By Michael Lanza
As if by some celestial act of deception, our first day on New Zealand’s Milford Track is, by far, the easiest: We hike just three nearly flat miles—five kilometers—following the track along the rain-fattened and fast-moving Clinton River. And the pleasant temperature and warm sunshine pouring onto us from partly cloudy skies almost lulls us into illusions of such relatively ideal (for this place) weather persisting throughout our four days on the Milford.
But we’re not fooled. We’ve seen the forecast and already received other warning signals of what awaits us. And the truth is, even those data points will not, could not paint a complete picture of just how wet it would get out here over the next few days.
Then again, nor could any forecast or warning prepare us for the biggest surprise of the adventure ahead of us: the magical, close to fairytale effect that biblical rains have on this epically, monumentally wet place called Fiordland National Park.
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Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track toward Mackinnon Pass in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
My wife, Penny, our daughter, Alex, our good friend Cat Serio and I have come to Fiordland to spend four days walking one of the most famous and popular multi-day, hut-to-hut treks in the world, the Milford Track.
Measuring 33.2 miles/53.5 kilometers, the trail makes a one-way traverse beginning at Lake Te Anau, rising through rainforest—what Kiwis call “the bush”—to cross the mountains at 3,786-foot/1,154-meter Mackinnon Pass. The track then makes a long descent back into rainforest to finish at sea level in Milford Sound—also known as Piopiotahi, the name given to it by New Zealand’s native Maori people—where sheer-walled peaks soar 4,000 to 5,000 feet (1,200 to 1,500 meters) or more straight up out of this narrow corridor to the sea.
After a 75-minute boat cruise across Lake Te Anau, where steep and intensely green mountains erupt from the water’s edge in almost every direction, we hike the flat, wide first section of the Milford Track through lush rainforest along the Clinton River for not much more than an hour to Clinton Hut, set within a clearing in the virtually impenetrable bush that fills the valley. On all sides, rainforest clings to mountainsides rising steeply to pinnacled ridges and peaks. Here and there, “slips,” or landslides triggered by often unceasing, occasionally heavy rainfall, scar the valley walls.
Yesterday, we weren’t sure we’d make it here.
My daughter, Alex, hiking the Milford Track up the Clinton River Valley to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
I had received an email from the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC)—sort of New Zealand’s equivalent of the U.S. National Park Service, managing the parks as well as hut bookings—warning of the possibility of our Milford reservations being canceled due to the forecast calling for 80 millimeters (over three inches) of rain. When I spoke with a ranger at the DOC visitor center in the little town of Te Anau, on the edge of Fiordland, he said that if the forecast reached 100 millimeters by morning on the day we were to start the Milford, the DOC would close the entire track for the day because of concerns over dangerous flooding. The result: All trekkers on it must layover a second night at their current hut—creating a backup that would necessitate canceling the trips for all hikers slated to start the Milford that day.
We entertained mental images of hiking through rain that heavy—“heevee roin,” as Kiwis pronounce it—reassuring ourselves… repeatedly… that we have very good rain jackets and pants. Then we got lucky, although we weren’t initially certain this represented a stroke of “good” luck: The DOC decided to keep the Milford Track open. Game on.
Instead of drenching rain while walking to the first hut, we enjoy moments of sunshine interspersed with clouds. The notoriously ravenous sandflies aren’t too thick, but they cluster in little clouds around our heads trying to feed anytime we stop moving or if we hang out on the hut’s outside deck. (Everyone sharing our bunkroom opens and closes the door quickly when entering and exiting to minimize insect invaders.)
My daughter, Alex, below waterfalls along the Milford Track in the Clinton River Valley, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
By late afternoon, the increasingly grayer overcast begins spitting raindrops.
That evening, in Clinton Hut’s main cooking and dining building, the ranger gives us details about the hike ahead of us tomorrow, some natural and human history of the Milford Track, and the emergency protocols in case of a fire starting inside the hut—which seems an extraordinarily low likelihood as the rain intensifies through the night, but people routinely do extraordinarily foolish things like setting hats and gloves to dry directly atop the dining room’s extraordinarily hot woodstove.
But his words that undoubtedly land most powerfully with his audience are: “The forecast for the next two weeks looks dismal.” That word dismal echoes even more ominously when one considers that, for these rangers, rain is entirely normal, like the sandflies: something you just live with.
