Today was another big Trip day! Up at 4 am (Ashish was not in charge of the alarm today since we wanted to sleep the extra 20 mins of snoozing alarms) and on the trail by 5:45 am. Routeburn is designed to be a multiple day hike for people who want to carry all of the stuff with them. We are not those people so we decided to do it as a long day hike. We left from the Divide parking lot, putting the car key in our lockbox so that the guy from EasyHike Car Relocations could get it and move our car to the end of the trail. The trail was much less elevation gain than the Tongariro hike and we set out confident that today would be much easier and maybe shorter than the Mt. Doom day. Starting in the dark meant we could look for the elusive bugs that Steve was keen to see, the velvet worm and the weta. We succeeded in finding a small weta but no worms! (The stick bug on Steve was found at the hostel the night before. It went full on stick mode, with it’s front legs pulled straight out in front.)

As the sun rose we continued our steady climb up the trail. This trail is much more interesting to walk than the never ending boardwalk of the Tongariro. We kept a pretty steady pace and arrived at the Saddle in about 7 hrs. My garmin had this half of the trek at 13.75 miles, with an elevation gain of 3,789 ft. Things I learned while hiking this; I am not a fast hiker, even when not carrying a heavy pack. My average pace is about 2 mph. I also put to rest the old saying of “If you aren’t the lead dog, the view never changes” because while I was always at the end, the views did change a lot!

Of course along the way, we had to do the obligatory CrossFitters on vacation stunt by doing handstands on top of mountains.

At the Saddle we did the optional trek up to Conical Peak, the highest climbable path around. This offered some amazing views and allowed Ashish to find his inner peace! I’m not really sure how much this added distance wise to the trek but it certainly added some views!

After Conical Peak we still had a long way to go to get to our car, so the stopping for pics became less and the scurrying down the trail became more! Once again, for me going down is always worse than the climb, but I wore my more industrial trail shoes and thankfully my feet didn’t quit on me this time! Ashish on the other hand (er, foot?) wore a hole through his Nike Metcons during the Mt. Doom hike and lost the duct tape repair early in on this hike! I decided a nice foot soak in the glacial melt water stream was just the thing we needed before the final push to the end.

All in all, it took us about 14 hrs to hike somewhere between 20 and 25 miles. I really need to calibrate my garmin to my short stride since I think it is inflating the actual mileage. We ended up using our small filter to fill water bottles near the end and could have carried much less water if we had filtered more often. The weather was almost too warm, something we did not plan for! This hike is fabulous and if you are reading this and trying to choose between this or the Tongariro, choose Routeburn! The views are amazing, the trail is interesting to walk, and it is totally doable in a day!