Te Araroa Day 93, Wanaka to Highland Creek Hut

Starting km: 2620
Finishing km: 2650
km covered today: 30

In addition to the (single) beer, the other treat I'd granted myself for the night in Wanaka was to not set an alarm. Not a bad thing, give that I was woken up by roommates returning in the wee hours.

And as this was (for once) not a monstrously long day, it didn't even matter that I woke up at 8:45.

Pack up, then on to an easy stroll along the lake shore. Somehow I managed to get lost while doing this (how do you get lost walking along the shore of a lake!?) But when I discovered this, it just meant that I walked along the (also fairly nice) road til it rejoined the trail.

It did this at the Glendhu Holiday Park. At which the surroundings were nice, but were shared with, at a guess, 2000 other campers in the ~1km long bit of shore it occupied, all of them in huge tents, caravans or both. "Who on Earth finds this pleasant?" I thought as I walked past. But then I imagine many people would ask the same question about what I'm doing.

From there it was on to the Motatapu Track. Constructed in 2008 as a condition of the sale of Motatapu Station to foreign owners (Shania Twain and her then husband), it parallels the Crown Ranges Road, which I've always  thought is one of the coolest bits of  road in the country.  It's also reputed to be a pretty tough bloody walk, so I was curious to see how my cold-weakend body would handle it.

The first stretch was supposed to be the easiest, and really was quite pleasant. Yes, it included a 400m climb, but this was mostly through cool and pretty forest so was not unpleasant.

Popping out of the bush, I arrived at the Fern Burn (burn as in the Scots word for stream; we're in Otago now) and got on to the next bit, which was meant to be more typical of the track. A long climb up to a 1260m saddle was managed with minimal trouble.  On the way up you could see Lake Wanaka back down the valley and at the top, some of the landscape to come.  I'd read some trail notes describing it as "broken" and now understood what they meant. Lots of steep cliffs, exposed rock, and hardly a ridge anywhere that continued unbroken for any significant length of time.  This did look like tough walking country.

But 30 minutes of steep descent and another 40 of upping and downing and sidling through that broken landscape and I was at the Highland Creek Hut.  In quite good time indeed.  The trail notes had said it ought to take 7 hours. I'd made it in just over 4. So I guess I was dealing pretty well with the cold.

I was sharing the 12 bunk hut with four others, meaning that there was plenty of time and room to enjoy the rest of the afternoon, reading, writing  cooking and chatting. (Interesting note: for only the third time since starting TA, Kiwis were again a majority in the hut.)