This is my fourth trip to New Zealand. I’ve hiked some of the Great Walks and other tracks, including some here in Fiordland—my favorite of this wonderful country’s parks—including the Kepler Track and New Zealand’s “hardest hut trek,” the Dusky Track. I’ve seen how much it can rain here. It’s no joke.
Throughout the night, rain falls steadily, increasing in intensity for short bursts. Thunder peels at startling volumes and lightning occasionally fills the hut with the light of midday.
Hearing it drumming on the roof when I awaken a couple of times during the night, one simple thought fills my mind: It has begun.
Fiordland National Park sprawls over nearly three million acres (1.2 million hectares) of the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island, an area larger than America’s Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks combined and larger than all but seven U.S. national parks (six in Alaska and California’s Death Valley). Mostly a wilderness of thick rainforest, rugged mountains, and long, deep fiords, it has glaciers, alpine ranges, and flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth, that have existed since New Zealand was part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.
Fiordland National Park, Mount Aspiring National Park, Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, and Westland Tai Poutini National Park comprise the Te Wahipounamu—South West New Zealand World Heritage Site, spanning over 6.4 million acres (2.6 million hectares), or 10 percent of New Zealand’s landmass, recognized by UNESCO as ecologically significant for having a wide range of geographical features and a pristine ecosystem where rare wildlife flourish.
The water bodies at either end of the Milford Track stretch beyond sight. Forty miles/64 kilometers long and covering 133 square miles/344 square kilometers, Lake Te Anau is the second-largest lake by surface area in New Zealand and the largest on the South Island, and its average depth is 554 feet/169 meters. The 10-mile-long (16-kilometer) fiord of Milford Sound—one of 15 fiords that incise the park’s coastline—reaches a depth of 1,312 feet/400 meters.
My daughter, Alex, hiking the Milford Track below waterfalls in the Arthur River Valley, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand. Click photo for my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
As for rain, well. The average annual precipitation on the Milford Track hits seven to nine meters, or 275 to 350 inches. One hut ranger tells us the Milford Sound area receives anywhere from nine to as much as 12 meters of rain a year—that’s up to 472 inches, or more than 10 times the annual rainfall of famously gray and drizzly Seattle. Pour that much water into a multi-story building and it will fill it up to the fourth-floor ceiling.
But here’s the surprising thing: Ask people who have enough experience out here to know the Milford Track’s many faces and they will tell you that the best times to hike it are actually during heavy rain.
And it’s not just some universal insider Kiwi joke played on oblivious tourists. The mysteries concealed around every bend in the foggy valleys, the rivers bloated and rushing with awesome power, the moody gray of the bush that can seem to enhance the endless variety of shades of green—and especially, the waterfalls that spring to life, swell to shocking dimensions, and become too numerous and frequent to count, are what make the Milford Track experience one that’s arguably unmatched anywhere.
Come morning, Alex, Cat, Penny, and I are not feeling any need to dash out the door of our warm and, most notably, dry bunkroom at Clinton Hut, especially while listening to the relentless patter on the metal roof and the random peels of psyche-rattling thunder. Other trekkers begin trickling out the door in full rain gear and pack covers, headed, like us, to Mintauro Hut—nearly 11 miles/17.5 kilometers and six soggy hours from here.
Around 9:30 a.m., with the sky a forlornly gloomy and deep hue of gray, we hit the trail to be greeted by rain spattering us while the waterlogged forest’s leafy overstory releases its own steady shower of fat water drops onto us. And despite the constant sensation of walking in the heavy mist of a large waterfall, we’re excited. After all, we are hiking the Milford Track!
Fortunately, the precipitation remains just persistent and moderate with periods of lighter rain—never escalating to a deluge. Not today, anyway.
At first, we catch only glimpses of the broader Clinton River Valley through brief gaps in the dense bush. But a couple of hours from Clinton Hut, we emerge from the forest into much more open meadows in the upper valley—and a scene that conjures the realm of the elves in Lord of the Rings (not surprisingly, since those movies were filmed in New Zealand; yup, it’s just hard to resist that reference).
Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Cottony puffs of small clouds lumber low along the valley walls, but the solid gray ceiling has risen nearly to the mountaintops, revealing cliffs garbed in dense rainforest up and down both sides of the valley. All along these darkly green walls, white ribbons of waterfalls, dozens of them, more than we could possibly tally up while walking, plunge and tumble downward in sheer drops and only-slightly-less-vertical cascades, some separating into braids and then rejoining again, or merging into another waterfall, and each of them falling hundreds of vertical feet, their rain-swelled volume generating their own little clouds of mist. We stop below a few walls of braided falls to admire—and, mostly, just gawk.
