Late June: My middle daughter Rose came home from Otago for mid-year break, we planned to go on a tramp together.

Over the years we’ve done a lot of family tramping, starting when the kids were really small. We were very lucky to have a father-in-law who’s a very keen outdoor person who would often book Jans Hut for us. We would take kids, including pushchairs and backpacks, to have those amazing outdoor experiences when they are young. Over the years, as they got bigger, we have done bigger and bigger adventures all around the country, including some of the Great Walks and an amazing five-night trip into Nelson Lakes.

Wintertime is a special time to be in the mountains. It’s great to get into the snow and frozen conditions and get the best out of the cosy huts that we have in our backcountry. We looked for a weather window to get away for a couple of nights somewhere not too far away, in our beloved Taurua Range. There are a couple of huts that I hadn’t been to and I knew that Rose would enjoy a circuit that included getting up onto the tops.

We found a couple of days after a southerly storm came through and mapped out a route which was starting at Holdsworth car park, heading to Totara Flats, then up Cone ridge and down the hill into Neil Forks, which is a place I’d get to visit for the first time. From there, heading up the hill to Maungahuka, onto the Southern Main Range, along to Aokaparangi, down to Mid Wahine, and then up the hill to Mount Holdsworth and then down past Powell back out to the Holdsworth car park. We planned this as a three-day, two-night trip, which, looking at the map and the planned times, looked like it would be achievable. With our weather forecast, the first day was going to be pretty yuck but travelling into Totara Flats and Neil Forks, you’re all in the bush line so it was pretty fine to be travelling in not the best conditions. The weather was forecast to get a little bit better after that, with our last day meant to be an amazing day. 

We packed our gear, planned for two nights, three days. Packing for winter is not much different from tramping for summer. There’s a couple of extra layers: an extra merino, an extra fleece and microspikes for the frozen ground. I packed my very cosy HUT slippers, which are not necessary in summer but helpful in winter. My HUT slippers were a gift from Nic who bought them in Nepal. They are lovely, cosy, fleece-lined woollen HUT slippers, which are perfect for putting over your socks and keeping your feet insulated. We also packed our emergency bothy bag in case we had to shelter between huts.

We found some good snacks and got our food planned together, including my recent favourite dehydrated meal. Real Foods recently released a gourmet pulled pork, which tried a few months ago at the end of a long 15-hour day. It just tasted divine, I was hoping it would live up to its first taste test.

We set off from a Holdsworth car park wearing our jackets. There was a bit of drizzle around it was quite cold, but wandering up the puffer warmed us up. Heading down to Totara Flats under the tree cover, we stayed pretty dry. From there we then headed up the steep hill to get up onto Cone Ridge, which then drops off down into Neil Forks. We got started a little later than planned. Rose had been out with friends and didn’t get home until 4:00am so we had a little sleep-in.

By the time we got to the top of Cone Ridge it was starting to get a little dark. We pulled out our head torches as we headed down into the dark Tararua forest and the very steep down climb into the Forks, eventually after some pretty good downhill scrambling. We reached the creek and wandered down to the lovely sight of a beautiful hut. They look so good when you arrive in the dark, cold and wet, Neil Forks Hut is a classic, cosy Forest Service six-bunker with an awesome log burner and lots of dry kindling, firewood and even some fire starters. We got the cooker going, Rose got the fire up and blazing. We prepared our pulled pork and a nice curry to share. We sat in front of the fire, nice and cosy, just enjoying the peacefulness that comes from being in a hut like that. We had it all to ourselves that night, chatting, catching up and later reading our books. Eventually it was time to crawl into our nice warm sleeping bags and get some rest for the day ahead. I tried to turn the fire down as much as possible but didn’t feel 100% confident completely turning the airflow off. The fully stoked fire pumped out a huge amount of heat over the next couple of hours, soon we were there, lying on top of our sleeping bags, just nice and cosy, not uncomfortably hot, but it was definitely warm in that hut, which was amazing on a cold winter’s night.

Later on the fire died out. We zipped up our sleeping bags and had a good rest. In the morning we woke as the light started to enter. It was still overcast, but the drizzle had stopped, hopefully the weather would clear. We packed up and got across the footbridge to start our climb up to Maungahuka.

