are, this meant seemingly almost as many small ups as downs, those maddening undulations that the terrain produces when a trail follows a ridgeline or traverses a slope, each small rise just enough to break the rhythm of descent and remind the legs that nothing on the TA comes without a cost attached. The body craves the simple mathematics of a straightforward downhill, and the trail refuses to provide it, offering instead a constant negotiation of rise and fall that accumulates fatigue out of all proportion to the actual altitude lost.
We stopped for a snack at the small two-person A-frame hut just over the saddle, a tiny shelter barely large enough to sit in, more emergency bivouac than proper hut, its angular roof and minimal footprint designed to survive the alpine weather rather than offer comfort. We squeezed inside and ate in the cramped, dry space, glad for the brief shelter from the wind that ran across the exposed tops, before continuing the descent into the forest below.
The bush reclaimed us as we dropped below the treeline, the beech forest closing in once more, and the trail wound downward through the familiar green world of moss and fern and filtered light. We stopped again at West Harper Hut, another old hut from a different era of backcountry travel. It had a dirt floor, the packed earth cool and slightly damp beneath our boots, the kind of detail that speaks to the age and simplicity of a shelter built when the backcountry was wilder and the expectations of those who walked through it were considerably more modest. The hut carried the particular atmosphere of places that have sheltered people for decades, the timber walls darkened by years of wood smoke and condensation, the structure sound but wearing its history openly. We did not linger. A brief rest, a few mouthfuls of water, and we continued on.
Eventually the trail descended to the valley floor and the creek crossings began again, that inevitable return to wet feet that had become the defining sensation of this stretch of the Te Araroa. We forded stream after stream, the water cold and clear and insistent, each crossing soaking boots that had only just begun to feel something approaching dry after the morning's climb through drier alpine terrain. The rhythm of wet feet was so familiar now it barely registered as discomfort, just another texture in the fabric of the walking day, as unremarkable as the weight of the pack or the sound of breathing on a climb.
We passed a few different groups of nobo hikers heading north, those brief trail encounters that punctuated the solitude of the day with moments of connection and shared purpose. We stopped each time to exchange trail information, offering what we knew of the country behind us, receiving what they knew of what lay ahead, that generous economy of knowledge that the trail runs on. We wished them well and they wished us the same, and then the trail carried us in opposite directions and the forest absorbed the sound of their footsteps and left us with our own.
We crossed a swing bridge over the river and headed five minutes up a side track to Hamilton Hut. A DOC clean-up crew was there when we arrived, and we had been told to expect them by one of the nobo hikers we had passed earlier in the day. They were working through the huts in this section, maintaining and cleaning the shelters that the backcountry network depends on, the unglamorous but essential work that keeps the trails and huts functional for the thousands of trampers who use them each year. They kept to themselves, and after a long day we were glad for the quiet. The energy for socialising had been spent somewhere on the trail behind us, left on one of the creek crossings or one of the false ups that the descent had insisted on.
It had been a longer day, but a good one. And buried within the tired muscles and wet socks was something worth noting. Anth's pace, while nowhere near Torrin's effortless stride, was now consistently hitting the longer end of the time estimates for each section. Not the fastest times listed in the trail notes, but no longer the slowest either. The body that had needed twenty-metre rest stops on Travers Saddle and had struggled to keep pace through the Nelson Lakes was adapting, quietly and steadily, reshaping itself around the daily demands of the trail. The improvement was not dramatic, not the kind of transformation that announces itself in a single moment, but it was real, measurable in the hours saved and the rest stops no longer needed, and it carried a pride that was all the deeper for being hard-won.Read more
TravelerWell done Anth. Torrin has been amazing allowing you to pace the trip and allowing your fitness to build. Proud of you both. 💞💞
Three Hitches to Methven
Apr 10–12 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌙 13 °C
Backtracking the short distance from Hamilton Hut to the main trail, we rejoined the TA and headed south. The temperature had dropped noticeably during the night, autumn tightening its grip on the Canterbury high country, and our pace was brisk from the start, bodies generating warmth through movement because the air was no longer willing to provide it. Within fifteen minutes we had left the forest behind and passed the DOC crew's 4WD parked on the track, the clean-up team presumably still asleep or preparing for their own day's work in the huts we were leaving behind.
