Cascade Saddle
Off to a late start on Saturday afternoon, we arrived in Wanaka around 6:30pm and decided not to bike in to the Aspiring Hut as planned. We enjoyed sizzling fajitas and margaritas in Wanaka, our first Mexican restaurant experience in New Zealand, and then drove out to Raspberry Flats Carpark, the trailhead for the Matukituki Valley. This would be our fourth visit to the Matukituki Valley since we arrived in New Zealand . . . you would think we like it or something. It was already dark enough to need a torch (what the silly Kiwis call a head lamp) so we ignored the “No Camping” sign, locked our bikes to the front wheel rim and set up our sleeping bags in the back of the car.
Our plan to wake up just before sunrise not surprisingly failed and we finally managed to get up, eat breakfast, pack our backpacks and start biking just before 9am. The trail may not be a trail I would ever just ride for the sake of riding, but it sure made the relatively flat track into the hut a short one. We had a few adjustments to make initially with our pack-bike set up. Walking with a big pack is straight forward. Biking with a small camelback is comfortable. But biking with a big pack is somewhat of a challenge. The back of my helmet kept hitting the top of my pack and standing up on my bike to better absorb rocks or bumps was pretty much out of the question. It also totally screwed with my center of balance, throwing my weight way over my handle bars which wasn’t very desirable for going downhill. However . . . we had a lot of fun doing it, slightly enjoying the worried look that would overcome the cows as we passed.
We arrived at the hut a little out of breath and pretty sweaty but we had barely begun what we had set out to do for the day. We quickly downsized to one pack with rain jackets and lunch, tossed our bikes in a grove of trees to hide them not from bike thieves but from the kea, or mountain parrot who enjoys eating rubber, and changed gears to begin our assent up to the Cascade Saddle. Cascade Saddle is the crossing between the Rees-Dart Track and the Matukituki Valley and usually ascended from the Dart Hut as a side day trip. The hike in to just the Dart Hut takes at least two days and seeing as we only had two days to spare we chose the one day straight up the mountain option.
From the hut we started off on a steep but hands-free trail in beech forest and before we knew it we had reached bushline and were looking down into the narrow valley we had just ascended. As a side note, most tracks in New Zealand are marked by orange arrows nailed to trees when you are in the bush, or orange posts when you are above bushline. It’s not the Yellow Brick Road down here, it’s the Orange Post Track. We had prepared ourselves for the section between bushline and the ridge which we would have to reach before descending to the saddle itself. The shortest distance between the valley floor and the saddle was a straight line up a giant rock wall, so to access the saddle the trail had to skirt around it entirely. But we may as well have been scaling the rock face because each orange marker was directly above the previous. 
Switchbacks (or zig-zags as they like to call them down here) did not exist on this track. But I don’t want it to sound like we weren’t enjoying ourselves. It may have kicked our butts and we may have been breathing way too hard, but I still had enough energy and pizzazz to do a little “Pylon Dance” when we reached the pylon marker at the top of the ridge. It was here, at the pylon, that we realized what a treat we were in for. Matukituki Valley was behind (or below) us, the Dart Glacier was starting to appear and Mt. Aspiring continuously fought the clouds that tried to envelop it. But we still had another hour ahead of us before we would reach the saddle so we trucked on . . . and it was totally worth it!
My words won’t do it justice but what we saw, or experienced, at the saddle was truly breathtaking. There was a strong wind too, which really did seem to take my breath away. So it literally, and figuratively, was breath-taking. We were standing on a cliffs edge that dropped straight down to the Matukituki Valley. In the distance Mount Aspiring’s snow covered summit peaked through the clouds. On the other side of the saddle we stood at eye level with the entire Dart Glacier, blue ice and all. All we could do was spin around in circles, attempting to digest the view in every direction.
We spent about a half hour at the saddle before starting back up to the ridge and then down down down to the hut where we spent a quiet night hobbling around, playing cards and reading with just a handful of other trampers. We woke up with tight legs and took the morning in the hut to drink a few rounds of coffee, eat a huge pot of muesli and read in front of the hut’s huge windows that faced up valley before getting back on our bikes for the descent down the valley and through the cattle to the carpark, homeward bound from another @$$ kicking and inspiring New Zealand weekend.