A Dangerous Business

Date: 29th December 2023

Start: Te Whare O Moturimu (km 1514.4)

End: Ian & Frank’s Hut (km 1529.2)

Distance Travelled: 14.8 km

Total Distance Completed: 1369.2 km

Song Currently Stuck in Head: Sun Goes Down by Robin Schultz

Rain: annoyingly persistent

This is going to be one of those posts where I’m going to have to tell today’s story mostly through my words instead of my photos. To put it simply, this was the wettest day I’ve had so far. Too wet to take many photos of the trail and it’s surroundings.

The rain began as soon as the sun went down yesterday. Heavily. The four of us in the shelter were nice and dry, although many a thought was given to those in tents. By morning it had abated and the damage report wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. A few people had a bit of water come in, but some were perfectly dry. I mean, so were we but that’s besides the point.

Today’s walk was only a “short” hop over to the next shelter. Standing in between us and it was Burtton’s Track, named after a local who lived alone in his hut around these parts in the early 20th century. With a less than promising forecast for later in the day, we got going early, starting on an easy climb up a forestry road.

Reaching the top of the hill, I made a few last minute additions to my grocery order and notified the owners of the Makahika Centre of its existence before switching flight mode on. This is where Burtton’s Track started.

There was no easing into it, the mud began instantly. I’d give it 2.5 out of 5 Pirongias; it had some depth to it, but never higher than my boots. Worse, the rain started. It was light and the forest provided some cover from it, but even still its consistency began to quickly drench our rain gear.

Staying with the wet theme, two river crossings then came in quick succession, threatening to ruin my dry feet streak. The rest of the gang has trail runners so didn’t care about wet feet in the slightest, so I felt like a bit of a nuisance having to go through the faff of removing my boots to cross the river. Twice. Considering the frequency of these crossings on the South Island, I might make the change to runners in Wellington.

From the crossings, the trail has been rerouted away from the river up and over a hill, where I quickly learnt that doing steep, muddy climbs in the rain just isn’t my thing. Having Vicky, Melly, and Matt around me did offer some encouragement to keep pushing; if they could all do it, so could I. The 6-7 hour estimate started sounding pretty reasonable when we got to the top and began dropping back down to the river, particularly after we followed a clearly marked trail of footprints right off the actual trail. We forgot rule number 1: follow the orange triangles. Melly got us back on track easily, and so began the slow descent (for me at least, I don’t know how they can go so fast). At the bottom we reached the site of old man Burtton’s whare. A picnic table was there, but sadly no shelter in which to have lunch.

The rain was still falling, becoming increasingly frustrating, so the call was made to push all the way to the shelter before having lunch. The track was a lot flatter from here but no less muddy, some parts getting up to the 3/5 Pirongia mark. Some parts were also out of the trees in grassy clearings, but all this meant was that we didn’t have any protection from the rain. By this stage is given up on wearing the hood of my rain jacket – it was making me too hot – so my hat was soaked and began dripping down my head into my eyes. Nothing felt dry, even my feet.

To make matters worse we encountered more river crossings. On one of them, probably out of sheer impatience, Matt carried me across the stream (that could’ve only been about 2 metres across) instead of waiting for me to do the whole boot routine again. A little further along, I didn’t have that luxury as he’d dropped back to get some pictures. A stream no more than 1 metre in width was in my way, without any rocks to hop across and far too deep to keep my feet dry. It was at this point that I finally accepted my fate and just got in it. The water quickly soaked into my boots but I was beyond caring at this point. The day was no longer fun and I just wanted to get to the hut and get dry. I responded to each little climb with a cry/grunt of frustration at my situation. The metres and minutes seemed to drag on before I appeared on the road leading to the hut, at long last arriving at 2:30pm.

It was already pretty busy by the time I got there and it only got busier once I’d taken off my boots and socks and wet clothes. John hung up some rope for form a clothesline, more in desperation than actually believing anything would dry off in the weather we were in. Ryann who initially planned to get all the way to Makahika had cut his day short here and were later met by another Kiwi named Bevan, who’s a DOC ranger from the Hokitika area. Mirjam and her friend Roisin (Irish) also arrived, as did Jenny who’d also got lost at the same spot we had but then took close to an hour to find the trail again. The rain had cleared by late afternoon so many people opted to pitch their tents rather than find a spot on the floor of this shelter, named after two pioneering members of the TA Manawatu Trust. Even dry I wasn’t in the best of moods, especially knowing I’d have to put on all of that wet gear tomorrow morning, saving my dry set for the Tararuas. Dinner and my obligatory hot drink and chocolate did raise my spirits a bit. Most of the people here would either be going to Makahika or Levin tomorrow, although Bevin was hoping to push all the way to the first hut on the Tararuas despite the appalling weather forecast. We’d do the former, hoping to head up the ridge the following day but only doing so if the weather allowed it. Four people have been rescued from the Tararuas in the last two months alone and it’s sadly not that rare that someone will pass away in the hills. They have a big reputation and need to be treated with the respect they deserve. As much as I tried to only think about the next day, the following three days over the mountains couldn’t escape my mind, causing me a great deal of anxiety. There’s nothing I could do about it, so I tried to sleep it off, tucking into a very cosy sleeping platform with very little room to manoeuvre, hoping that we could have a nice, dry day tomorrow.