Day 44 - Locke Stream Hut to Hurunui # 3 Hut, 14.5km, 5 hours

"Mice, mice in the night" might not have the same fear factor as "Drums, drums in the deep" but did for the poor SOBO we were sharing the hut with last night. A full on scream followed by a series of high pitched whimpers woke me. Going to investigate I found that a mouse had got in her pack.  Unpacking for her, I shooed the mouse (as in waved it away, not squashed it with a boot - while this is also a viable option I had good reason to suspect this walker was a vegan and might not appreciate the gesture), and placed her pack safely up on a table. Given it's now autumn and getting cooler the recent influx of mice into the huts is not unexpected. With my preference for tramping in colder months I fairly commonly have them running over my sleeping bag in the night. I've got some good mouse stories...

The day started with crossing a very new, and very long swing bridge. It seemed a little extraneous to me, the river was easily fordable and if it's not then you probably shouldn't be going over Harper's Pass anyway. In any case, being a new(ish) bridge I appreciated not having to worry about snagging my tent on the bedraggled wire that tends to go with all other swingbridges.

There was also the interesting spectacle of a subterranean stream emerging from a scree slope near the valley floor, leaving me to speculate as to whether this had been a recent landslide with the scree still loose enough to allow the stream to run inside it.
Harper's Pass has phenomenal views into the upper Hurunui River, and especially down the long (and largely straight) Taramakau. With the weather unimproved from the day before we were not going to enjoy any of those larger views however...

...but still got to enjoy the power and beauty of the upper Taramakau as it dwindled to a stream near the pass.

I was feeling pretty cold so didn't hang around long on the pass itself, just stopping for the obligatory photo.

This led me onto a piece of track I'd really been looking forward to. I remember the couple of kilometres between the Pass and Harper's Pass Biv as exceedingly beautiful. In this case my memory wasn't shielded behind rose tinted glasses. It is just as beautiful as I remembered it; I enjoyed every second of the descent.

All too soon we were at the tiny 2 man bivvy for an early lunch. Neil and I squeezed ourselves in away from the drizzly conditions to dry off and warm and feed up.

In a piece of absurd timing the first significant group of SOBOs we had seen in weeks, 5 of them, turned up while we were lunching. It's somewhat of an understatement to say the bivvy was overfull. We left them to it and continued down valley.


Below the bivvy was the worst piece of track I've yet seen on trail. A 6 or 7 meter high bank, perhaps 10 metres across and pitched at more than 45° with no discernible safe route across. I wasn't too subtle in my approach, attempting a controlled slide, which quickly became an uncontrolled slide. I was fortunate to get to the bottom with nothing ripped or injured.
Neil, being a rock climber, had a bit more finesse and was able to pick a way across the top then down climb an easier section.


Unwilling to trust the track further we took to the Hurunui River bed for some easy travel, stopping at Cameron's Hut for afternoon tea and some amusement with a particularly brave mouse...


Before calling the day off at our now customary mid afternoon time when we reached Hurunui # 3 Hut, roughly midway between the Pass and Lake Sumner.