Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club
Enjoying the great outdoors since 1947
Billed as an Easy-Medium, the Kawakawa Hut trip sounded like just what I needed after a long break from overnight tramping and a hideous cold. As benefits a trip of this grade, proceedings commenced with a coffee at Martinborough and it was 11am before the actual tramping began. Being new to the area, I’d done … Read more
On Friday the third of June seven intrepid Wellington trampers congregated in Auckland airport to await the beautiful scenic thirty minute flight to Great Barrier Island. The Island is serviced by two airlines (Barrier Air and Fly My Sky) and by a slight miscommunication as a group we were split between the two airlines but … Read more
4th June – Mangatutu Hot Springs to Te Puia Lodge and Mangatinoka Hot Springs Total Walking Time – 2.5hours Total Hot Pool Time – 2.5hours After a long drive our group arrived at the Mangatutu Hot Springs camping ground at around 1:30am on a very cold evening. Our road weariness and the cold, hard ground … Read more
The Croesus Track is located in the Southern Paparoa Range in the West coast region. This track is one of finest surviving examples of a miners’ track (1881) on the West Coast. A group of 12 from WTMC, lead by Matt and assisted by Catherine started our adventure on Thursday night of Easter weekend 2016. … Read more
My optimism was slowly fading as the week progressed. The forecast was predicting strong winds, rain, and near freezing temperatures. But as we baked in the afternoon sun waiting for the ferry, that forecast seemed like a distant reality. After a sunset across the Cook strait, a sail through the sounds lit by the full … Read more
After the last attempt to go around the loop was stopped due to bad weather in the Tararuas (how surprising!), some of the punters were more than keen for another shot. Fortunately a good weather window coincided with the trip schedule. Some us were left waiting at the road end ready to go, wondering where … Read more
It’s never a good sign when wet weather gear has to come out of the pack before even reaching the van at platform 9, but thankfully this wasn’t a sign of things to come for the WTMC trips heading to Nelson Lakes for Labour weekend. We boarded the ferry at 5pm, and by the time we … Read more
We left Wellington on a sunny Saturday morning and after a caffeine boost in Martinborough arrived at the Putangirua road ready for our adventures. With boots and packs on we set off to find orcs amongst the Putangirua Pinnacles. Possibly it was too sunny for the orcs to be out so we had no success … Read more
We left Friday evening, the van was full and everyone was happy and excited for our tramp. After a quick dinner in Bulls, we arrived at a backpackers place in Stratford, where we found out that we would get to sleep in until 8am, so we were already off to a very good start of … Read more
Saturday morning was sunny but quite cool when we emerged from the van at the road end. Extra layers of clothing were quickly added. Our track was a 4-wheel-drive route, at times deeply rutted and beginning with a huge muddy pool. We walked downhill through regenerating bush to the first of 10 river crossings and … Read more