Tararua Forest Park, Holdsworth Road End
Group: Me (leader), Mark, Kyle, Jo
What a cruise of a tramp. Purposely advertised as an Easy Easy trip at club, with a Saturday morning departure and only a couple of hours walk to a brand spanking new hut, we planned to take it easy and eat extremely well!
Saturday morning saw Mark and I off to the rental company to pick up the vehicle the club had hired for us for the weekend, which happened to be a nice sedan instead of a van for a change, which was great. Collecting the other two at the railway station at 9am and with only a brief stop at Carterton to get the meat for dinner, we were at the road end in good time.
Its a track I have completed several times before, but there were some new sections along the way, where they have been improving the track to what can only be described as "great walk standard", which is nice for the fact that the bits done are so front country. Due to the fact I had had a fairly major back injury less than a month previous and was only leading this trip because I was damnably determined to get to this new hut, we passed on the option of going up to Mountain House and then down, instead heading direct for the hut.
On the way in we passed a pair of Dads with their collective kids, off for a couple of nights at Atiwhakatu, with a day walk up to the snow on the rain-gauge track on the day in between planned. It was nice to see the kids out and about, enjoying themselves. I'd like to see it more often!
The new hut is a VAST improvement on the old, although the toilet that was there when we came through was still the old one - the new one was lying on its side behind the hut, so I assume by now they will have dug a new hole for it...
We had lunch at the hut, and then spent most of the rest of the afternoon trying to get the fire lit in the new fire box to keep the hut warm. Snow was already confirmed at only about 500m above the hut by people who had come down from Jumbo and stopped to chat, and more was predicted overnight. Kyle went for a wander up along the track a way, and then came back to chop up some more of the old hut as firewood.
Eventually it was dinner time - Mince Nachos, a real treat on a tramping trip! Since we had only had a couple of hours walk, we had decided to carry mince, canned tomatoes, chilli beans and cornchips for dinner. Dessert was meant to have been Butterscotch instant pudding, but it was made with too much water, so only the marshmallows to go with it were really edible... Oops!
Eventually, after a couple of long games of 500, we headed to bed. By this stage it was very very warm in the hut, and the kids on the top bunks were not sleeping well. I think several wound up on mattresses on the floor eventually.
After breakfast and packing up, we headed straight back for the road end and home, delivering people back in Wellington about 1pm. A great, cruisy weekend and one I really think I should do again soon!
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