The trail became a 4WD track, two rutted lines pressed into the earth by the occasional vehicle that ventured this far into the backcountry, barely visible in places where the grass had reclaimed the ground between the wheel marks. This track crossed back and forth over the creek with a frequency that quickly became the defining character of the day. At the start, we tried the alternate paths that previous hikers had worn into the bank, those hopeful detours around the water that thru-hikers create in the optimistic belief that dry feet are still possible. They were not. The detours were overgrown and often ended at the water's edge anyway, requiring the same crossing they had been designed to avoid but with added bush-bashing for the privilege. In the end, it was simply easier to walk straight through. Shoes wet, feet cold, onwards. The creek crossings were not deep or dangerous, just persistent and unavoidable, the trail and the water sharing the same corridor down the valley with neither willing to yield to the other.
The DOC crew passed us on their way out, their 4WD bouncing along the track with the casual confidence of a vehicle that knew this road, and we stepped aside to let them through, exchanging waves before they disappeared in a cloud of dust and engine noise. And then the valley was quiet again, just the sound of the creek and our footsteps and the steady rhythm of two hikers working their way south.
This back and forth down the valley, crossing the river, continued for almost the remaining eighteen or so kilometres of the section. It was repetitive in the way that only river-valley walking can be, the scenery shifting slowly, the creek appearing and reappearing with the reliability of a recurring character in a long novel, the mountains on either side maintaining their distance while the valley floor unspooled beneath our feet. But there was a meditative quality to it too, the kind of walking that asks nothing of the mind and lets it wander while the body does the mechanical work of putting one foot in front of the other across ground that changes just enough to prevent true monotony.
In the opposite direction, we passed 4WDs heading into the valley, hunters most likely, their vehicles loaded with the gear and provisions of people planning to spend days in the backcountry pursuing deer and chamois and tahr through the mountains above. We also passed a group of school-aged backpackers moving under the guidance of group leaders, young faces carrying packs that looked almost as big as they were, their energy and chatter a bright contrast to the quiet determination of the two middle-aged and young-adult hikers they encountered coming the other way. There were hunters on foot as well, heading in with rifles and that focused, purposeful stride of people who know exactly where they are going and why.
Finally, we arrived at Harper Road. A camping spot marked the junction where the trail met the dirt road, the kind of basic, informal site where most TA hikers stopped for the night, pitching tents on the flat ground and preparing for the road walk ahead. We decided to try our luck hitching into Methven, with camping here as the fallback if the road proved as quiet as it looked. And it looked very quiet. A remote dirt road in the Canterbury high country, connecting vast sheep stations to the wider world, was not the kind of place where traffic was measured in anything more than vehicles per hour, if that.
But the trail has a way of providing when provision seems least likely. We had been sitting down for barely ten minutes when a work ute pulled up and a fellow named Tim stepped out. He worked on the property that surrounded us, a station that spanned twenty thousand hectares of high country, running merino sheep whose wool supplied brands like Icebreaker and Lululemon. Twenty thousand hectares. The scale of Canterbury farming is difficult to comprehend until you are standing in the middle of it, surrounded by an expanse of land that stretches to the mountains in every direction and belongs to a single operation. Tim was generous with both his time and his knowledge of the country, and before driving us out to Harper Road, he gave us an impromptu tour that included a view of Lake Coleridge from the property, the lake sitting in its basin of tussock and rock, a vast body of water that serves as both a scenic wonder and a hydroelectric reservoir. It was an unexpected gift, a window into a way of life that most trail hikers pass through without ever truly seeing, the working landscape beneath the walking landscape.
Tim dropped us on Harper Road, and while he had saved us a significant stretch of road walking, the distance to Methven was still formidable. We headed down the dirt road with our thumbs ready, but the cars that passed were few and none of them stopped. The afternoon wore on, the shadows lengthened, and the prospect of cowboy camping on the roadside began to shift from theoretical fallback to likely reality.
