2nd-3rd May 2009: Mount Pirongia

The tramping tracks in Pirongia Forest Park are some of the most challenging we have walked. Our two-day tramp up Mount Pirongia and back took in two long ridges, each with a series of small steep-sided tops, and there were a fair few scrambles. Scrabbling up and down rocks is made harder if you have a 10-15kg pack on your back!

We walked up the mountain from Grey Road via Ruapane and Tirohanga Tracks, returning on Mahaukura Track, and spent the night at Pahautea Hut, a compact 6-bunk building near the 959m summit of Mount Pirongia. The last to arrive, barely before sunset, we were lucky to find exactly two beds left.

Pahautea Hut

The other beds were taken up by a very talkative homeless bird photographer who was spending a week in the hut; a couple of hunters, complete with orange camo shirts (deer can't see orange, but other hunters can); and a keen young traffic light engineer who is determinedly taking up tramping after going on an Outward Bound course earlier this year.

One of the great things about staying in the huts is that we meet people we never normally would. Sharing a single room with no heating or lighting (we were lucky someone had left a couple of candles), we chatted for a couple of hours after dark before fleeing to our sleeping bags for warmth at 9pm. All our companions were tradespeople who do manual, outdoor work, and inhabit a world I have little exposure to. It brought home to me how narrow my experience is. But then again, they have as little idea about my life as I do about theirs.

The other contrast we encountered was one we have often seen: the variety of walkers we meet. In the hut we were probably the least experienced in the group. Four punishing hours from the summit and one hour from the car park, the track got wide and easy and suddenly was busy with young families and older couples, looking faintly awed at our muddied legs and big backpacks.