Peel Range Roaming

The weather was perfect so Brendan took Friday afternoon off work and we drove up the Cobb Valley. A short 15 minute walk brought us to our accommodation for the night: the cosy 4-bunk Myttons Hut. This wee hut, discarded by DOC in 1994 and now maintained by Friends of Mytton Hut, turned out to be one of our favourite huts we have ever stayed at. A couple of beech trees which had been felled beside the hut provided ample firewood.

Saturday was blue skies and hardly a puff of wind. An easy hour up the track to Peel Ridge then we turned right and continued up the ridge to Mt Peel, which turned out to be easier than it looked. Munching our sandwiches on the summit we decided to make the most of the amazing weather and continue exploring Peel Ridge (the opportunity was too ap-peel-ing to pass up). Dropping off the back of Mt Peel what looked like a nice runnable 150m high scree slope turned out to be semi-frozen and required care to negotiate. We carried on 3.5km northwest along the tops hoping we might be able to drop down into the Cobb near Chaffeys Hut. It was incredible gazing out over Kahurangi and seeing ridge after ridge in the distance. Too much country to explore! Just past Mt Mytton the ridge got pretty gnarly so it would have taken a lot of time and effort to get any further (although it looked possible) so we opted to save the route for a future adventure.

Instead we turned around and headed back to Balloon Hut, which had been our original destination for the night. To our dismay this meant retracing our steps back up the 150m scree slope to Mt Peel, which by this time had thawed out. From Mt Peel it was an easy amble along the ridge southeast of Lake Peel to pick up the track to Balloon Hut. We had successfully managed to make the most of being out on the tops in such glorious weather, extending a 8.5km 3 hour trip into a solid 17+km over 7 hours.

The stars were brilliant when we went to bed but by morning the hut was in the cloud, and we woke up to a dusting of snow falling and a strong icy southeasterly wind. It was a cold, windy walk back past Lake Peel, where we had an obligatory stop to attempt to break the skin of ice. Despite heaving the biggest rocks he could find Brendan only managed to crack the ice at the very outlet of the lake, which proved to be over an inch thick!

As we descended through the beech forest to the Cobb Valley the bellbird song gradually increased until the air was filled with golden notes, reaching a crescendo five minutes above Myttons Hut. I don't think I've ever heard such a chorus in the middle of the day on mainland New Zealand! That is yet one more reason why Kahurangi is my favourite national park.