Then a small car pulled over. Three young Chinese students studying primary school teaching, who had been visiting Lake Coleridge for the day, offered us a ride with the immediate, unhesitating warmth of people for whom picking up hitchhikers was simply the obvious thing to do. We piled in with our packs, the car suddenly very full, and the road that had been passing so slowly beneath our feet now flew past the windows. They were heading to Christchurch and dropped us where the road to Methven branched off, another huge stretch of the journey consumed by the kindness of strangers.
Windwhistle. Nothing more than an old service station and a crossroads, the kind of place that exists on a map primarily as a name attached to a junction rather than anything resembling a town. Again it was getting dark. Again no one was stopping. The traffic was thin and the drivers who did pass showed no inclination to add two trail-dirty hikers to their evening. We stood at the crossroads and watched the light drain from the sky and resigned ourselves to the fact that we might have to walk and camp on the side of the road, one of those unglamorous realities of thru-hiking that never makes it into the promotional photographs.
Just as the resignation was settling into something approaching acceptance, another small car stopped. Joe. A man with a wicked sense of humour who had just dropped his son at the airport and was heading home. He listened to where we needed to go, calculated that it was well out of his way, and took us there anyway. All the way into Methven, the conversation filling the car with laughter as the dark Canterbury Plains slid past the windows and the kilometres to town disappeared. Three hitches, three acts of generosity from people who had no obligation to stop but did, and the road that had seemed impossibly long when we stood at Harper Road was behind us.
Methven. A small town on the edge of the Canterbury Plains, best known as the gateway to Mount Hutt ski field, sitting in the agricultural flatlands with the Southern Alps rising to the west like a wall between worlds. We grabbed a room above the Blue Pub for two nights, that perfect trail-town combination of accommodation and cold beer under the same roof. The room was simple but it had a bed and a shower and walls that did not let in the wind, and after weeks of hut bunks and sleeping bags, it felt like luxury of the highest order.
The next day, Anth managed to buy some replacement Injinji toe socks, those beloved items of trail footwear that separate each toe individually and reduce the blisters and friction that conventional socks allow. The pair lost somewhere in the accommodation shuffle of Hanmer Springs had been sorely missed, and their replacement felt like restoring a vital piece of equipment to the kit.
We debated about the next section, the stretch of trail between the braided rivers of the Rakaia and the Rangitata. The logistics of getting to the trailhead were complicated, the kind of remote access problem that plagues certain sections of the TA where the trail passes through country that is far from any town or public transport. Skipping it was discussed, the pragmatic option for hikers whose time and energy were finite resources that needed to be spent wisely. But in the end, neither of us wanted to leave another gap in the trail. We had already skipped Deception Gorge, and the accumulation of missed sections was beginning to weigh on the conscience in the way that only matters to people who have set themselves a goal and measure their integrity by how closely they hold to it. We reached out to someone who runs TA hikers to remote trailheads, the kind of shuttle service that exists because enough people walk this trail each year to make it viable, and the plan was made. We were keen to get back on trail, and the braided rivers were waiting.Read more
Old Hut, Old Wind
Apr 12–13 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 13 °C
Pies for breakfast. The proper start to a trail day in New Zealand, where the humble meat pie occupies a place in the national food hierarchy somewhere between staple and sacred. We checked out of the Blue Pub and ducked into the grocery store, grabbing pies and drinks with the efficiency of hikers who knew their ride was coming and the trail was waiting. Torrin bought a new belt and a pair of sunglasses, both previous versions having succumbed to the rigours of the trail. The belt had given up somewhere in the backcountry, the sunglasses at some point after that, the small attritions of daily use and rough handling that slowly dismantle equipment not built for the sustained punishment of thru-hiking. Replaced now, the kit was whole again, and we stepped outside to meet our ride.
