Our group of 8 kicked things off as usual by departing Wellington Train Station at 5pm on Friday – piling into the van with 3 Medium-Fit (MF) trampers.
Day 1
After a 3 hour drive, we were up past Feilding and winding around the back-roads heading towards Petersons Road end. One of the crew had talked up a glow-worm spot close to our destination. However, as we rolled up to the Petersons Road and Limestone Road intersection, there was a unanimous ‘yeah, nah’ from the group. We still had some walking to do to get to our beds for the night.
Instead of finding a spot to camp, we donned our head torches and set out to Alice Nash Memorial Lodge in the chilly, clear night. As we hopped out of the van and hauled on our packs, we admired the generous sprinkling of stars above. With DOC times indicating we had a one hour walk ahead of us, we hustled down into the valley and were glad when we rocked up to the Lodge in less than 30 minutes.
The 8-bunk Alice Nash Memorial Lodge is rather spacious, so some of us hunkered down on the floor to enjoy the warmth of the fire. There is a large grassy area beyond the hut’s wrap-around verandah, which has enough space for a few tents. Maintained by the Palmerston North branch of the NZ Deer Stalkers Association (NZDA) , the Lodge is a very pleasant stay for the night. They ask for a small donation in return, or you can use one standard DOC hut ticket.
Day 2
Our MF companions rose early and set out to the relocated Leon Kinvig Hut. A little later our group had a quick briefing over breakfast about what to expect on the Iron Gate Hut track. Cyclone Gabrielle had left the track peppered with slips and some workarounds had been put in place. However, there were comments in the Lodge’s intentions book, indicating that some trampers had decided to play it safe and abandon their attempts to traverse the slips.
We were not deterred, however, as we had been assured by intrepid club member Monique Bon , who had visited the area recently, that the track is passable. We carried her notes with us, which outlined three notable sticking points along the way, like some sort of Sphinx puzzle. Refreshed, we picked up our gear and, after a quick selfie at the Lodge, set off at around 8.30 am.
The sky was cloudless and the sun beamed down, but we soon found ourselves descending into the shade of the thick bush, occasionally catching glimpses of the sun-warmed tops surrounding the Oroua River valley.
Most of the route runs high above the river, with steep sections up and down over tangled erosion-exposed roots and slippery boulders. Moss-laden trunks flank the track and there are a few across the track that we had to duck beneath.
Many of us admired tiny clusters of colourful fungi, and we were greeted by several agile Piwakawaka along the way. The surrounding bush is populated with tree ferns and majestic podocarps erupting far above the canopy, adorned with their characteristic epiphytes.
Less than 1.5 km into our walk, while zig-zagging down a leaf-litter strewn bank, we came across the first potential pitfall Mon had described in her notes. She wrote: “The first to watch for is a piece of pink tape on your left, which will lead you to a switchback path to the creek. I went straight ahead across a slip which wasted 5 minutes.”
We came across a stretch of track with conflicting orange markers, when one of our group noticed some pink tape conspicuously tied to a tree branch on our left. After some deliberation, we decided to head down the bank and shortly beyond there were large orange triangles beckoning us to the track across a stream. Two sizeable slips flanked the gully – the first signs of the lasting storm damage.
We continued along the sharply undulating track, pausing at hilltops for a breather every so often. Occasionally the path dropped down to the river, before climbing back up and sidling around the hillside. We traversed a couple of crumbly slips carefully, following the precarious lip carved out by those crossing before us. As Monique rightly pointed out in her notes: “There are some narrow edges and this wouldn’t be a good trip if you are afraid of heights.” Sound advice, from experience!
At around 3.5 km into our walk, the track presented us with with another conundrum – a wide slip with no orange triangle in sight. It looked as though some trampers had opted to scale straight up the scree and onto a step, continuing up and around the top of the slip. We passed under an arch of vegetation on the right of the slip to bypass a scramble up the loose gravel. By doing this, we only needed to then shimmy across the very top of the slip and go up the step to get to stabler ground. In hindsight, this was clearly the second of Mon’s riddles: “There is a huge slip which has a steep track on edge and a big step at the top. Looks much hairier on the way back.” We’d kept that in mind for the next day…
We continued on, hugging a rock face and hopping a creek. We stepped through and around boggy patches, finding ourselves more consistently on the flat and level with the river. We took advantage of this to scout out a blissfully sunny spot right on the riverbank for a lunch stop. By this point we had nearly reached the hut (less than 1 km away) and identified that we’d be crossing over three more streams before reaching our destination.
Now on the final stretch, we had no more hiccups finding the route. Mon’s third clue stated that we would “come to a tree stump with a marker on it”. Yet none of us noticed any particular stump denoting an alternative path. Although we skipped out on the stump (which likely housed a gnome that required payment for the right to pass) we soon crossed over a Nikau fern trunk, which acted as a bridge over the final stream before Iron Gates Hut.
