Ruahine tramping mission nearly complete

Maarten Ruiter during one of his tramping adventures in the Ruahine Range, where his goal to visit all of the huts in the forest park is nearly complete.

There are about 57 tramping and forestry huts in the Ruahine Range, and Maarten Ruiter is only three away from having visited all of them.

A member of the Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club for the last nine years, he started out taking trips to the easier to reach ones with club members and then decided to head off on his own to the more inaccessible sites.

"I come and visit my family who are in Hawke's Bay and decided to start ticking them off."
In the last few days he walked to four huts that he had not been to before, including Iron Bark hut on the Rangitikei side of the range.

This involved four days of tramping - two three hour days and two 11 hour days.

"You definitely have to be experienced, people often get helicoptered into the remote areas."

He said there were three or four ranges to cross along the way and he had perfectly timed his supplies to see him through.

"About three hours away from the carpark I was down to my last handful of nuts - I have it fine-tuned now," he said.

He caught the tramping bug at a young age, after his first visit to Sunrise Hut, but subsequent studies took up his attention as a teenager until he got in with a crowd in Wellington who helped re-ignite his passion again.

With the club he has tramped in many different areas - he's completed half of the huts in the Kawekas, and about three-quarters of those in the Tararua Range.

His favourite spot in the Ruahine Range is Waterfall hut, he said.

"It's not fancy and it only takes eight hours to get there so it's not a hard slog but it still feels remote."

Getting away from it all makes a nice change from his day job as a sleep researcher.

"I sit in front of a a screen monitoring people through the night - it's good to get away from the computer screen and the cellphone."

This summer he intends to head to complete the rest of the western side of the Ruahine Range, the furthest one in being Wakelings hut.