MUELLER
HUT

Before getting to the route itself, it is worth showing the drive into Mount Cook Village. For me it is one of the most beautiful stretches of road in New Zealand, on par with the road to Glenorchy from Queenstown.

This stretch is only 55 km and takes about 45 minutes to drive, but on a clear, cloudless day, if it is your first time here, you are guaranteed to stop many times at the viewpoints, of which there are at least a dozen on both sides of the road.

As you approach the village itself, Mount Sefton rises up in front of you in all its grandeur. It is a vertical massif of rock about 3000 metres high, with snow caps and glaciers year round.

We have hiked to Mueller Hut only once so far. The final point of the route is the hut itself. A lot of people go up for two days, to enjoy the sunset, spend the night, catch the sunrise, and head back down at a leisurely pace.

But staying overnight has its complications: you have to book the hut in advance, it holds only 28 people, and in the summer season it sells out fast. On top of that you have to carry a much heavier load: a sleeping bag, extra clothing, more food. We wanted to go light, so we chose the day-hike option. In summer there is more than enough daylight for it.

We set off for the trailhead early, at 6 in the morning from Queenstown, and were at the car park by 9. It was already completely full, and while we got ready it kept filling up more. The paid parking has made things a little better, but over the New Year holidays and in good weather the spaces still run out fast.

I have been in Mount Cook in perfect weather and in complete cloud, so if you get the choice between the two, pick your forecast as carefully as you can (it sounds very obvious, but this place shows its full beauty when there are either no clouds at all or they sit well above the peaks). On the day of our hike the forecast promised a window of good weather from roughly morning to midday. But when we arrived at the trailhead, to our huge disappointment, dense cloud hung over the valley.

The climb to Mueller Hut can be roughly split into three parts:
- 1.3 warm-up kilometres with a gentle gain of about 100 metres up to the start of the stairs,
- 1.5 km with 456 metres of gain over 2000+ steps up to Sealy Tarns,
- 2.2 km with 513 metres of gain across alpine rock. This part is obviously the hardest.

The first stage is predictably very easy, there to warm you up and get you ready for the suffering. The moment you reach the stairs it gets hard right away. The steps seem endless, uneven, of all different heights. I have been to Sealy Tarns twice. One time I went with my parents, and my mum could not even get past the halfway point. So you have to gauge your own strength: the gain here is very steep, and on a hot sunny day (which is exactly when the views are best) the climb is noticeably harder.

It took us about 1 hour 45 minutes to reach Sealy Tarns from the car park. When we got there, cloud still hung over Sefton, in the Hooker Valley, and over Mount Cook itself. Since we have been here twice, I am adding a photo from the other hike, showing how it all looks in clear weather.

We spent a long, agonising while deciding whether it was worth climbing on, since everything above was in cloud and it seemed the good views were not going to happen for us. We had almost turned back (in my head I was already planning how I would drive out here again the next day from Queenstown and climb these steps all over again). But luckily we made a firm decision to keep going up.

Above Sealy Tarns there is no path at all, only orange markers. But there were so many people that it was clear where to go. With all the traffic the ground is more or less worn in, and the climb was not as hard as, say, the rock on Ruapehu.

The hardest part of the climb lasts a little over an hour, you crawl up about 1.5 kilometres, roughly as vertical as the section up to Sealy Tarns, and come out at a viewpoint looking onto Mount Sefton and the Hooker Valley. By the time we got there, the cloud had lifted a little but still covered the peaks. Even so, the sense of scale was like nothing else.

There was a little under a kilometre left to the hut, with a small gain of 75 metres. You walk among boulders, crags, and leftover winter snow, and to the right a mountain valley and the Mueller Glacier open up.

The last kilometre goes easily and you finally reach the hut. The whole climb, with a fairly long break at Sealy Tarns, took us a little under four hours. Reaching the top, I said something like "Well, I'm not really tired at all, it wasn't that bad and not all that hard". How wrong I was.

Up top the cloud still hung over the tops of the main peaks. After a bite to eat we decided to wait in case it cleared, and wandered around nearby. We took photos from the viewpoints over the Hooker Valley and the other way, where the Mueller Glacier lies, and we also met a kea

After about an hour at the top, and having lost hope that the cloud would clear, we decided to head back. Naturally, that was exactly when the cloud started to pull apart.

Back at the Sefton viewpoint, we did manage to take a few extra photos with the mountains partly revealed.

"I'm not even tired!" - famous last words

The descent went fairly easily up until the steps began, and that is where my legs started saying "that's it, mate, you're on your own from here". The descent is just as steep as the climb: steps of all different heights, more load on the knees than usual, and on top of that the fatigue of a long day sets in.

The whole descent took 2.5 hours with stops. The last kilometre after the steps, back to the car, felt endless, and my legs were completely shot by that point.

All in all, Mueller Hut is a really great, beautiful track. It is hard, but it turned out not to be as tough as we had imagined before setting off. You need to be in reasonable shape (at minimum some experience climbing 500-1000 metres of elevation and no serious joint problems) and ready to grind your way up the steps and rocks.

For me this track is still unfinished business. That day the cloud never let us properly see all the peaks around us. So one day I will definitely come back.

But even in weather like that the hike stayed with me. When you walk those last kilometres to the hut, the mountains and glaciers around you are so vast that photos afterwards still cannot convey the full scale of how it looks in person.