Day 90 - side trip
St Arnaud —-> Angelus hut 21km
Today we were going off the TA trail. Clearly not content with the 3000 odd km we were already doing, why not add more! Angelus hut was supposed to be a stunningly beautiful hut right up in the mountains of the Nelson Lakes. The track to get there took you along the Robert Ridgeline which was lauded as one of the best hikes in the area. It wasn’t included on the TA as it’s an uber popular hut that usually requires booking months in advance. With the bad weather due to hit us later in the afternoon and stick around for a couple of days, we took advantage of the hut cancellations, decided to peg it up there and hunker down there for a couple of nights. Insanely cheaper than staying in St Arnaud and hopefully a heck lot more beautiful than the inside of a hotel room.
We were off by 7.15am and walking the 9km along the road to the Mt Robert car park where the track to Angelus hut started.
It was pretty easy going until the road turned upwards. Our packs heavy with ten days worth of food, we powered up as quick as we could, annoyed it was so steep and we hadn’t even gotten to the trailhead yet.
The route to Angelus started with the Pinchgut Track. Up an (even more) incredibly steep hill, we were huffing and puffing, pausing for breath at the end of every switchback. We looked out over Lake Rotoiti and hoped the menacing clouds hanging over it would stay well over there for the next few hours.
A plane was dust cropping over nearby fields. As we climbed higher up the track and re-emerged from the forest we weren’t sure whether we were in cloud, or dust.
The first few times it was dust, until it was definitely cloud.
We’d walked in our fair share of cloud by this point, even scary tourist signs as we reached the start of the Robert Ridge track didn’t put us off.
By midday, we’d passed eight people, all of whom had stayed at Angelus hut the night before. All of them desperately told us of the weather front coming in, as if we wouldn’t know. One woman even told us we were crazy for walking in there now. We weren’t. It was cloud, there was only a breath of wind.
By 12.30pm, maybe just as an FU to all the worriers, blue sky had appeared. The cloud started to lift showing us exactly why this ridge was so revered.
We took the chance for a quick lunch whilst we watched the clouds come and go, revealing incredible mossy rock formations and little blue lakes amongst the mountain peaks.
The walk across the ridge was relatively easy, well formed rock paths mixed in with sections of large boulder hopping.
The clouds were adding a real mystery to the ridgeline, I was starting to be really thankful they were there, having the views reveal themselves to us in this way was really magical.
After a final scramble around some rather pointy rock faces, we reached the end of the ridgeline overlooking Lake Angelus and saw the hut sitting neatly on its shoreline.
It didn’t look real, this fully man made structure sat right in the middle of utter beauty - it was one of the most astonishing views I’d seen so far.
The clouds cleared even more as we descended to the hut. By the time we were outside, they had almost gone from the mountain peaks completely.
Excited that we had another day to relax tomorrow, we settled into the hut chatting to the few other people who’d also made the trek up. It was freezing, but once they (thank you other hut-peeps) got the fire going, we were nice and toasty.