 I’d never been on this spur before, it’s a pretty solid climb. My map told us it would be a couple of hours. My old classic Taurua Forest Park map, which has been an amazingly useful tool over the years, is one of those great maps that has really good estimates of time and very consistent, so it gives you a really good resource for planning. The day before, we’d been pretty much smack on the map times. Maybe slightly faster so I was thinking that the two-hour estimate should be a pretty good guide but we started pretty slowly, and Rose was feeling a little tired from the night before so we slowly but surely climbed our way up the spur. After an hour or so it was clear that it was going to take us much more than a couple of hours. We had a few breaks and got up over Concertina Knob into the Goblin Forest and eventually got onto the Alpine. When we got into the Alpine, the clag was well set in, and the wind was blowing a bit stronger than forecast. As we got right up to the top of Maungahuka, there were a few gusts that meant we needed to steady ourselves, and the drizzle and clag were super wet. We got down to Mangahuka Hut. It was great to get into the shelter of the hut and have a break, have something to eat, and decide what we do from there.

Originally we had planned to go through to Mid Wahine Hut on that day from Neil Forks, but after sitting in the hut for a little bit and experiencing some of those gusts and just the constant battering that the hut was getting, we decided that it would be safer and more comfortable to stay at Mangahuka. We heated up some warm drinks and enjoyed a bit of hut time.

This is Rose’s favourite hut in the Tararua area. The first time we came in, we went up via Kime, stayed the night at Kime, and on a beautiful day walked across to Maungahuka. We got there not long after lunch and just bathed in the sun. There wasn’t a breath of wind. It was just the most incredible day up there, so amazing in fact that JD from Amalgamated Helicopters flew in with a young couple who were getting engaged on top of the mountains.

I went for a little dip in the tarn to freshen up and Rose spent a few hours taking photos of all of the amazing alpine plants up there. We had lovely hut siestas and got to eat our dinner out on the western-facing slope beside the hut. We had one other visitor, Chris Sanson, who was doing his main range S-K that day and came through late in the day. We filled up his drink bottles for him as he chased his sub-24-hour main range S-K to become a platinum member of the Tararua S-K club and secure his reserved car park in the carpark of glory.

The weather was very different that day and the hut was absolutely freezing today. The outside temperature was down below -4, it wasn’t much warmer inside the hut. We had all of our clothes on when we were sitting at the table, snuggled up in our sleeping bags. We had one of the hut mattresses on the floor below the table to insulate my cosy hut slippers from the cold of the floor. The last time I was sitting at this table, with a mattress underneath the floor, Tim Sutton slept underneath the table during our main range S-K film trip; this brought back great memories of our adventure with Tim, Joe, and Megan. 

Rose and I chatted through our different options. We got an up-to-date forecast on the Garmin, which gave us hour by hour for the next 12 hours, then every 2 or 3 hours for the next 24 hours after that. That gives a really good picture of what was forecast to happen. The wind was going to ease off late that evening and no more precipitation the next day. That was consistent with our forecast for our third day being a nice day.

Our 3 options were:

1. If the weather forecast didn’t line up, the safest exit was to go back the way we came, which would mean climbing down that steep hill down to Neil Forks and then scrambling up the other side. That wasn’t that appealing but would get us back to the road end in a reasonable amount of time.

2. The shortest way out would have been to go back towards Kime and Bridge Peak and then out to Otaki Forks. That’d be the shortest exit from there, but it would mean going over the ladder and through the Twins, the forecast was for some snow. Given the temperatures, we knew it was going to be slippery and frozen so that felt a little uncomfortable.

3. Our third option was to continue on our planned route but because we stopped at Maungahuka, it would mean a much longer day. Given the timing on getting up from Neil Forks, I was concerned that we were going to be slow getting across to Aokapurangi and then the climb from Midwahine up to Holdsworth. I’d been told that was quite a tough climb and, being over a thousand vertical metres, it is definitely a lot of time climbing and would be our biggest climb of the trip.

We thought we would see what the weather conditions looked like in the morning before making the final decision. We were hoping that we could continue on our planned route but that it may mean that we had to spend another night at Powell Hut and then walk out the next morning.

