Sunday 15 March 2026 – You can do all sorts of things from Wānaka – boat tours on the lake, rafting, helicopter flights, waterfall cable climbs, sky diving, paragliding. It seems such a nice town, yet everything seems to be geared towards getting you out of it. Anyway, another option is to find a trail and go walking. So, with a day on our hands, that’s what we decided to do. Obviously.
Caroline looked us over and said that we looked like the hiking types (appearances can be so deceptive), so why didn’t we try the Rob Roy Glacier trail? We took a look at it: 472m gain in 5km, according to AllTrails, is a little on the daunting side, but we decided we’d give it a go. It’s not local to Wānaka; it’s a 50km drive into the Mount Aspiring National Park, and some 30km of that is along a dirt road.
As we left Wānaka, the extent and scope of the A&P show was somewhat borne in on us, even though they were breaking down and clearing up.
Soon we could see the snow-capped mountains in the distance
and eventually hit the dirt road.
The scenery, as you’d expect from heading into the mountains, was dramatic
and so were the driving conditions, occasionally.
The sheep were loose, but there were also herds of deer behind fences, presumably being farmed. We got to the car park to find, to our total lack of surprise, that on a sunny Sunday, lots of other people had had the same idea as us.
We managed to find a space that didn’t seem too obstructive (later, we found that people had strewn cars all along the road, so we needn’t have worried about being tidy after all). A quick visit to the loo there and off we went,
past a rather handsome sculpture of a raptor of some description.
(It’s got a rather Simpsons-narrow-eyed expression, don’t you think?). The path starts off not completely level but at least “Inca flat” – ending at the same altitude it started – beside the Matukituki river
before one crosses the suspension bridge and the path starts to climb.
It’s largely through forest, which means that the bloody trees get in the way of the view
but occasionally they clear to give one a decent view.
Most of the trail is fine, if a little rocky, but there are some interesting moments as you climb.
and then you get to some steps – 126 of them in total.
These are relatively recent additions, to bypass damage that had rendered the trail impassable, so I suppose I’ll let them off. Shortly after the steps, you reach the Lower Lookout, where there are benches and an opportunity to rest and get some idea of what awaits those who carry on to the Upper Lookout.
From the signs and the AllTrails track profile, I was expecting this last kilometre to be rather tougher than what we’d already climbed, but basically it wasn’t. There were a couple of spots where the track became what Ian Burley would describe as “technical” and which I would call “bloody tricky and a bit nerve-racking”.
but we negotiated them without injury and carried on, past a couple of decent views
to
the end of the trail – unofficial caption: “Thank Christ for that!”. Apart from the sheer satisfaction of having grunted one’s way up there, it’s a great place to get to. For a start, you can sit down and have your lunch,
and read the various info boards about the history of the place, which completely fail to answer the one obvious question that must occur to everyone as they heave themselves up the trail: why the actual is it called the “Rob Roy Glacier Trail”? What has a Scottish outlaw from the 17th Century got to do with an ice field in New Zealand? The glacier is named after the mountain, Rob Roy Peak; the naming of the mountain is usually attributed to one Charlie Douglas, a late 19th-century explorer with strong Scottish connections. There seem to be many Scottish aspects to this region of New Zealand, and this is a classic example.
Anyway….the view is fantastic.
It’s of course very difficult to do justice to photographically; I also tried a bit of video from this lookout and a point slightly below it.
I hope you get the idea.
Having lunched, of course, we had to face the inevitability of getting back down again; down can be so much harder than up. Actually, it was OK, with a couple of decent views as we went,
but we were glad to see the suspension bridge and the car park again.
Unsurprisingly, there were far fewer vehicles there when we got back to our car.
According to my Garmin, the trail was 11km, and I expended 1300 calories in 16,000 steps. This makes it half a Tongariro, without the utter fucking brutality of That Descent, so we felt pretty good having completed today’s hike in just four and a half hours..
The journey back to our accommodation was as scenic as the journey out,
and we spent the rest of the evening resting.
This was our only full day in Wānaka – the morrow would see us moving on to parts new and even further south on our journey to the bottom of the South Island, via a couple of potentially interesting places – stay tuned to find out which.