Hugging the Ridgeline at Nelson Lakes

Geography time: Nelson is the biggest city on the northern side of the South Island. It’s situated between Abel Tasman National Park (more on this later), Picton (where the ferries to Wellington leave from), and lots of mountains. Many of the mountains to the south of the city, as well as a number of lakes, make up the Nelson Lakes National Park.

We’d actually passed this area about six weeks ago – some of our more devoted readers might recall that period as the ‘Great West Coast Deluge’, where it rained on us for many days straight. To catch everyone else back up, we skipped the trip to Nelson Lakes back then (no views + wet gear = no fun), but resolved to try again on our way back north. These days, given a little more schedule flexibility and accumulated experience with planning around the fickle NZ weather, we ended up with a couple beautiful hiking days.

Our planned route took us up a steep mountain shoulder, across a series of ridgelines, and then to the alpine Lake Angelus. We’d camp next to the lake (and next to the similarly named hut that had no more openings when we looked to reserve it), and the next day descend via the Speargrass Creek Ravine below our first route’s ridgeline.

You’ll notice below that there are many more pictures from day 1’s ridge walk than from day 2’s ravine adventure. The weather and the landscape made for a picture perfect first day. We’d finish navigating one ridgeline just to pop over a saddle into yet another beautiful bowl, take a few photos, and wander across that ridgeline as well. After several times of mistaking the next ridge as the final one, we made it to our beautiful lakeside destination. We found a bumpy but overall nice spot for the tent near the water, made some food, and watched a nice sunset before going to sleep.

Our trail on day 2 was classified by the DOC as a ‘route’ rather than a ‘track’. Practically, this means that instead of an established walking path, there are just poles with orange tops stuck in the ground every so often, and you have to find the way between them. Sometimes there’s a path, sometimes not. Given the amount of brush and the many creek crossings we had to do, we ended up making it to the bottom of the ravine only after a good amount of backtracking and some wet shoe experiences. Turns out that not all trails in NZ are perfectly maintained, but such is life.

Overall, the trip was beautiful on the first day, tiring on the second, and pretty fun as a whole. We got in the vertical feet that we’d miss in our upcoming beach-to-beach Abel Tasman adventure, and finally got to do some real talus hiking in NZ across big boulders and the occasional unsteady rock. While this hike won’t be a candidate for Great Walk status anytime due to the terrain, the ridgeline walk is still near the top of my list for awesome recommended walks in NZ.

If you use Strava, here’s the way up and the way down.