Central Whirinaki Hut to Mangamate Hut with hundreds of stream crossings

This was a super nice relaxing day with only a four hour walk so the morning was taken super easy for a change. I spent most of the morning sitting down by the river by myself reading my book – so very nice and relaxing even with no sightings of the whio family from the night before.

Julianne and Robin spent the morning sleeping in and recovering from yesterday’s long drive and long 16 walk.

Just after 9am our packs were on and we headed off into the bush.

The first part of the walk was similar to yesterday’s gentle climb up the Whirinaki river, but then we crossed over to the Mangamate Stream to follow it upstream to its source before heading back down another stream to the arrive back at the car tomorrow.

Robin

A robin

But unlike the easy upstream Whirinaki river track this section of the tramp is a lot more challenging with no bridges of any kind, which resulted in lots and lots of water crossings! And very wet feet! Robin has crossed several rivers before but never so many and the first few stream crossings became a great training environment for him.

After a couple of hours of stream crossings he had it all sorted and was crossing at his own pace, nice and safely and at all not worrying about his very wet feet.

And the so called bad weather which was supposed to happen today never appeared through the wind did pick up at different times throughout the day. We saw plenty of birds as well, including more kaka’s and robins. The stream crossings got more progressively easier as we headed upstream and the water volume decreased.

Compared to yesterday’s late arrival were we were expecting to the get to the hut nice and early well before 6pm. So today was an easy walk and in addition this was Robin’s forth day tramping this week and his ability to walk long distances with a pack on has really improved; there was none of this stopping every 5 minutes which he was doing on the first day.

The last 30 minutes involved leaving the stream to head up to the top of a saddle where the Mangamate Hut is located and again I was really impressed with Robin’s tramping. After all day walking with a pack he successfully walked non-stop to the top of the saddle and compared to Robin from the first day this was a great improvement and shows how practice is important.

We arrived at the Mangamate Hut around midafternoon for what was a big surprise!

In the hut were a number of Footprint’ magazine’s, this is the annual tramping magazine from Auckland University’s tramping club. There was one copy going back to 1974 and the most recent being 2015 so quite a range. What was really fascinating was copies from ‘1997’ and ‘1998 & 1999 combined’ which are the years that I happened to have been in the Auckland Uni tramping club. There were several tramping reports which mentioned me and one large photo of a tramp I did in Taranaki with the club back in the late 1990’s. It was so cool to reminisce and think back to those early tramping days while in the middle of a tramp! And to make it extra special I was able to share these early tramping experiences with Robin and Julianne, interestingly all my tramping clothes and my pack are the same ones I am still using today – great Macpac equipment.

Can you spot a much younger Adam?

There was a Canadian couple who were also staying up at the Mangamate Hut as well which is normally a shame as we do like to have DOC hut’s to ourselves but they were very friendly as most people are when tramping and they had a tent so they actually weren’t in the physical hut itself. They had visited the area lots and stayed all the DOC huts in the area so they were a great source of information.