The Routeburn Track

Hey everybody,

Sorry it has taken me so long to get another post out. School has been crazy lately, and I just finished the second of two, 25 page papers due in the last week... I've been busy. The computer situation didn't help either, but all seems to be ironed out and back to normal, so it's time for a new entry.

This past weekend was the first chance I've had to get out in a while, and I wasn't about to waste it, so my car-mates and I headed past Queenstown to the trailhead of the Routeburn Track this past Friday, the 14th of May.

A little history lesson on the Routeburn to give you all an understanding of what this trip was about... The Routeburn Track was the first thing I saw about New Zealand, in a magazine article about ten years ago. It looked unbelievable, and really sparked my desire to come to NZ. In short, the Routeburn is, in many ways, THE reason why I'm here today. It's the trip that started it all.

With these sort of expectations and all my years of waiting and imagining the views and hiking, I was only setting myself up for disappointment when it came time to actually tackle the trek, right?

Wrong. Very, very wrong. This is the first time I have actually been overwhelmed in New Zealand. It was especially powerful because of the fact that I did have such high hopes for the trip, and yet it still managed to blow me away. There are really no words to describe the trip, what I saw, what I felt, and what I still feel, and the pictures I will post here do not even come close to doing it justice. With this in mind, I'm not even going to try to tell you how awesome it is, because I simply can't. Instead, I'm posting some of my favorite pictures and I'll tell you about the track itself, and how we hiked it.

The Routeburn is a 32 kilometer track running from just outside of Glenorchy to The Divide, in between Te Anau and Milford Sound. The track is a "Great Walk", meaning it gets a ton of traffic and operates on a reservation system during the high season. This is why I  have waited so long to hike it, and it turned out to be a good decision because the trail was almost empty and we didn't have to sign in beforehand. Here is a map of the Routeburn. It's a little hard to read, but it's the best I could do.

Day 1 was Saturday, and took us from the Routeburn trailhead on the Glenorchy side of the track, up to Routeburn falls, and all the way up and over the alpine crossing at a place called Harris Saddle, finally descending to Lake Mackenzie that night, totaling about 20 kilometers and 8 hours of hiking. This is a long day given the elevation gain and loss involved, and at the end, I slept from 6:30 that evening to 8 the next morning.

Day 2 took us back up from Lake Mackenzie to the high alpine area of Harris Saddle once again. We couldn't hike the trail as a straight shot because we had to get back to our car on the Glenorchy side of the mountains. This gave us a chance to slow down and do a side trip to Conical Hill, up from harris saddle, where views of mountains stretched to the fiords and Tasman sea. We ended up hiking down from the alpine zone, past the Routeburn Falls and down to the Routeburn Flats for the second night.

Day 3 was a short hike back to the car, and we were able to make our way back to Dunedin through Queenstown, stopping for burgers and visiting Arrowtown, a small gold-rush town in the mountains where the fall colors apparently reach their best in the country. I would have to agree. We arrived back in Dunedin around 6PM on Monday.

Getting to hike the Routeburn (basically twice) has been the highlight of my trip, and I really doubt it will be surpassed. I'm down to a month left in New Zealand now, and classes end in two weeks. I should have some time to travel before finals, perhaps finally getting down to Doubtful Sound. I also have an All Blacks game to look forward to. I can't wait to get home though.

Alright, thanks everybody, I will be making another post relatively soon covering some of the other things I have done in and around Dunedin, as I've spent so much time here lately.

Jake