Even in the rain, it’s so beautiful that we don’t try to rush today’s hike. By the time we reach the Mintauro hut, we’re sopping from head to toe, fully ready to shed our wet layers, dry off, warm up, and put on the dry clothes safely packed in waterproof stuff sacks inside our backpacks. Hiking for hours in steady rain, cool temperatures, and wind sucks heat and energy from the body. We’re tired and hungry, but also, I think it’s fair to say, we’re all enchanted by our first full day on the Milford Track.
The dining room sounds like a party as 40 guests cook and eat and rejoice in the dry warmth of the woodstove and the heat produced by so many humans. Previous hut treks in New Zealand have taught me that, as is true in other world-class trekking destinations like the Tour du Mont Blanc, Iceland, Italy’s Dolomites, and Patagonia, the huts function as a gathering space for people from a multitude of countries, where you’ll overhear conversations in numerous languages. The cacophony of excited banter bounces off the walls as everyone recounts their day among their own family or group and meets new people who shared this experience of walking here today from Clinton Hut through the rain and the valley of waterfalls.
Murray, the Mintauro Hut ranger since this nice, new structure opened in April 2021, gives the usual talk about safety protocols and some history of this hut and the Milford Track. Then he moves around the room meeting some guests. Sitting to chat with us, he doesn’t mince words about tomorrow, when we hike the route’s crux, crossing Mackinnon Pass: It’s going to rain all day. A lot.
In the morning, yes, it’s raining. I don’t think it has stopped since yesterday and it continues falling lightly but steadily as we leave Mintauro at 8:30 a.m. to begin the 1,600-foot/500-meter climb to Mackinnon Pass. From the clearing just outside the hut, we can see that pronounced chop in the mountains: A cloud almost as thick as honey washes over the pass like a waterfall. Not a promising sign.
Alex and Penny slowly pull ahead of Cat and me as we ascend the trail’s moderate angle through long switchbacks, separating into “buddy” pairs so no one’s alone while all moving at a pace that keeps us warm without sweating too much—wet base layers against skin could make us cold and risk hypothermia, especially once we hit the wind that’s screaming over the pass. In the bush, much of the wind and rain doesn’t reach us, but the trees are still so overladen with water that the dripping simulates a rainstorm.
My wife, Penny, and Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Before long, we emerge above the bush line—the distinctive margin where the forest abruptly ends and gives way to alpine terrain—to views of the head of the Clinton River Valley from high above the valley bottom, looking out over its green, fortress-like mountainsides scored by countless tall ribbons of falling water. Gray clouds verging on black swirl around the clifftops. The scale of it feels overwhelming and thrilling.
As we near the pass, the wind starts to pick up—and just minutes farther up the trail, it really gathers steam.
As Cat and I crest the expansive, rolling, and wide-open terrain of the pass and commence a long, winding alpine traverse across it, the wind, squeezed through this natural funnel in the mountains, buffets us, the strongest gusts nearly knocking us over. Bullets of horizontal rain pelt our cheeks, the only part of our faces not shielded by our hoods.
With the fusillade of rain and wind pounding us on one side, we hustle as fast as we can over the wet rocks and puddled trail to duck inside the small Mackinnon Pass Shelter, where we catch up to Penny and Alex. With numerous, dripping wet rain jackets hanging from hooks in the mud room and as many trekkers crowded onto the benches or stand inside the one small main room, fog hangs as thickly in here as outside these walls. We recognize everyone and are getting to know some because we’re all on the same hut schedule, like all Milford trekkers.
Luxuriating in this respite from the wind and rain, we linger for close to an hour, boiling water for hot drinks on one of the gas cookers. There’s no hope of drying anything we’re wearing or truly warming up; we stay only long enough to feel less cold, but leave before our body core temps start dropping. We must move for heat.
We step back out into the wind and driving rain. Shifting curtains of fog reveal the contours of Mackinnon Pass: huge, vertiginous walls of rock and rainforest with yet more long ribbons of water pouring down them, all bloated to exaggerated dimensions by the incessant rain. Across from us, one waterfall freefalls for hundreds of feet; another gets squeezed through a constriction in rock, creating a gigantic waterspout bursting from the cliff face.
Dumpling Hut on the Milford Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Descending the trail in another wrestling match against the wind—which I think we could, at best, depict as a draw—we finally reach the relative protection of the bush, where the wind no longer menaces us. But the rain keeps coming in intermittent waves of light and heavy.
