By Chris Russell, 11 April 2025
6am Friday morning I woke up to my alarm with the most motivation ever as I had huts to bag! Got a train to Waikanae as I had opted to not drive since I would just have to pick it up later in the week if I did. Was also an opportunity to do the pukeatua track which I've never done! But it was clouded over so I got no views all the way to Parawai lodge. Though turns out it was good I did go that way because the Otaki gorge slip roadworks means that I would have had to do the emergency access track since they work on weekdays. I got to Parawai in the rain at 3pm and I was considering pushing on to Waitewaewae to get ahead early, but then I thought about how that meant walking a couple hours in the dark and rain on a boring ass track and decided to stay the night. Though to torment me the weather cleared 30 mins later! That night I had the weirdest semi-lucid dream where I kept waking up in Parawai lodge but then something wouldn’t quite be right, like the table arrangement, or another group would be sleeping downstairs (when I actually had the hut to myself). One time I looked out the door and saw a bear far away and thought “Wait, we don’t have bears in NZ!?” and so I was aware it was a dream and I would try really hard to wake up and open my eyes and then I would check my surroundings to find that yet again I was in a dream.
Saturday I woke up to my alarm at 5am, a bit groggy from the very disrupted sleep (I also kept waking up to rats making noise in the hut) but managed to get up and go by 6am at first light. There was absolutely nothing eventful about the walk to waitewaiwai hut, last paragraph me said it best and I quote “boring ass track”. But I was surprised to find that although I thought I was walking slowly, I did that section in 4.5 hours. Met a couple hunters there who helicoptered into anderson and were walking out the next day, due to the drama that occurred when posting about Bag All the Huts on the Tararua forum earlier in the week, I decided not to yap about what I was doing to hunters in particular during the tramp (iykyk). I felt a bit ill climbing up to shoulder knob but I think I just ate too much on the track?? The tops were clouded over in the morning but cleared pretty much as soon as I got onto the tops which was stunning! Got some reception to do my updates and continued to Anderson Memorial hut. On the way I bumped into this guy Greg and he was very interested in what I was doing, it then turned out he was an old VUWTC member! He even attended a Bag All the Huts back before the 2000s! He said it was run by Eric Duggan that year which is a pretty famous name in the club! It was also funny we were both heading to Nichols hut that night because that was the hut they missed on their Bag All the Huts on his year. Now the most beautiful part of the tramp has to be coming down from Mt Crawford to nichols as the clouded tops parted just enough to let the sunset through. After taking ages coming down due to getting my camera out every 2 seconds I made it to the hut at about 6:30pm just barely not needing my headtorch. And that made that a 12.5 hour day so a well deserved rest! It was also nice not being alone in the hut, Greg and two other women were there and everyone was quite experienced and we all exchanged stories of our awesome adventures. I also realised that I had forgotten to drop off heels/backcountries at all the previous huts! So I left a couple there to make up for it.
Sunday we actually all happened to be wanting to get up at 5am because we all had a long day ahead of us, and getting up as a group was great for motivation to get up and out of the hut in a reasonable time frame. Again was out of the hut as soon as there was any light. I said my goodbyes to the others and headed to Dracophyllum hut. Sunday was just spectacular weather right from the start, amazing views all around. Two people had slept in dracophyllum the night before so I was glad I didn’t push onto there the day before because it was full! I think they were hunters because they had left their stuff there but there were no people around, and someone also had to camp outside on the helicopter pad it seemed. From here is where my route got really interesting. In order to save some time Tommy had suggested rather than going around the tops via Arete, I could just bush bash off the dracophyllum spur into the Park River and then up another spur up to the Carkeek Ridge. I like bush bashing and saving time so I did! The bush bash down was very pleasant, little bit of scrub at the top and no human track, but overall pleasant forest to bash down. The Park River was stunning as usual. I went down river briefly before spotting the start of the spur I needed to go up, but I decided to go up a side stream for a bit first to avoid what looked like a cliff on topo. And it seems others had had the same idea because I thought a couple markers marking the start of the route up the spur, but that was as far as the marking went, it was a good spur but definitely very unused and there was quite a bit of annoying cutty grass near the top, as well as a bit of leatherwood to push through at the bush edge. But once I got onto the carkeek ridge path I felt great after the successful bash!
