1 – 2 December 2025

Many people are no doubt familiar with the trip into Howletts Hut, it being one of the hardest trips the club does regularly as we take bits and pieces up for hut maintenance or to comply with some new DOC rules and regulations. This time we thankfully didn’t need to take anything extra with us, we were just visiting for the first time since the team reclad the hut earlier in the year.  

One group had already gone in the previous Friday with plans on finishing off bits of leftover work, while my group contained entirely newer members who would be completing the climb for the first time. As we approached the Daphne Hut carpark off Kashmir Road the first day was already promising to be miserable. After parking the van we were surrounded by low cloud and mist meaning you were lucky to see 50 meters, along with on and off drizzle meant the scrub that covers the track was wet. 

It took us nearly 2 and half hours to climb to the top of the first hill from the Car park, a number of fallen trees over the track hadn’t helped, at this point I wasn’t sure if we would be able to make it up to Howletts, given the time it had taken us to climb the first 400 meters, but figured would see how things were going when we got to Daphne Hut. Going up the Tukituki river to Daphne was also fairly slow going, the river was very cold but thankfully outside of a couple of sections the current wasn’t strong and it never got above my knees (but no doubt it was less fun for our shorter members). 

We arrived at Daphne Hut just after 1 pm, the trip so far had taken a bit over 4 and half hours. We stopped at Daphne for Hut for lunch, and while the weather wasn’t nice the mist had at least lifted. At this point I still wasn’t sure if we should continue onwards to Howletts hut, knowing we had the steep 700 meter climb ahead of us, which I was thinking could potentially take over 4 hours based on our pace so far. The others however were all keen to give it a go. 

We left Daphne to start the climb at 1:45pm, so if it took as long to climb as I was thinking it might, it would be a rather later arrival to the hut than ideal for our group. This was the first time the 3 others climbed the Daphne spur, but they did remarkably well. We stopped a few times on the way up on the slightly flatter sections for short breaks, but they were determined to keep going. As we climbed upwards we ended up back in the Mist, once we broke out of the tree line it was very thick with visibility at about 10 meters. 

We finally arrived at Howletts Hut at 4:40pm, it had only taken us 3 hours to complete the climb faster than I had expected us to manage, and were greeted by a nice warm welcome thanks to the group who had arrived the previous day already having the fire already going and a billy boiling. The next morning the weather had changed completely, the mist had disappeared thanks to strong winds. We briefly considered trying to go out across the tops but decided it wouldn’t be worth the risk due to the strong cold wind.    

As we headed back down toward Daphne we were greeted with the views we missed out the previous day, and once we were sheltered from the wind the temperature started to climb. Thankfully we had a relaxed trip back out, the river was still cold but thankfully was now just refreshing as the temperature had climbed to 20 degrees. We stopped for a snack just before we started the slow and steady climb back up the final hill, this time everyone knew what to expect. We finally arrived back at the Van at 2pm, barely a cloud in the sky, a complete contrast to when we arrived the previous day.

Party: Nic W, Constanze H, Minh N, Andrea F.