At this point, there’s no question in my mind that this day has already morphed into one of the wettest I’ve experienced in 40 years of hiking, backpacking, climbing, and trekking thousands of miles around the U.S. and the world.
Water covers most of the trail; but for the few steps here and there where our boots do not incur some level of immersion, we splash into at least a couple of inches of water with every stride. Puddles have over-topped our boots so many times we’ve given up hope of having dry feet again on this trip. The rain has even penetrated our rain jackets and pants in certain spots, mainly where the waterlogged shoulder straps and hipbelt are essentially squeezing water through the shells’ membranes. But our mostly dry fleece insulation is helping keep us warm enough. That, and simply moving.
Waterfalls in the Arthur River Valley, seen from the Milford Track in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand. Click photo for my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
All around us in the forest, water rushes downhill. We cross innumerable footbridges over swollen, deafening creeks. Storm-spawned streamlets erupt from the bush to form a small but fast-moving current across the track. Some of them flow down the trail and even more streamlets enter it, transforming the trail into a creek for many meters until a drainage wall of rocks diverts it into the bush.
For hours, we hear almost nothing but the sounds of water filling our ears: waterfalls, cascades, flooded trail, and rain drumming onto the forest canopy, the ground, our hoods.
Cat and I descend a very steep stretch of the Milford Track, mostly on wooden stairways constructed on the high-angle earth, alongside a cascade pumped up like a bodybuilder to insane dimensions, the roaring whitewater plummeting through a stone stairway over drops of 10, 20, 30 feet.
After a short break out of the rain under the roof of the Andersons Cascade Shelter, we agree that Alex can depart ahead of us to reach the hut faster and grab four bunks for us; and I leave soon after her, contemplating the side hike of perhaps 90 minutes out and back to Sutherland Falls, the tallest in New Zealand at over 1,900 feet/580 meters. Uninterested in that side trip, Penny and Cat will hike together at their own pace to the hut. Not long afterward, at the junction with the trail to Sutherland, it’s visible in the distance, raising a plume of mist half its height; but my feeling of thorough wetness has dampened my interest in spending even more time in the rain.
A little while later, I reach what looks like a swollen creek crashing over rocks; but it’s not a creek, it’s the flooded track, with a fast-moving, knee-deep current racing down it. A small, young woman stands there, looks at me, and in halting English, asks where we should cross. I point and walk to a spot a short distance upstream where it’s a bit wider and only perhaps calf-deep, and I hand her one of my poles for the crossing. She asks if she can follow me and I say, “Yes, sure.” We wade down the current’s edge to the point where the floodwater diverts off the path, briefly leaving us hiking in a merely shallow little stream. That doesn’t last long.
We ford yet more floodwater flowing across the trail, both laughing at the craziness of this scene. We pause to look up at muscular, massive waterfalls, including one some 20 feet wide that falls over several tiers for maybe a hundred feet, an enormous flow of water that thunders beneath a footbridge as we stroll across it.
Finally—more than eight miles/13 kilometers and several hours from Mintauro, my new friend and I reach Dumpling Hut, exchange a laugh, handshake, and first names, then go looking for our own companions. I immediately find Alex in one of the bunkrooms, happily lying warm and dry inside her sleeping bag. Not long afterward, Penny and Cat arrive, all smiles. It’s been an unbelievable day and we’re happy—no, elated—to be here.
Our last day begins with several people in the bunkroom rising before 6 a.m. and moving around quietly, using headlamps, to a soundtrack of long, very loud peels of thunder, flashes of lightning, and—incredibly—the loudest rain we’ve heard yet on this trip beating upon the roof.
The Gear I Used See my reviews of the outstanding rain jacket and pants, sleeping bag, fleece hoodie, trekking poles, and headlamp I used on this trip.
See also “How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking,” “5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking,” “7 Pro Tips For Keeping Your Backpacking Gear Dry,” and this menu of all stories offering expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.
As if by some celestial act of deception, our first day on New Zealand’s Milford Track is, by far, the easiest: We hike just three nearly flat miles—five kilometers—following the track along the rain-fattened and fast-moving Clinton River. And the pleasant temperature and warm sunshine pouring onto us from partly cloudy skies almost lulls us into illusions of such relatively ideal (for this place) weather persisting throughout our four days on the Milford.
But we’re not fooled. We’ve seen the forecast and already received other warning signals of what awaits us. And the truth is, even those data points will not, could not paint a complete picture of just how wet it would get out here over the next few days.
