New Zealand Experience: Our Routeburn experience: Water, floods and everything else that could go wrong
On a trip to tramp the Routeburn and Greenstone tracks 10 of us left Glenorchy on Nov 13 1999 little known to us what was in front of us, being caught in one of the worst floods in 120 years.
We caught the bus from Glenorchy to the start of the Routeburn in brilliant sunshine, our first night being the Routeburn Falls hut. Arrived in lovely fine weather. We read the DOC weather report in the hut and saw that the weather was meant to turn rough the next day.
So preparing for that we got away early next morning as to get over Harris Saddle, being our highest point on the track, before the weather got bad. Just after leaving Harris shelter and heading down the Hollyford face, the weather turned for the worst.
By the time we arrived at Lake McKenzie hut it was pouring, and then the thunder and lightning started (It lasted 40 hours by the time it had stopped). It continued to pour thunder and lightning all through the night.
The next day was no better, and it still rained, thundered and lightning all the way to our next stop, Lake McKellar on the Greenstone Track. Rain still continued all night, and one clap of thunder was so loud that it shook the pots on the bench.
We left early again the next morning as to get to our next hut,
Mid Greenstone, before there was too much water about. The track was under water in a lot of places and rivers were rising quickly. Still the rain continued and didn’t seem to be lifting much at all.
After going through a lot of water, some waist deep , we arrived at the Mid Greenstone Hut. The rain thunder and lightning continued all night. We could see the Greenstone River in front of us slowly rising.
Next morning was our last day on the tramp, and we were due at the Greenstone shelter to meet the 2pm bus. We set off about 8am to give us plenty of time to get there.
All went well except for surface flooding on the track, until we got to where we were meant to go along the grassy flats in the riverbed, there was no way we could do that as water was above the track level and we could only just see the track markers so we were above the river on to higher ground keeping the trackerd markers in our view.
We sidled around the side of the hills, crossing a shingle slip which was turning into a waterfall and starting to move. With a bit of bush bashing we got back on to the track. Just past the Slyburn Hut turn off we had to take our packs off to cross a flooded waterfall, which would only have been a trickle of a stream once.
We were once again going along the track quite well when we got to another lot of flooding over the track and about thigh deep, so we crossed to higher ground, and bush bashed our
Above right: The Dart River in flood. Middle right: In the township of Glenorchy.
Below right: A stream flooded running into the Greenstone River.