Alabaster Hut, Hollyford Track, Fiordland National Park
Its been so long since I did this trip, that I completely forgot it when I was writing my hut book / trip list until I found a photo of Hidden Falls Hut on my Flickr stream.
Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, as now that I remember it, I wish I didn’t.
I’ve actually done this trip twice (and there is a good chance that some of my memories of the trip are compilations of the two), both times in late February / early March with the Otago University Tramping Club. Apart from a massive mission to the Abel Tasman Coastal Track and a couple of Bushballs, its about the only tramping I did with the club (that I can remember at least) as I was constantly either too financially poor or too time poor to get out much.
2002 was my first club trip, and I was a punter. I remember two bus loads of students stopping in Gore for dinner on Friday night, harassing the bogans, lots of rain, a seriously over-full hut with a leaking roof, sleeping on a spare mattress on the floor, and sleeping on the bus on the way home.
In 200, I was living in Te Anau, and got roped in with Jo F to lead Alabaster Hut again. Not having to spend all night on the bus, and avoiding stops in Gore were big plusses to doing this trip again. I started packing at about the time the rest were leaving dinner in Gore, and was ready and waiting in my room when the text came through at about 10.30pm that they were nearly there.
The Hollyford Road end has nothing to commend it as a sleeping location except a long drop. When you have a party of about 12 people, the tiny patch of grass that was there was woefully inadequate to fit everyone, so we pitched a fly off either side of the van, my groundsheet was commandeered by a couple of American exchange students (not best pleased), and we all settled down to an uncomfortable night not really sleeping on the sloped gravel of the carpark.
Distributing the group food in the morning proved difficult, as two members of the party had bought what could only be described as school bags, and by the time they had packed their sleeping bag, warm jersey and bottle of wine into it, they claimed they had no space for group gear or food. A thought was had of leaving them behind for the weekend with their food, but we decided it wasn’t that bad a track and the rest of us could just hack it.
The weather was iffy all day, interspurced with bouts of heavy rain, and the girls were soon complaining. We stopped for lunch at Hidden Falls Hut, which was seriously infested by sandflies (outside was worse), before motoring on. Some sections of track here seemed to take forever, and I was very glad to see the guided walk companies Pyke Lodge, which meant we only had about 20 minutes to go.
The weather wasn’t nice enough to swim in the lake, so we all just chilled with a drink and our books before we had dinner. On one of the trips (it may have been this one), I got really awful chafing from wet shorts, and spent the evening trying desperately not to itch it, wearing my long johns inside out so something was resting on it, but not moving. I wound up wearing boxer shorts to walk out the next day!
Track maintenance was underway while we were there, and one of the things they had been doing was gravelling the track. But not with little gravel. The stuff they were using was an awful middle size, everyone had wicked blisters from their boots, as really you would have been better off wearing sneakers. These blisters led us to take a longer than anticipated lunch stop in the sunshine at Hidden Falls Hut.
Eventually my blisters got so bad I could barely walk any more. We started running exceedingly late. A splinter group was sent on to the road end to tell them we were definitely coming and would be there soon, but by the time they got there (20 minutes after we thought our pickup time was, so within waiting limits), the van was already gone. Turns out that there had been a mixup as to whether the pickup was 3pm Daylight time, or 3pm Standard time (as daylight saving ended on Sunday morning) and the van had waited an hour for us before leaving. Thankfully Roy dumped his load of people on the bus and came back to save us.
Our last bit of entertainment for the weekend was also a feeling of relief – the bus broke down about 30 minutes out of Te Anau, so we were exceedingly glad not to be on it! After taking my van load to my local fish n chip shop (rather than going into town, they all wanted to eat quickly then get going), they dropped me home and it was the end of my weekend. I threw the boots out when I got home after realising that the reason they had given me such awful blisters was the damage I had done to them the previous September, leaving them too close to the fire on the Abel Tasman track! (they had given me nasty blisters the last day of that tramp too)
(You'll need to click through to see this at a decent resolution...)
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