Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
area is not well served by public transport, making it twice as hard for trampers to arrange a
drop-off on one side of the mountains and a pick-up on the other.
But the lack of transport leads to the park's most endearing quality - a lack of other
trampers. If you're looking for an alpine adventure, where it's possible to spend an after-
noon tramping alone along a ridge and through tussock, then the Ruahines are well worth
the effort needed to reach the tracks.
History
There has been human activity in and around the park area for almost 1000 years, beginning
with the Maori. In pre-European times the forests and streams were a good source of food
for the descendants of the Rangitane, Ngati Apa and Ngati Kahungungu people.
The first European to explore the Ruahine Range was Reverend William Colenso. After
arriving in NZ in 1834, Colenso became a travelling missionary and crossed the range seven
times. He was a skilled botanist whose observations became the basis of the first botanical
records of the area. Eventually the Maori track he used became known as Colenso's Track.
In the early 1900s the forests in the Ruahine foothills were cleared for farms and milling.
Red deer were released in the mid-1920s for game hunting, but their numbers increased so
rapidly their browsing caused extensive forest destruction. That resulted in the New Zealand
Forest Service (NZFS) building many of the park's tracks and huts in the 1960s for deer
cullers.
Ruahine's most famous hut, Rangiwahia, was originally a shepherd's shelter, built in
1930 just above the bushline on the western side of the range. It became the focal point of a
ski hill in 1938, after a group of young men drinking pints in the Rangiwahia Hotel formed
the Rangiwahia Ski Club - only the second ski club to be incorporated in NZ. The skiers
winched a bulldozer up the valley to level out the slopes, built a towrope that used an engine
from an Indian motorcycle and added a wing to the hut.
The club's membership peaked with 80 skiers, but sadly it was disbanded during WWII
and never reformed. In 1967 the NZFS rebuilt Rangiwahia Hut, and the classic corrugated-
iron structure served trampers for almost two decades, finally being replaced in 1984. Sit-
ting at almost 1300m, on the edge of a vast alpine area, 'Rangi Hut' (as most locals refer to
it) is still an important gateway into the Ruahine Range for trampers, deer hunters and the
occasional skier.
Environment
