Day 6
15 images Created 19 May 2019
Day six on the track dawned grey and although not raining, the threat would hang around all day and cast a gloom over the track. After our usual steady start, we were on the trail by 9am for what would be a pretty long day of 15km plus, including side trips to D’Alton, Fergusson and Hartnett Falls and a 2km climb to the Du Cane Gap before a final downhill into Burt Nicholls hut.
Not long out of Kia Ora, we came to the historic Du Cane Hut, built by Paddy Hartnett in 1910 where he lived and worked as a trapper and mountain guide with his wife Lucy. The hut was restored in the 1990’s and provides only emergency accommodation now. We then entered some faery forest, full of green and damp and boggy, rooty trail and soon reached the first of our side trips to D’Alton and Fergusson Falls. With all of the recent rain, the falls were running hard and were therefore not easy to approach but they were lovely and certainly worth the diversion. Back on the main trail we continued further on until we reached the track to Hartnett Falls, by far the largest of all of the falls and a 1.5km round trip from the main trail to visit. It seemed most people had skipped one or all of the falls and we were the last on the gloomy trail into Burt Nicholls Hut.
The slog up to the Du Cane Gap was through some very uninspiring scrub and on trails that took us back to day three and the slog to Frog Flats. And to top off the misery it had started to rain. Again, we entered auto-pilot, survival mode with nothing to see but our feet making one muddy step after another.
Mercifully the hut arrived in view around 3pm and it turned out to be a very modern and large hut that would host only a very small group of nine of us for the night. The hut has three large bedrooms that have platforms sleeping 12 in each (six top and six bottom) and we had a whole room and top platform to ourselves. Otherwise the hut seemed to have quite a bit of wasted space, but it was warm and pleasant and in the rain provided a dry place to again gather ourselves up. The hut looked directly across at the Du Cane Range which includes the Acropolis – one of the side trips from our destination at Pine Valley, tomorrow.
The night passed, dinner was consumed and we retired to our beds to listen to the wind and rain on the tin roof of the hut.
(Day 6: 15.5km, 6.5hrs, ascent 600m, descent 600m)
Not long out of Kia Ora, we came to the historic Du Cane Hut, built by Paddy Hartnett in 1910 where he lived and worked as a trapper and mountain guide with his wife Lucy. The hut was restored in the 1990’s and provides only emergency accommodation now. We then entered some faery forest, full of green and damp and boggy, rooty trail and soon reached the first of our side trips to D’Alton and Fergusson Falls. With all of the recent rain, the falls were running hard and were therefore not easy to approach but they were lovely and certainly worth the diversion. Back on the main trail we continued further on until we reached the track to Hartnett Falls, by far the largest of all of the falls and a 1.5km round trip from the main trail to visit. It seemed most people had skipped one or all of the falls and we were the last on the gloomy trail into Burt Nicholls Hut.
The slog up to the Du Cane Gap was through some very uninspiring scrub and on trails that took us back to day three and the slog to Frog Flats. And to top off the misery it had started to rain. Again, we entered auto-pilot, survival mode with nothing to see but our feet making one muddy step after another.
Mercifully the hut arrived in view around 3pm and it turned out to be a very modern and large hut that would host only a very small group of nine of us for the night. The hut has three large bedrooms that have platforms sleeping 12 in each (six top and six bottom) and we had a whole room and top platform to ourselves. Otherwise the hut seemed to have quite a bit of wasted space, but it was warm and pleasant and in the rain provided a dry place to again gather ourselves up. The hut looked directly across at the Du Cane Range which includes the Acropolis – one of the side trips from our destination at Pine Valley, tomorrow.
The night passed, dinner was consumed and we retired to our beds to listen to the wind and rain on the tin roof of the hut.
(Day 6: 15.5km, 6.5hrs, ascent 600m, descent 600m)
