Mueller Hut
Activity Date:
Updated:
People:
Finn,
Jen,
Tessa,
Louise B,
Daniel S,
Hayleigh M,
Tim H,
Hannah M,
Tom S
| Sat Jan 7, 2023 [Show, Download GPX] Mueller Hut - Up | 5.48km 4:06:48 | 1.33km/hr 1121m ⬆️, 68m ⬇️ |
| Sun Jan 8, 2023 [Show, Download GPX] Mueller Hut - Down | 5.60km 3:11:38 | 1.75km/hr 54m ⬆️, 1174m ⬇️ |
| 11.08km 7:18:26 | 1.52km/hr 1175m ⬆️, 1242m ⬇️ |
Initiated by Hannah, this trip was to be a nice weekend away with a bunch of friends. After futzing around with a couple of cancellations and group food preparation, we were good to go. Except, the weather wasn’t. A front was blowing through on Friday and was not set to clear for Saturday. Ah well, up we go!
We all arrived at Mt Cook Village at different times on Saturday, so decided to start on our own time and meet at Mueller Hut. Jen and I walked up with Louise and Daniel who we carpooled with. Because we started relatively early in the day we got the worst of the weather and faced a lot of rain. That said, without the rain, it would have been much sweatier work!
The track starts nice and gentle through the forest before sending it steeply up the face to Sealey Tarns. This first section is very well formed and has lots (2000+) of steps constructed of rocks and wood. Pretty amazing. The view could be excellent but we saw only cloud. We quickly lunched at Sealy Tarns before continuing – we didn’t want to get too cold.
After Sealy Tarns the track devolves into natural rocks, mud and non-manmade steps, but is still very obvious. It would be hard to go wrong in this section! After grinding uphill some more you reach a scree section where the rocks are quite loose. We also found some snow here – that was unexpected. Thankfully it wasn’t enough to turn us around! I hadn’t thought about snow in January. Whoops!
Once you turn off onto the ridgeline the track crosses a boulder field and then some more snow before reaching the hut. Through here it could be possible to lose your way in the cloud, so it was nice to have a NZ Topo app on my phone to double-check. We reached the hut with no issues and claimed some beds for the 9 of us.
The afternoon and evening were spent chatting with the others as they arrived at different times, eating a lot of food, and drinking wine. Awyis. The rather interesting (and a bit odd) hut warden Eddie told us that he’d be up for stargazing at 1am and sunrise at 5am. Sadly, the clouds hadn’t cleared for stargazing, but they did lift for sunrise!
We grovelled out of bed, put on many layers of clothing and hobbled over to the ridge to get a view of the sunrise over Kā Tiritiri o te Moana (Southern Alps). The colours were truly wonderful and it was worth the early rise.
After that, we slowly had breakfast, cleaned up, and got ready to head back down. Louise and Daniel headed off a little ahead of the rest of us (determined not to slow us down) and the rest of us came a few minutes later. We met up for lunch at Sealy Tarns where the cloud had cleared enough to get a beautiful view up to Mt Cook, The Hooker Valley and surrounding areas.
A short descent later saw us back at the carpark which was packed to the brim. We did some rearranging and squeezed five of us into our car and headed home.
Overall: an amazing trip with great walking, despite the poor visibility and rain on Saturday. A must-do.