Then again, nor could any forecast or warning prepare us for the biggest surprise of the adventure ahead of us: the magical, close to fairytale effect that biblical rains have on this epically, monumentally wet place called Fiordland National Park.
Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track toward Mackinnon Pass in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
My wife, Penny, our daughter, Alex, our good friend Cat Serio and I have come to Fiordland to spend four days walking one of the most famous and popular multi-day, hut-to-hut treks in the world, the Milford Track.
Measuring 33.2 miles/53.5 kilometers, the trail makes a one-way traverse beginning at Lake Te Anau, rising through rainforest—what Kiwis call “the bush”—to cross the mountains at 3,786-foot/1,154-meter Mackinnon Pass. The track then makes a long descent back into rainforest to finish at sea level in Milford Sound—also known as Piopiotahi, the name given to it by New Zealand’s native Maori people—where sheer-walled peaks soar 4,000 to 5,000 feet (1,200 to 1,500 meters) or more straight up out of this narrow corridor to the sea.
After a 75-minute boat cruise across Lake Te Anau, where steep and intensely green mountains erupt from the water’s edge in almost every direction, we hike the flat, wide first section of the Milford Track through lush rainforest along the Clinton River for not much more than an hour to Clinton Hut, set within a clearing in the virtually impenetrable bush that fills the valley. On all sides, rainforest clings to mountainsides rising steeply to pinnacled ridges and peaks. Here and there, “slips,” or landslides triggered by often unceasing, occasionally heavy rainfall, scar the valley walls.
Yesterday, we weren’t sure we’d make it here.
My daughter, Alex, hiking the Milford Track up the Clinton River Valley to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
I had received an email from the New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC)—sort of New Zealand’s equivalent of the U.S. National Park Service, managing the parks as well as hut bookings—warning of the possibility of our Milford reservations being canceled due to the forecast calling for 80 millimeters (over three inches) of rain. When I spoke with a ranger at the DOC visitor center in the little town of Te Anau, on the edge of Fiordland, he said that if the forecast reached 100 millimeters by morning on the day we were to start the Milford, the DOC would close the entire track for the day because of concerns over dangerous flooding. The result: All trekkers on it must layover a second night at their current hut—creating a backup that would necessitate canceling the trips for all hikers slated to start the Milford that day.
We entertained mental images of hiking through rain that heavy—“heevee roin,” as Kiwis pronounce it—reassuring ourselves… repeatedly… that we have very good rain jackets and pants. Then we got lucky, although we weren’t initially certain this represented a stroke of “good” luck: The DOC decided to keep the Milford Track open. Game on.
Instead of drenching rain while walking to the first hut, we enjoy moments of sunshine interspersed with clouds. The notoriously ravenous sandflies aren’t too thick, but they cluster in little clouds around our heads trying to feed anytime we stop moving or if we hang out on the hut’s outside deck. (Everyone sharing our bunkroom opens and closes the door quickly when entering and exiting to minimize insect invaders.)
Save yourself a lot of time and headaches.
Get my expert e-book “Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
Get my expert e-book “Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
‘The Forecast Looks Dismal’
My daughter, Alex, below waterfalls along the Milford Track in the Clinton River Valley, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
By late afternoon, the increasingly grayer overcast begins spitting raindrops.
That evening, in Clinton Hut’s main cooking and dining building, the ranger gives us details about the hike ahead of us tomorrow, some natural and human history of the Milford Track, and the emergency protocols in case of a fire starting inside the hut—which seems an extraordinarily low likelihood as the rain intensifies through the night, but people routinely do extraordinarily foolish things like setting hats and gloves to dry directly atop the dining room’s extraordinarily hot woodstove.
But his words that undoubtedly land most powerfully with his audience are: “The forecast for the next two weeks looks dismal.” That word dismal echoes even more ominously when one considers that, for these rangers, rain is entirely normal, like the sandflies: something you just live with.
This is my fourth trip to New Zealand. I’ve hiked some of the Great Walks and other tracks, including some here in Fiordland—my favorite of this wonderful country’s parks—including the Kepler Track and New Zealand’s “hardest hut trek,” the Dusky Track. I’ve seen how much it can rain here. It’s no joke.
Throughout the night, rain falls steadily, increasing in intensity for short bursts. Thunder peels at startling volumes and lightning occasionally fills the hut with the light of midday.
Hearing it drumming on the roof when I awaken a couple of times during the night, one simple thought fills my mind: It has begun.
