Firstly, I'd like to thank the organisers of this event – we certainly felt inspired by the idea and it gave us a good opportunity to push our limits .
Last trip – the forecast looked really good for this one. However, with only 13 hours of daylight to use, this was going to be abit more difficult than our earlier trips.
We slept for a few hours in the car at The Pines Rd end before heading off, at 1.31am, up the easy track towards Mitre Flats. Even though this is easy and well marked, it was good to be quite familiar with the route. We hadn't been up there since the new bridge was built so it was nice to find it is a lot closer to the hut than the previous one. No one was in residence at the hut when we arrived at 4.14am, so we loitered for awhile and had a cup of tea. We were headed for Mid -King Biv and knew that we wouldn't be able to find it in the dark.
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Looking towards Jumbo from above Mid-King Biv
It took us awhile but we made it up Sth Mitre Stream to the foot of the spur with dry feet – the true left seems to be the way to go. It got light part way up the easy to follow spur and we didn't have too much trouble finding the biv at 7.40am – would be easier coming down though. After abit of a rest, we climbed up to the top of the ridge, spotting deer on Sth King along the way. It was an absolutely stunning day to be on the tops and it would have been easy to spend lots of time looking at the views. We carried on over Nth King, Adkin and Girdlestone to reach Tarn Ridge hut at 11.01am. Quick stop and then we backtracked to Dorset Ridge Hut – easy to find on a clear day. By the time we'd climbed back up from the hut to Dorset Ridge, we were ½ way through our day.
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Dorset Ridge
Decision time – to go or not to go to Carkeek Ridge Hut. Neither of us had ever been there and our planned route was to drop off Dorset Ridge to the N/E into the upper Wiohine, then climb directly on to Carkeek Ridge to a point above the hut – a route shown on some old maps. However, we also wanted to be clear of the bush on McGregor Spur by the time it got dark and we came to the conclusion that we probably didn't have time to get Carkeek – not an easy decision at the time but in hindsight, more than likely the right one. We'll have to do the route some time and see. At this point we could have retraced our steps back over the Kings etc but didn't want to do this so headed off down Dorset Ridge – the worst decision of the day as this is a horrible overgrown difficult thing to follow, going down hill anyway. There are various old intermittent markers but it's probably best not to follow these and to use your compass. We did the last 400m or so as a bush bash but hit the stream as planned right on the forks – never did find the track on that last section. I'm not sure how many hours it took but it was too long!!
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The Big Tarn, Dorset Ridge
The river down to Dorset Creek was a nice change to the bush and we easily found the start of the track up McGregor Spur. It's rather overgrown and poorly marked but wasn't too hard to follow uphill .We still only just cleared the bush before dark – the scrubby, leatherwood zone would have been difficult in the dark. The track is well worn in the tussock but we couldn't find any sign leading to the Biv so, at 7pm, it was out with our faithful copy of Tararua Footprints for last minute instructions on how to find it. Easy when you know how!!. We then climbed up on to the ridge again in still perfect conditions to look down on the lights of Masterton. We were back in familiar territory here and didn't have too much trouble following the route over Angle Knob to Jumbo and then down to Jumbo Hut (9.22pm). The hut was crowded and we didn't stay long. Dropped down the well worn trail to Atiwhakatu Hut (10.43pm), and then with a rather overwhelming sense of relief that this
was nearly over, walked out to the Holdsworth Rd end (00.47am), where we'd left our 2nd car. Time for a well earned sleep.
A total of 31 huts for us - 12 of them new huts for me – one less than I had planned for. We did the planning around an average of 3 hours per hut. We're both really pleased that we did this and also that it's now over. We're going to do some slow tramping now – maybe, one or 2 huts a day and plan to go back to some of the new places we seemed to have rushed past.
