Hiking the Tararua Southern Crossing in 10 hours

2017-12-23

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In my continuous attempts at self-oneupsmanship, I formulated a plan in the past month to take advantage of the abnormally dry & stable November & December weather Wellington has been experiencing to hike the Tararua Southern Crossing, a nominal 32km walk stretching from Kaitoke to Otaki Forks on the western side of the range, heading in a northwest direction. Normally this is completed in 2-3 days as a multi-day hike, but it can be turned into a single knee-pain-inducing endeavour with some planning and an early start.

Accompanying me on this walk was my daypack, my running shoes, and my Apple Watch — which would record the workout. To keep the weight on my shoulders to a minimum, I packed the following:

Sunscreen.

Drink: 1x 750mL Powerade Zero, 1x 1L water bottle.

Food: 2 eggs, 2 nectarines, 1 snickers bar, & a handful of strawberries.

Wind jacket, in case it all turned sour.

AirPods, which I did not use.

iPhone (loaded with Topo50 maps).

Huawei 13000mAh external battery, to keep iPhone charged.

Sony α7r ii with 24-240mm zoom & 18mm prime lenses + polarizing filters.

Food & drink values should be considered a bare minimum. If you tend to need a lot of water (or would prefer not to get headaches), take more. You can rely on the water supplies at Alpha Hut, Kime Hut, & Field Hut (indeed, there was cold, fresh water at the former), but you run the risk of the huts running out — especially considering we’ve had 40 days with little to no rain — and given the greater chance of water contamination, you may prefer to avoid these water sources.

The external battery is an optional extra, but provides some peace of mind, especially if you aren’t carrying a dedicated GPS or beacon locator unit. For most of the walk there is cellular coverage which is surprisingly strong. Additionally, to save on the watch battery life, the device will offload GPS data collection to the iPhone — my suspicion is that Apple additionally implements a more resource-intensive GPS data ingestion policy if iPhone has significant power reserve or is otherwise charging. I’m willing to spare an extra 200 grams to ensure this.

The conditions were predicted to be fine, with early morning cloud dissipating by midday, and a very light southerly breeze. I would later come to be grateful for the high Cirrus that persisted over the track for the entirety of the day.

I set out at 7:24AM from the Kaitoke entrance at the southern end of the Tararuas, hoping to take advantage of the extra elevation to reduce the amount of ascent needed (in reality, your body will hate you after 30km+ regardless of whether you’re climbing or dropping). I chose to start at the now-abandoned older entrance, which is now most decidedly overgrown with gorse and all manner of prickly shrubbery.

The track up to Marchant Ridge is in good condition, but past the Smith Creek track junction, it deteriorates significantly into a labyrinth maze of tree roots and the occasional muddy bog, which must be wrestled with until kilometre 18 at Alpha Hut. As the elevation of the track weaves between 900 and 1100 metres, just below the subalpine transition into tussock, you will at most have short glimpses of surroundings in portions of the bush which have been burnt by lightning strikes and have yet to re-vegetate.

It wasn’t until 11:30AM that I arrived at Alpha Hut. Of course, just to tire you out beforehand, you cross two very steep saddles traversing from Marchant Ridge to the hut before you can have some respite. I didn’t stop generally, excepting for grabbing some drink+food or taking a photo. Despite this, you can never make as much progress as you’d like. My average moving speed was 3.97km/h, well short of my desired 5km/h. If you aren’t tripping over roots, you’ll be fumbling over rocks and climbing up or down tricky banks.

From Alpha at 1361m (4465ft), the track opens up into subalpine tussock as you follow the ridgeline north. The track is more easygoing than wading through an ocean of tree roots, but careful footing is required in along some of the more precipitous ridges. One slowly makes their way across the peaks, from Alpha to Ashton, Atkinson, The Beehives, climbing up to the track high point at Mt Hector, 1529m (5016ft) — 1200 metres of net vertical elevation change from the start. With little to no breeze, the buzzing of flies pervades your sense of hearing, accompanied by the occasional birdsong from the valleys below — eerily quiet. Cirrus lingered in the sky overhead, getting thicker towards Kime, keeping me from the worst of the heat. Navigating the ridgelines from Alpha to Kime took approximately 3 hours. It is very easy to see how this terrain can be fatal in bad weather. This is no place you want to linger.

At Mt Hector stands a memorial cross, dedicated by the Wellington Tramping Clubs to New Zealanders who lost their lives in World War II. Here seemed like a suitable place to make an exception to the “keep on walking” rule and grab some food and rest. After sitting down for a few minutes and letting my body heat be wicked away by the light breeze, it became apparent how remarkably cold it really was, even though most of the region was bathed in sun.

One last struggle up and down the saddle from Hector to Field Peak and the vast majority of the climbing is complete. Of course, 25+ kilometres in, walking hurts regardless of vertical direction. I passed Kime Hut without stopping to check for water or people, and continued on northwards to one of my favorite parts of the hike: Kime to Table Top — a remarkably flat and smooth section of track with expansive ridgeline plains.

From here, it’s 8+ painful kilometres of downhill to Otaki Forks — dropping back down beneath the treeline and into shrubbery quickly is not a pleasant experience. The cooler temperatures of altitude rapidly give way to humid and hot bush which is stifling!

I crossed the Otaki Forks swingbridge at 5:45PM, officially ending my Southern Crossing. Total time taken was 10 hours 21 minutes, of which 9 hours 32 minutes was moving. As expected (shorter, past walks have indicated this), the total track distance was about 10-15% more than expected: 37.92km. My suspicion is that this a combination of factors: higher levels of GPS bounce when under treecover and more accurate traversal readings than official measurements which may have been done as estimates.

2944 active calories.

3739 total calories.

2641m (8664ft) of total elevation gain.

167bpm peak heartrate.

Ivory Towers

How difficult should it be to record my workout on Apple Watch and produce a neat relive.cc visualization for it? Not hard, surely.

Frustratingly, it is still not easy to be a data-oriented person who exercises with this device. Third party applications and the Watch itself do not encourage or even provide the ability to export or import tracklogs in open formats. You’re out of luck if you want to natively export a watch exercise in GPX — the best third party application I’ve found that will do this is RunGap, which you can email to yourself (or, if you pay $2.99, can sync with iCloud Drive) — good app, thoroughly “meh” design. It’d be very nice to have this feature integrated natively.

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There’s definitely potential for Apple to expand into Strava’s as well as Garmin’s domain by offering thoughtful fitness hardware & software design, as well as expanding the social aspects of their current implementation. Activity sharing on the watch seems like a good initial first move that could be expanded into a broader stateless interface that allows friendly competition between friends as well as track & friend discovery. I’d like to see Apple take steps in this direction.

An Addendum

It goes without saying attempting to dayhike the Southern Crossing, or any long walk recommended as a hiking track, should only be attempted if you’re aware of your limits and have experience in subalpine terrain. Please do your research before you go and don’t overestimate yourself.