What a day this was, what an amazing view and rewarding hike. We started the day slowly, getting up at 9am and arriving around 11.30am to the lake of Rotoiti.
The drive over was fairly nice, surrounded by mountains is, well, amazing. We arrived in the carpark ready to complete the Mount Roberts Loop, a total of around 10km. There were 2 carparks for the loop, there’s one you see when you first reach the starting tracks for Mount Robert and then one more if you keep driving upwards, we parked in the lower one.
We decided to go up paddy’s track and comeback on the Pinchgut track. The track up had amazing views, of the lake, surrounding mountains, with some bearing snow/glaciers on top and the track down was mainly enclosed forest. Having a starting elevation of around 750m and a peak elevation of 1200mwe knew the hike would have amazing views…
I would recommend you go up the Pinchgut track and down Paddy’s track or do the paddy’s track x2. As the Paddy’s track, really does provide you with huge reward for your hard work in terms of great views. Note Paddy’s track does require you to walk across a lot of loose rocks so good ankle strength is helpful.
At the summit/peak you could see all of the lake and surrounding mountains, I’ll let the photo do the talking….
At the peak, there was also another “off road” track that seemed to go up another mountain, there was a danger sign next to it though, however the weather conditions on the day we chose to hike were perfect. In the end, we decided not to go up it as we were a bit too tired and already had an amazing view and were constrained by time.
The Hike wasn’t difficult as such, it was well directed by poles and had a decent pathway, however certain points did get quite steep, yet there were steps to help with this. On Paddy’s Tracks there was huge bags of gravel and sand to prevent rock roll down and in order to stay safe you had to step on and over these bags.
Drive Over 6/10
View 8.5/10
Hike 8/10
Difficulty 7.5/10
My Overall Experience 7.5/10
So that was our experience, are you going to go and complete the Mount Roberts Loop in 2019?
Yours Truly, Dylan
