Te Araroa Trail – Day 35

Start: Arthur’s Pass
Finish: Arthur’s Pass
Distance: 24km

Thanks to the kindness of Bill from The Sanctuary, where we were staying, we were able to do this Goat Pass section as a day walk without our heavy packs. So we boarded his shuttle at 7am and headed out to Morrisons Footbridge.

After crossing the bridge we followed the sparsely marked track, alternating between the forest and the riverbed, crossing the river whenever needed. I knew that sometimes these river crossings can be an issue as the river level fluctuates but today it was fine, fast in some places but never higher than our knees.

After a few hours we reached Upper Deception Hut where we stopped for a quick break before starting the difficult section up to Goat Pass. We were climbing up boulders taller than me, but it definitely wasn’t as bad as people had made it out to be. We had been under the impression we would be rock scrambling for kilometres on end, and sure there were some difficult bits but it wasn’t constant.

We reached Goat Pass Hut and retreated inside for some lunch. I was a bit concerned about the weather as it was quite windy and the grey clouds were getting closer and closer but thankfully it hadn’t rained yet.

We set off again and the track soon turned into boardwalk which was a nice change from the slow-going rocks.

We passed a couple of beautiful waterfalls while all the trail runners passed us. This route is the route for Coast to Coast, and being a Saturday everyone was out training. In total we had 53 runners pass us today.