The Hut seemingly popped into view as we entered a grassy clearing. The new Iron Gates Hut was built in 2019 with help from the NZ Defence Force. Like the Alice Nash Memorial Lodge, the modernised Iron Gates Hut has a generous deck with an outside tap at one end, a wood-burner and a decent sized floor plan. We were the first to arrive for the day at close to 1pm. We each staked a claim to one of the ten bunks and hung up our wet gear.
The river runs just next to the hut, and the hut’s intentions book entries mention Whio (including young whio) being sighted very close-by. The constant trapping efforts of the Ruahine Whio Protectors will have had a significant role in the success of these birds. Its members’ activities are a noticeable presence in the Hut’s intentions book (alongside notes from others monitoring the various traplines).
Owing to the time of year, the sun did not hit the Hut, or the Hut surroundings, in the shaded valley at all. Feeling the chill, Kirsten and India ferried logs in from the woodshed, gathered more kindling and got the fire going. The unfortunate dampness of the logs seriously hampered the fire. But with time and tenacity the pair’s combined efforts eventually it going, finally providing some much appreciated warmth!
Meanwhile, with so much time left in the day to relax, some of our group held an inaugural meeting for the unofficial WTMC Book Club. The agenda for the meeting? – settle yourself somewhere in the wilderness and become engrossed in some good reading material. No set quorum.
The afternoon trickled on, and we were joined by two other trampers, neatly filling up the hut for the night.
Our group came back together for a shared meal of the WTMC Cookbook’s Carrot and Chickpea Tagine with couscous recipe. We prepared 8 very generous servings – there were still decent leftovers even after sharing it with our two other companions.
We decided that we would still make the shared dessert we had planned – Bushcraft Chocolate crackles! We pooled the ingredients we had brought along for the dessert:
Coconut oil? (A substitute for Kremelta in the recipe) Check.
Rice bubbles? Check.
Cocoa powder? Check.
Desiccated coconut? Check.
Powdered Sugar?
…
Who was bringing the powdered sugar again…?
The answer: Nobody. In an unfortunate lapse of concentration, the sugar was missed off the list of items to bring. The one ingredient that would make our dessert a dessert was absent, and we were a long way from a dairy.
We opted to put in every effort to make up for the mishap. Knowing that milk powder contains sugar, we used milk powder as a substitute. It was also thought that adding extra cocoa powder might salvage the flavour. The concoction was mixed, pressed into a plastic container and left out in the cold. After allowing an hour for the mixture to set, we learned that nothing we had at hand salvaged our dessert plans.
Courageous taste-testers were left without words, clearly finding the resulting rice bubble-encrusted brick indescribable. Finding some clarity, Claire observed that the confection had ‘savoury notes’. Others, such as Karen, uncompromisingly condemned the snack with the flair of a Masterchef judge, providing the excuse that she had already cleaned her teeth.
At some point the abomination was suggested as a breakfast option. The question was raised whether there would be any leftovers.
“Oh, there’ll be leftovers,” Karen asserted with confidence.
To nobody’s great surprise, she was right. Come the next morning, no-one particularly fancied any for breakfast after all, so we had no choice but to carry it out.
Day 3
Frosty grass crunched underfoot as we set out, backtracking along the same route we had taken the previous day.
At one early break stop, India was seen examining what at first looked like an interesting rock, but turned out to be a large slab of the failed chocolate crackle.
The redeeming factors of the coconut-oil-laden mess of our dessert were the lessons learned along the way, as well as the extraordinary mileage it had as a source of hilarity. That was something that a successful Bushcraft Chocolate crackle could never provide.
Our 7+ km walk to Iron Gates Hut on Saturday had taken us just over 4 hours (including breaks) – in line with DOC’s estimated time. Now familiar with the track and all the tripping hazards (minus the mysterious stump), we tackled it backwards in 3 1/2 hours. And Mon was right – that big slip did look much hairier on the way back. But we all got down it in one piece! However, if faced with that big slip in the rain, you can understand why some folks would prefer to play it safe (instead of scrambling around on the clay).
We were back at Alice Nash Memorial Lodge by midday. It was a glorious place to stop for an extended lunch, soaking up the sun, before we needed to head back up to the van. Both groups were expected to be back at the van by 2pm, so we were not in too much of a hurry.
Eventually we slung on our packs and headed up the track we had taken on Friday night, seeing our surroundings for the first time. The river was clogged with fallen trees far below the bridge we had crossed. The sunlit peaks of the Ruahine Ranges now behind us.
Once reunited with the MF cohort, we hit the road and drove back down to Wellington. We had a snack stop in Shannon along the way – ensuring no-one would need to eat the chocolate crackle out of desperation.