Tararua Tramping Club

The club takes its name from the Tararua mountain range lying about 50km north of Wellington and covering 155,000 hectares.

This is a rugged area of steep sided hills covered largely in native beech forest with wind-lashed ridges of rotten rock and tussock grass rising to over 1,500 metres in places. On a fine summer's day the ridges and peaks provide great views not only of the Tararua range itself, but far beyond to Mt Taranaki in the north-west, the Wairarapa valley in the east, south to Wellington harbour and the Kaikoura range and west to Kapiti Island and the Marlborough Sounds. For much of the winter snow blankets the higher bush and the tops - an awesome place to be when the weather is kind!

On the sides of the ranges precipitous streams flow from the open tops, down through the beech forest, combining to form rivers sometimes flowing along open grassy valleys and sometimes slowing to form deep pools in narrow gorges.

The Tararua Range was New Zealand's first Forest Park. By reputation it is a beautiful, but also a potentially dangerous place. Storms sweep the Tararua tops on average 200 days a year and over 40 hunters and trampers have perished there since the early 1900s.

Tararua Range - Looking North from Bridge Peak

Tramping is the Kiwi description for an outdoor recreational activity that could be considered a mix of hiking, river crossing, bush-walking and climbing. One of our members, Tony Nolan, once described it as:

"... not simply walking ... but something with a more deliberate intent, offering an element of adventure and demanding a higher level of mental and physical effort.".

Just to clarify matters, in case you're not a Kiwi, a person who goes tramping (not hiking) is called a tramper (not hiker or a tramp!) and they carry their food, clothes and equipment in a pack (not a rucksack, not even a back-pack ... just a pack).

Organised tramping began in New Zealand with the formation in 1919 of the Tararua Tramping Club and many geographical features of the Tararua ranges bear the names of some of our earlier members.

The Tararua range is a popular area for our club trips but we run trips into almost all the significant ranges, forest parks and national parks of New Zealand. Further afield, club expeditions have gone to almost every continent of the world.

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