Reading the Routeburn Like a Falling Glass
Nor'wester twenty-five knots, veering nor'east on the sea breeze by afternoon, tide making at Akaroa Heads six-forty that morning. That's the day I picked to be six hundred kilometres from my boat, walking uphill instead.
Akaroa, Neap Tide, Two Days Off the Boat
Wind was nor'west ten to fifteen at the wharf that Thursday, dropping to nothing by dark, tide low at five and making all morning. That's a soft forecast, the kind that lets you leave a boat on its mooring without checking the lines twice.
Akaroa's a working harbour if you know where to look, though the cruise ships anchoring off the heads twice a week would have you think otherwise. Behind the ice cream shops and the day-trip catamarans there are still six boats running craypots and setting for blue cod out of here, mine included, a 9.2 metre steel hull called Kotare I've skippered four seasons now. Tourist wharf gets the photos. Round past the fuel dock, the town wharf's where the real work ties up, and nobody down there takes a picture of the diesel drums.
I booked the Routeburn Great Walk huts back in September, the way you have to, five months out, before I had the faintest idea what my October roster would look like. Charter work doesn't hand out a schedule that far ahead. It hands out a boat, some paying fishermen, and a weather window, and you fit your life around whichever one shows up first. This trip only happened because a low parked itself over the Tasman for four days straight and cancelled two charters I'd already banked the deposit on. Their loss put me on the road to Queenstown by nine that night.
Six hundred kilometres of driving to walk forty, and the low that gave me the days off was already filling in behind me. I gave it until Sunday afternoon before it caught up with the Divide.
Two hut nights, booked five months blind
Glenorchy to Routeburn Flats, Nor'wester Building
Beech forest on the lower track, an hour or so above Routeburn Shelter.
Cloud base at twelve hundred metres by the time I hit Glenorchy, wind still nor'west and starting to mean it, that thick warm push that tells you a front's stacking up against the Alps somewhere you can't see yet.
Glenorchy calls itself the gateway and it plays the part, paddleboards racked outside the general store, a jet boat idling at the jetty for the tourist run up the Dart. Nice enough wharf. Nobody's hauling pots off it. I've got no problem with a harbour that's gone over to tourism entirely, Akaroa's half that way itself, I just like to know which one I'm looking at before I decide what it's worth.
Track starts at the shelter, thirty-odd minutes past Glenorchy on gravel, and drops straight into beech forest so old the trunks have their own weather. Somebody on the wharf last week told me you never take a banana on the boat, bad luck, sinks the catch. It's not luck. Bananas off-gas ethylene fast enough to rot everything else in the chiller bin a day quicker, and the old banana clippers ran such tight schedules that any mechanical trouble near one got blamed on the fruit instead of the engineer. Left mine at home anyway. No sense arguing with eighty years of deckhands over a piece of fruit.
Routeburn Flats Hut sleeps twenty, has a warden through the season checking hut tickets against the DOC booking system, and sits on a river flat with the Route Burn running milky grey with glacial flour on one side. I got there by four, wet through the shoulders from bush drip rather than rain, which is its own kind of soaked.
Warden said the front was still six hours out, maybe eight. I've had skippers give me better odds with worse instruments.
Harris Saddle, Front Coming Through by Four
Wind swung sou'west overnight and came up the valley at a genuine thirty knots by seven, the kind of number that would have me checking the barometer twice and calling round for a second opinion if I were still on the water.
Above the bushline the track breaks out onto open tussock, dry and gold and moving in long waves each time a gust came through, the tops of the range still holding last winter's snow in the gut lines where the sun doesn't reach. I read that slope the way I'd read a channel marker, current one way, wind against it, standing waves where the two disagree. Up here it was just wind against rock, but the tells were the same.
Lake Harris sits right on the saddle, a tarn the colour of gunmetal under cloud, ringed by peaks that were still catching morning light while the water stayed in shadow. The saddle itself is the boundary between Fiordland and Mount Aspiring National Park, one step either side of a cairn, and it's the one place on the whole track where the weather off both coasts can reach you at once.
Old boats used to say never call a passage flat till you're tied up at the other wharf. Same rule crossing a saddle. I gave us until early afternoon before that sou'west turned to actual rain, and I wasn't wrong by much.
Above the bushline, climbing toward Harris Saddle.
The saddle held two extra hours of weather I never trusted.
Routeburn Falls Hut, Falling Glass
Barometer dropping, if I'd had one on me, wind still sou'west and cloud down to the hut roof by three, the falls themselves running loud enough to hear from the track twenty minutes out.
Deckhand's notes
Hut tickets in Great Walk season (Oct-Apr) lock a specific date on the DOC booking system, no swapping once you're on the water and the weather doesn't cooperate.
A nor'wester that keeps a charter boat tied up on the East Coast often clears the Alps two days later, worth checking both forecasts before you commit the days off.
Pack for the sou'west change on the tops even if you left the harbour in a t-shirt. The saddle doesn't care what the water was doing.
Routeburn Falls Hut sits on a rock shelf above the valley, ninety-odd bunks split across two buildings, gas cookers, a ranger checking hut tickets at the door same as every DOC Great Walk hut on this track. Red iron roof, built to take weather straight off the Tasman with nothing between here and the sea to slow it down. From the deck you can watch the falls drop two hundred metres off the range behind, and watch the cloud come down to meet them, which it did about twenty minutes after I got my boots off.
Rain set in properly overnight and didn't let up till Glenorchy the next afternoon, which meant a wet drive out and a phone full of missed calls from a bloke wanting to charter Kotare for the Friday that had already gone. I told him Saturday, weather permitting. It wasn't. ■
