The Hartebreak Ridge track starts at the first creek crossing on the Whispering Falls track, and follows a ridge up to a high point 596. After crossing a flat area it enters a beech forest area and ascends to meet the Rocks Browning Huts track. The track had been opened up by NTC members approx. 2 years ago, the bulk of the effort being done by Ian Morris. Both NTC and Waimea clubs have led trips to this area and when combined with a loop to Browning Hut it is an excellent moderately tough day walk close to Nelson. The track had been marked with pink ribbon and we were aware that it was time to replace this with more permanent markers and to do a bit of track maintenance.
4 Trampers set off from the Hackett car park about 8.25 armed with equipment to do some track marking and maintenance on this circuit track. It was boots off for the crossing of the Hackett Stream before we started up the ridge just past the river crossing. Graeme had nicely prepared permalat markers and nails, though inadvertently we had left most of the nails back in the car – the first mistake of the day.
It was slow moving getting up to the first high point (P447), taking our time clipping gorse, and placing markers.
It was 10.15 so we paused for morning tea, enjoying the warm sunny day. The next 2 hours was a hard scramble – rough & rocky terrain, looking for and debating the route, and continuing to mark the track, meant we were progressing slowly. We found that we were not able to place many markers as there were few good trees to attach a marker. In hindsight we should have been putting more pink tape up as well as the markers, second mistake. We eventually entered the bush where the remaining pink markers were in better condition and travel was easier. At this point we started to add new pink tape as well as permalat markers. We arrived at Beer Bottle flat at 3.10 and having decided that 3pm was our turn around time, we had a short break.
We anticipated that it would take us 2.5hrs to return to the Whispering Falls Track which it did. The return identified a few flaws in our track marking, causing us to get off track. We remedied a few of these. The biggest navigation error was turning down the wrong ridge on the last drop down to the Whispering Falls Track – we found ourselves heading towards Whispering Falls instead. A sidle around the slope corrected this and we were quickly down and again crossing the Hackett Creek, boots on this time. Debbie led a fast hike back to the car park where we arrived at 6.30.
It had been a productive day, perhaps we did not achieve as much as we planned, but still a good job done.
Participants: Graeme, David, Kath (leader and scribe), and visitor Debbie