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Fiordland National Park
Fiordland National Park sprawls over nearly three million acres (1.2 million hectares) of the southwest corner of New Zealand’s South Island, an area larger than America’s Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks combined and larger than all but seven U.S. national parks (six in Alaska and California’s Death Valley). Mostly a wilderness of thick rainforest, rugged mountains, and long, deep fiords, it has glaciers, alpine ranges, and flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth, that have existed since New Zealand was part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland.
Fiordland National Park, Mount Aspiring National Park, Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, and Westland Tai Poutini National Park comprise the Te Wahipounamu—South West New Zealand World Heritage Site, spanning over 6.4 million acres (2.6 million hectares), or 10 percent of New Zealand’s landmass, recognized by UNESCO as ecologically significant for having a wide range of geographical features and a pristine ecosystem where rare wildlife flourish.
The water bodies at either end of the Milford Track stretch beyond sight. Forty miles/64 kilometers long and covering 133 square miles/344 square kilometers, Lake Te Anau is the second-largest lake by surface area in New Zealand and the largest on the South Island, and its average depth is 554 feet/169 meters. The 10-mile-long (16-kilometer) fiord of Milford Sound—one of 15 fiords that incise the park’s coastline—reaches a depth of 1,312 feet/400 meters.
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My daughter, Alex, hiking the Milford Track below waterfalls in the Arthur River Valley, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand. Click photo for my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
As for rain, well. The average annual precipitation on the Milford Track hits seven to nine meters, or 275 to 350 inches. One hut ranger tells us the Milford Sound area receives anywhere from nine to as much as 12 meters of rain a year—that’s up to 472 inches, or more than 10 times the annual rainfall of famously gray and drizzly Seattle. Pour that much water into a multi-story building and it will fill it up to the fourth-floor ceiling.
But here’s the surprising thing: Ask people who have enough experience out here to know the Milford Track’s many faces and they will tell you that the best times to hike it are actually during heavy rain.
And it’s not just some universal insider Kiwi joke played on oblivious tourists. The mysteries concealed around every bend in the foggy valleys, the rivers bloated and rushing with awesome power, the moody gray of the bush that can seem to enhance the endless variety of shades of green—and especially, the waterfalls that spring to life, swell to shocking dimensions, and become too numerous and frequent to count, are what make the Milford Track experience one that’s arguably unmatched anywhere.
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Clinton Hut to Mintauro Hut
Come morning, Alex, Cat, Penny, and I are not feeling any need to dash out the door of our warm and, most notably, dry bunkroom at Clinton Hut, especially while listening to the relentless patter on the metal roof and the random peels of psyche-rattling thunder. Other trekkers begin trickling out the door in full rain gear and pack covers, headed, like us, to Mintauro Hut—nearly 11 miles/17.5 kilometers and six soggy hours from here.
Around 9:30 a.m., with the sky a forlornly gloomy and deep hue of gray, we hit the trail to be greeted by rain spattering us while the waterlogged forest’s leafy overstory releases its own steady shower of fat water drops onto us. And despite the constant sensation of walking in the heavy mist of a large waterfall, we’re excited. After all, we are hiking the Milford Track!
Fortunately, the precipitation remains just persistent and moderate with periods of lighter rain—never escalating to a deluge. Not today, anyway.
At first, we catch only glimpses of the broader Clinton River Valley through brief gaps in the dense bush. But a couple of hours from Clinton Hut, we emerge from the forest into much more open meadows in the upper valley—and a scene that conjures the realm of the elves in Lord of the Rings (not surprisingly, since those movies were filmed in New Zealand; yup, it’s just hard to resist that reference).
You don’t have to be cold. See my “5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking”
and “7 Pro Tips For Keeping Your Backpacking Gear Dry.”
and “7 Pro Tips For Keeping Your Backpacking Gear Dry.”
Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Cottony puffs of small clouds lumber low along the valley walls, but the solid gray ceiling has risen nearly to the mountaintops, revealing cliffs garbed in dense rainforest up and down both sides of the valley. All along these darkly green walls, white ribbons of waterfalls, dozens of them, more than we could possibly tally up while walking, plunge and tumble downward in sheer drops and only-slightly-less-vertical cascades, some separating into braids and then rejoining again, or merging into another waterfall, and each of them falling hundreds of vertical feet, their rain-swelled volume generating their own little clouds of mist. We stop below a few walls of braided falls to admire—and, mostly, just gawk.