Dave was there, ready to drive us the hour out to the trailhead on a road so quiet and remote that we realised almost immediately how impossible hitching out this way would have been. The sealed road gave way to gravel, the gravel narrowed, the farms grew larger and the fences further apart, and the traffic, already sparse, dwindled to nothing. This was deep Canterbury high country, station land that stretched to the mountains in every direction, and the road existed to serve the people who worked it and almost no one else. The decision to book a shuttle rather than rely on the goodwill of passing drivers had been the right one, and we were quietly grateful for it as Dave's vehicle bounced along the empty road toward Glenrock Stream.
It was just after half past ten by the time we hit the trail, later than we would normally start but unavoidable given the distance from town. The trailhead sat on the banks of Glenrock Stream, and it was this stream we followed uphill through private farmland, the trail marked with poles and the occasional orange triangle, the land around us open and grassy and divided by electric fences that kept hikers constantly alert. The stream ran beside us, shallow and clear over its stony bed, the sound of it a steady companion as we climbed through the pastoral landscape toward the conservation land above.
The farmland gave way to conservation land at a boundary that felt more significant than the simple sign that marked it. The managed grass and fencing of the station yielded to tussock and native scrub, the hand of agriculture withdrawing as the altitude increased, and the landscape took on the wilder, less groomed character of country that belonged to no one and everyone. The trail zigzagged up an old 4WD track toward Turtons Saddle, the gradient steady and the switchbacks long, each turn revealing a little more of the view behind us as the Canterbury Plains began to appear in the distance below, a vast, flat expanse stretching east toward a horizon so far away it seemed to belong to a different country than the mountains we were climbing into.
We passed over the top and began the descent on the far side, the track continuing south across open slopes still well above the treeline where the tussock rippled in the wind and the sky felt enormous and close.
Coming toward us, a lone figure. A female nobo hiker climbing up from the valley below, her pack and her stride marking her as a thru-hiker before we were close enough to see her face. As the distance closed, there was a moment of recognition. Torrin and the hiker saw each other at the same time, and the expressions that crossed their faces were the particular delight of trail friends reuniting unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere. Courtney. She and Torrin had hiked sections of the TA together on the North Island, sharing trail and conversation before their paths had diverged, Courtney skipping ahead and Torrin continuing at his own pace. Now she was heading north, filling in the section she had missed, and was only a few days out from finishing the entire trail. The encounter was brief but warm, the kind of trail reunion that carries an outsized emotional weight because the odds of it happening at all, two hikers moving in opposite directions crossing paths on a remote saddle in the Canterbury high country, are so small that it feels less like coincidence and more like the trail arranging things for its own amusement. They exchanged news and the quick, essential information about what lay ahead in each direction, and then they parted, Courtney north toward her finish and us south toward whatever was next.
We continued the descent, stopping at the small A-frame hut tucked into the valley for a snack break. It was a tidy three-bunk shelter, more waypoint than destination, and we used it as exactly that, sitting on the narrow bunks and eating with the mechanical efficiency of bodies that needed fuel more than comfort.
From the A-frame, the trail followed the stream through a series of river crossings before delivering us to Comyns Hut. Eight bunks. Built in 1957, the hut was basic but solid, restored following work in 2008, and it carried the worn, weathered character of a shelter that has been doing its job in the high country for the better part of seventy years. We settled in for the night, just the two of us again in a hut that felt as though it had been waiting patiently for someone to arrive.
Outside, the high country settled into its evening quiet, the tussock fading from gold to grey as the light withdrew, the stream murmuring in the gathering dark. But as the night deepened, the wind came up. It arrived first as a low moan through the gaps in the timber, then built steadily until it was pressing against the walls with a force that made the old hut creak and shudder around us. The gusts found every crack and seam, whistling through joints that seventy years of high country weather had slowly loosened, and the roof above us hummed and rattled as though the mountains were reminding us that shelter out here is borrowed, not guaranteed. We lay in our sleeping bags and listened to the wind work at the hut and trusted that a building that had survived nearly seven decades of Canterbury storms could handle one more night.Read more
TravelerThank goodness for bad weather Anth. 😊😅🤣
Traveler🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
TravelerThanks my Love 😘❤️