Mount Wellington has many hidden secrets. We’ve discovered a few of these over the years, but today we visited two hidden treasures we’d not yet been to and have been meaning to visit for years: two mountain huts. As you might know from some of our past walks, there are some mountain huts that are well known, on main tracks, and shown on maps. The huts we headed to today aren’t, so this post has no map and none of the photos are geocoded.
We had an idea of where we might be able to pick up a footpad, so headed there. We figured that if it wasn’t a track, it was at least a convenient spot to bush-bash from. It turned out that soon it became hard to tell what might be a faint human track, what might be a wallaby track, and what might just be a few boulders that happened to be lined up and were large enough so no shrubs could grow up. So we just bush bashed. This entailed either scrambling up or down boulders or trying to find footing between shrubs. If trying to find non-boulder footing, it was often hard to tell what might be a rock and what might just be emptiness you could jam a foot into. But it wasn’t too bad; we were able to get on.
And I certainly didn’t want to stop. One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post was that if we paused, for some reason biting flies kept wanting to be my friend. They didn’t want to play with Scott, just me. And today the phenomenon continued. Oh joy.
In any case, after a while we’d bashed our way to our first destination. I don’t think this is the approach we were meant to take, but we came down a cliff to a hut. All was in good order: mattresses and blankets were hanging inside to air, pots and pans were hanging above the fireplace, and candles and a torch were scattered about. This is why the location of these huts is so secretive; no one wants vandals to attack. These huts are small shacks built and maintained by the community.
We’d been told there’s no direct track from the first hut we were visiting to the second, so we felt totally justified in bush-bashing our way there. Is there any other way? As we had on the first leg of our journey we disturbed a billion spider webs strung between trees, climb up and over boulders, and occasionally even remembered to pause and take in the views.
We approached the second hut from above too (interesting habit), shimmying down a rock crevice towards it. It was actually easier coming up or down boulders than trying to find ‘flatter’ ground. Flatter ground had lots of vegetation and lots of spots to catch a foot or twist an ankle, whereas the boulders are made of dolorite. The dolorite’s great to climb/walk on. Hard and not crumbly at all, and enough roughness on the surface that walking boots just seem to stick to it. After making our way down to the hut and writing of our visit in the log book, we made our way out. This time we actually found and kept to a track, so we were back out of the bush fairly quickly. I’m glad we finally made it to these hidden spots.
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