We lay in the hut and read our books. I was reading “The Trading Game” by Gary Stevenson, who’s an ex-foreign exchange trader turned wealth equity advocate. Reading about his early days as a trader, being wined and dined at London’s finest restaurants, was a world away from being at Maungahuka hut in wild weather. During the night, the wind continued to blow but seemed to ease off a little bit by morning. It was definitely cold and awoke to snow on the windows; the ground was frozen solid outside, which made a very precarious trip to the bathroom. The water tank was frozen, the outside door handle took a few whacks to get back into the hut.

As we sat there eating our breakfast, the sun started to rise. It was majestic outside as the sunrise colours began to show and light up the frozen tussock. The wind was blowing stronger than the forecast but we decided that we would head off on our planned route and check in after half an hour and see how we were feeling in the cold. We layered up with good warm layers, our good thick gloves, extra insulation layers, and our over trousers, put on our microspikes, and headed off down the hill. It’s quite nice heading north from Maungahuka; you get quite a nice downhill, and as we dropped down the wind seemed a little lighter and there were bits where you get on the western side of the ridge out of the southeasterly, so we continued on.

My map had said that the time to get from Maungahuka through to Anderson is six hours and it said two hours from Aokapurangi through to Anderson so that meant that the difference of four hours was the time that it might take us to get through to Aokapurangi. I knew from travelling on this ridge that you can definitely move faster than that but a lot of that came down to how everybody was feeling and the conditions so planning for four hours we seem to be moving really well as we were climbing up a one of the many hills along that range. I thought that this was probably the hill before Aocapurangi. The sun was behind the hill as we climbed. We were in the shade but the light was just starting to hit some of the frozen tussock above us, it was spectacular. I noticed a deer on the ridge looking down at us I grabbed my camera and took a few photos. The deer with a good set of antlers just sitting there watching us. We stayed nice and still, took a few photos, then it started moving slowly towards us. It was an amazing looking creature, surrounded by the frozen tussock with its antlers backlit by the sunlight. One of those cool mountain experiences.

The deer kept wandering towards us and saw that we were smelly humans, it took off down one of the spurs. Not long after that I got a glimpse of the signpost. I knew that meant we were actually on Aokaparangi and had been able to get through there much faster than we expected, in nearly half the planned time, which was awesome. It meant that there’s a good chance that we could actually get out that night as planned and not have to spend an extra night, which would cause worry at home. We celebrated in the sunlight and ate some more of our yummy snacks. From Aokaparangi we dropped down to mid-Wahine, it was the first time I’d been down that track. It was pretty amazing, one of those beautiful parts of the Tararua, a really spectacular goblin forest on the top section. Because it was still quite early in the morning, the way that the sun was coming through the trees was beautiful.

Eventually we wound on down the spur, it’s not super steep for Tararua standards. We got down to the river across the footbridge, the classic wire bridges which are super important for safe travel in the range to get across those rivers. There was a bit of a detour on the eastern side of the river due to a slip. We found our way up to Midwahine hut and found a lovely sunny spot right down next to the river near the helicopter pad there.

We sat there and got out the cooker and heated up our second serving of the pulled pork for a lunchtime warm meal and filled up on our electrolytes to prepare for our 1000+ m climb that afternoon. There was a beautiful swimming hole sitting there and I was tempted to go for a swim but decided just to enjoy the sun and stay nice and warm.

After a good break we started our climb up to Mount Holdsworth and decided that we would break it down into 300 m vertical sections. We’d stop and have a little break after each one of those to keep our motivation and energy high and it was a real treat. We got a couple of glimpses looking back at the main range as we climbed up the spur but in the last hour or so the clag came in a little. Eventually we popped out into the alpine and as we got up to Isabelle we popped through the top of the clag and got to see some of the tops of the range popping out of a thick layer of cloud filling all of the valleys. To the south we could see Hector, which was covered in snow, popping out. We could see Muangahuka, Aokapurangi, and looking to the north we could see many of the northern high peaks.

We got up to Holdsworth, it was frozen solid up there. We popped our microspikes back on and headed down to Powell as the sunset; it was absolutely beautiful, colours lighting up the range as the sun was setting, the full moon in the east was rising, a pretty surreal experience. We grabbed lots of photos. As we went past Powell, it looked like there was a good crew of people in to enjoy the good weather over the next couple of days. Those were the first people that we’d seen in our three days adventuring out in the range. There is something really nice about just being out there together spending time without the busyness of everyday life and enjoying this wild adventure and all of the beauty that the range has to offer. Definitely a trip to remember.