‘Best’ HUT in the world BECKONS

It was a late-summer cyclone that sent us over the high hills of Hokitika to the ‘best backcountry hut in the world’.

For months, the four of us had been planning a traverse of the Gardens of Eden and Allah, from the Wanganui River to the Perth. But the closer we got to the start of our West Coast trip at the Hotel Hari Hari, the closer came ex-tropical cyclone Pam.

Family men all of us, we thought it imprudent to be aiming to camp at 2000m on an ice plateau when one of the most intense tropical cyclones recorded in the South Pacific was bearing down on New Zealand.

Plan B was enacted. Tents were left behind. Ivory Lake was on.

I had only vaguely heard of Ivory Lake and its hut until introduced by my tramping friends Derek, John and Craig, and, crucially, the Permolat hut and track restoration group.

Wilderness readers voted Ivory Lake Hut the Hut of the Year in 2016. Two years earlier, it was honoured as the ‘best backcountry hut in the world’ by America’s Backpacker magazine, after writer Rachel Zurer tramped in via a particularly precarious route.

Every way in by foot is precarious to some degree;