Even in the rain, it’s so beautiful that we don’t try to rush today’s hike. By the time we reach the Mintauro hut, we’re sopping from head to toe, fully ready to shed our wet layers, dry off, warm up, and put on the dry clothes safely packed in waterproof stuff sacks inside our backpacks. Hiking for hours in steady rain, cool temperatures, and wind sucks heat and energy from the body. We’re tired and hungry, but also, I think it’s fair to say, we’re all enchanted by our first full day on the Milford Track.
The dining room sounds like a party as 40 guests cook and eat and rejoice in the dry warmth of the woodstove and the heat produced by so many humans. Previous hut treks in New Zealand have taught me that, as is true in other world-class trekking destinations like the Tour du Mont Blanc, Iceland, Italy’s Dolomites, and Patagonia, the huts function as a gathering space for people from a multitude of countries, where you’ll overhear conversations in numerous languages. The cacophony of excited banter bounces off the walls as everyone recounts their day among their own family or group and meets new people who shared this experience of walking here today from Clinton Hut through the rain and the valley of waterfalls.
Murray, the Mintauro Hut ranger since this nice, new structure opened in April 2021, gives the usual talk about safety protocols and some history of this hut and the Milford Track. Then he moves around the room meeting some guests. Sitting to chat with us, he doesn’t mince words about tomorrow, when we hike the route’s crux, crossing Mackinnon Pass: It’s going to rain all day. A lot.
Get my expert tips on successfully booking Milford Track huts and planning your trek smartly
in my e-book “Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
in my e-book “Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
Mintauro Hut to Dumpling Hut
In the morning, yes, it’s raining. I don’t think it has stopped since yesterday and it continues falling lightly but steadily as we leave Mintauro at 8:30 a.m. to begin the 1,600-foot/500-meter climb to Mackinnon Pass. From the clearing just outside the hut, we can see that pronounced chop in the mountains: A cloud almost as thick as honey washes over the pass like a waterfall. Not a promising sign.
Alex and Penny slowly pull ahead of Cat and me as we ascend the trail’s moderate angle through long switchbacks, separating into “buddy” pairs so no one’s alone while all moving at a pace that keeps us warm without sweating too much—wet base layers against skin could make us cold and risk hypothermia, especially once we hit the wind that’s screaming over the pass. In the bush, much of the wind and rain doesn’t reach us, but the trees are still so overladen with water that the dripping simulates a rainstorm.
Planning your next big adventure? See “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips”
and “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes.”
and “The 25 Best National Park Dayhikes.”
My wife, Penny, and Cat Serio hiking the Milford Track to Mintauro Hut, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Before long, we emerge above the bush line—the distinctive margin where the forest abruptly ends and gives way to alpine terrain—to views of the head of the Clinton River Valley from high above the valley bottom, looking out over its green, fortress-like mountainsides scored by countless tall ribbons of falling water. Gray clouds verging on black swirl around the clifftops. The scale of it feels overwhelming and thrilling.
As we near the pass, the wind starts to pick up—and just minutes farther up the trail, it really gathers steam.
As Cat and I crest the expansive, rolling, and wide-open terrain of the pass and commence a long, winding alpine traverse across it, the wind, squeezed through this natural funnel in the mountains, buffets us, the strongest gusts nearly knocking us over. Bullets of horizontal rain pelt our cheeks, the only part of our faces not shielded by our hoods.
With the fusillade of rain and wind pounding us on one side, we hustle as fast as we can over the wet rocks and puddled trail to duck inside the small Mackinnon Pass Shelter, where we catch up to Penny and Alex. With numerous, dripping wet rain jackets hanging from hooks in the mud room and as many trekkers crowded onto the benches or stand inside the one small main room, fog hangs as thickly in here as outside these walls. We recognize everyone and are getting to know some because we’re all on the same hut schedule, like all Milford trekkers.
Luxuriating in this respite from the wind and rain, we linger for close to an hour, boiling water for hot drinks on one of the gas cookers. There’s no hope of drying anything we’re wearing or truly warming up; we stay only long enough to feel less cold, but leave before our body core temps start dropping. We must move for heat.
We step back out into the wind and driving rain. Shifting curtains of fog reveal the contours of Mackinnon Pass: huge, vertiginous walls of rock and rainforest with yet more long ribbons of water pouring down them, all bloated to exaggerated dimensions by the incessant rain. Across from us, one waterfall freefalls for hundreds of feet; another gets squeezed through a constriction in rock, creating a gigantic waterspout bursting from the cliff face.