I had lunch at Carkeek hut and read the intentions book to find that my entry from a trip last year was only a page before since carkeek doesn’t get many visits. I was making great time so I thought I might be able to make it to jumbo even. But this next section took longer than I expected. I was feeling tired going down the ridge to Park Forks so I decided a swim might wake me up which it did a little. But then going through the Park Forks Gorge I was cursing the thought of Tommy as he told me earlier it would probably be less than waist deep, while doing multiple waist deep crossings. I finally found the start of the McGregor spur marked with a large orange triangle, though it was quite the sight and it looked like I had to climb a cliff to get to the triangle. It wasn’t too bad in the end but it was an extremely steep narrow spur to start with. At this point of the day I was just getting irritated by everything. I was getting annoyed at how badly the track was marked, because it was constantly giving me the mental dilemma of “is it quicker to search for the markers in the hope of a more worn trail?” or “do I just make a straight line for where I think it should go because I don’t actually need the markers for navigation”, it became so overgrown that undergrowth was covering a lot of the markers. I eventually popped out at McGregor biv, again just at dusk where I had the decision to stay here the night or push over the tops in the dark while the weather was good, to avoid the nasty wind the next day. Weirdly the thought that made me stay was that I didn’t particularly want to barge into Jumbo hut full of people trying to sleep at like 9pm and have to make dinner and go to bed really quietly when I could just have the biv to myself right now! And again I had been walking for 12.5 hours so I was tired of course. To reward myself for my efforts, dinner that night was a bit nicer, I strained my noodles properly and added some Tuna that Greg gave me since he had spare food, and I wasn’t certain I had enough if I got stuck at McGregor due to the wind, how nice of him. I also remembered that I brought a dehy desert as well, apricot crumble yum!
Monday: I felt like I was really getting into this rhythm at this point of the 5am wakeup and then walk till dark and get to sleep about 8pm every day. Only thing is I kinda wish I got up an hour earlier so that I could have seen the sunrise at Angle Knob but oh well. I left and did my only climb of the day to Angle Knob only to be surprised that it was only average Tararua windy, not ‘I can’t stand up’ windy as I imagined because of the forecast. Turns out I must have been sheltered by McGregor peak as I descended down the ridge to jumbo when suddenly the wind hit me… And it was strong, ‘I can’t (barely) stand up’ strong in fact, but luckily I only had to deal with that struggle for about 15 minutes, but not before stopping to take a video referencing the “It’s fuckin wimdy” meme to send to Jackson specifically. I also couldn’t hear this guy coming at me around the corner while I was mid snot rocket so that was a fun way to start a conversation, also while in gale force winds. But he enjoyed my ‘where tf did I come from and what the hell is Bag All the Huts’ spiel which at that point I had that spiel rehearsed very well to dump on anyone that dared. The next victims being every person getting ready to leave at Jumbo Hut when I got there. One group had many cute dogs, one named Kevin (sent a photo of him to my friend Kevin). And another group were a bunch of students and when they saw me write the club logo in the intentions book they were like “Are you doing that bag all the huts thing?”. It turns out they had recently joined the club and had considered signing up even. They were also like “Oh you’re the one doing the fucked route” which made me feel like a bit of a celebrity lol. The last part down to Atiwhakatu Hut and out to the carpark was a bit of a blur because now it was just boring ass valley DOC tracks and the exciting bits of the tramp were over, but I was still riding the high of my successful hut bagging, the tramp went pretty well as planned. And I didn’t have to wait long before the trampers I passed at atiwhakatu got to the end and were happy to give me a ride all the way back to Wellington!
And that was that, I love hard tramps. I find them the most rewarding and I especially love how with Bag All the Huts you have that feeling of doing your part of a bigger thing. Also I bought another power bank so I recorded Strava for this entire thing! So now I have some fun stats:
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Distance: 78.34km
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Elevation Gain: 5731m
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Max Speed: 67.5km/h (this is definitely real and not a gps tracking bug)
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Huts bagged: Parawai, Waitewaewae, Anderson Memorial, Nichols, Dracophyllum, Carkeek, McGregor, Jumbo and Atiwhakatu (that’s 9 huts!)