Hump Ridge Track Self-Guided Walk

The Hump Ridge Track became New Zealand's eleventh Great Walk in 2024, and it is the one the others are not: bookable for the coming season, a loop with two lodges that have hot showers, a licensed shop and bunk rooms instead of a hut floor. It starts and ends at the same car park on Te Waewae Bay, at the bottom of the South Island where the road runs out.

The three days are three different walks. The first follows the beach and the forest edge, then climbs 900 m to Ōkaka Lodge above the trees, which stands in a bowl of granite tors and tarns, with Stewart Island on the horizon and a boardwalk loop for the evening light.

The second runs south along the ridge and drops to the old logging tramline, where the walking is flat and the history is in the timber: the 1920s wooden viaducts, two of them closed for safety and bypassed, one still walked, and at the end the ghost town of Port Craig with its lodge above the beach.

The third is the coast home. Blowholes Beach at low tide, Hector's dolphins in the surf most days, and the same ten kilometres of beach and bush you walked out on, back to the car park and the shuttle.

This is a real tramp. You carry your pack, sleeping bag and three days of food, about 10–14 kg, and the first two days are seven to nine hours. On Mondays and Thursdays a helicopter can fly a bag to the first lodge. Distances and climbs on this page are approximate, measured on our own route lines.

We book the lodges, the motel in Tuatapere and the shuttles to and from the track, and give you route and tide times in your guidebook. The pride of the walk is that the rest is yours.