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Dumpling Hut on the Milford Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.
Descending the trail in another wrestling match against the wind—which I think we could, at best, depict as a draw—we finally reach the relative protection of the bush, where the wind no longer menaces us. But the rain keeps coming in intermittent waves of light and heavy.
At this point, there’s no question in my mind that this day has already morphed into one of the wettest I’ve experienced in 40 years of hiking, backpacking, climbing, and trekking thousands of miles around the U.S. and the world.
Water covers most of the trail; but for the few steps here and there where our boots do not incur some level of immersion, we splash into at least a couple of inches of water with every stride. Puddles have over-topped our boots so many times we’ve given up hope of having dry feet again on this trip. The rain has even penetrated our rain jackets and pants in certain spots, mainly where the waterlogged shoulder straps and hipbelt are essentially squeezing water through the shells’ membranes. But our mostly dry fleece insulation is helping keep us warm enough. That, and simply moving.
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Waterfalls in the Arthur River Valley, seen from the Milford Track in Fiordland National Park, New Zealand. Click photo for my expert e-book “The Complete Guide to Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
All around us in the forest, water rushes downhill. We cross innumerable footbridges over swollen, deafening creeks. Storm-spawned streamlets erupt from the bush to form a small but fast-moving current across the track. Some of them flow down the trail and even more streamlets enter it, transforming the trail into a creek for many meters until a drainage wall of rocks diverts it into the bush.
For hours, we hear almost nothing but the sounds of water filling our ears: waterfalls, cascades, flooded trail, and rain drumming onto the forest canopy, the ground, our hoods.
Cat and I descend a very steep stretch of the Milford Track, mostly on wooden stairways constructed on the high-angle earth, alongside a cascade pumped up like a bodybuilder to insane dimensions, the roaring whitewater plummeting through a stone stairway over drops of 10, 20, 30 feet.
After a short break out of the rain under the roof of the Andersons Cascade Shelter, we agree that Alex can depart ahead of us to reach the hut faster and grab four bunks for us; and I leave soon after her, contemplating the side hike of perhaps 90 minutes out and back to Sutherland Falls, the tallest in New Zealand at over 1,900 feet/580 meters. Uninterested in that side trip, Penny and Cat will hike together at their own pace to the hut. Not long afterward, at the junction with the trail to Sutherland, it’s visible in the distance, raising a plume of mist half its height; but my feeling of thorough wetness has dampened my interest in spending even more time in the rain.
A little while later, I reach what looks like a swollen creek crashing over rocks; but it’s not a creek, it’s the flooded track, with a fast-moving, knee-deep current racing down it. A small, young woman stands there, looks at me, and in halting English, asks where we should cross. I point and walk to a spot a short distance upstream where it’s a bit wider and only perhaps calf-deep, and I hand her one of my poles for the crossing. She asks if she can follow me and I say, “Yes, sure.” We wade down the current’s edge to the point where the floodwater diverts off the path, briefly leaving us hiking in a merely shallow little stream. That doesn’t last long.
We ford yet more floodwater flowing across the trail, both laughing at the craziness of this scene. We pause to look up at muscular, massive waterfalls, including one some 20 feet wide that falls over several tiers for maybe a hundred feet, an enormous flow of water that thunders beneath a footbridge as we stroll across it.
Finally—more than eight miles/13 kilometers and several hours from Mintauro, my new friend and I reach Dumpling Hut, exchange a laugh, handshake, and first names, then go looking for our own companions. I immediately find Alex in one of the bunkrooms, happily lying warm and dry inside her sleeping bag. Not long afterward, Penny and Cat arrive, all smiles. It’s been an unbelievable day and we’re happy—no, elated—to be here.
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“Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
“Trekking New Zealand’s World-Famous Milford Track.”
Dumpling Hut to Sandfly Point
Our last day begins with several people in the bunkroom rising before 6 a.m. and moving around quietly, using headlamps, to a soundtrack of long, very loud peels of thunder, flashes of lightning, and—incredibly—the loudest rain we’ve heard yet on this trip beating upon the roof.
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The Gear I Used See my reviews of the outstanding rain jacket and pants, sleeping bag, fleece hoodie, trekking poles, and headlamp I used on this trip.
See also “How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking,” “5 Tips For Staying Warm and Dry While Hiking,” “7 Pro Tips For Keeping Your Backpacking Gear Dry,” and this menu of all stories offering expert backpacking tips at The Big Outside.
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