Silver Peaks Backpacking

On Friday Xander, Rob, Heather, Julie, and I set out of the Silver Peaks trail heading to the Jubilee Hut, where we'd be spending the night. The trailhead was about 20 minutes north of Dunedin. We parked Pam, our car, on the dirt road that you get to the trail from. It was about a 3 and a half hour hike to the hut. It was a really varied track- we walked through part of a forest, across tall grasslands, across ridgelines, and up and down almost vertical cliff faces. On the way there though the weather was beautiful and you could see clearly for a long way. We got to the hut just before dark; would have been real bad if we'd left even 15 minutes later. The trail was almost unrecognizable in some parts and finding the hut took a bit of searching first. But, we got there just in time. Two guys Xander knows from his study abroad program, Ross and Neil, were already there- they'd arrived about an hour earlier. Xander had dropped them off at the trailhead earlier in the day. The hut was really nice- almost brand new, a table, about 10 mattresses, and some shelf space. There was a rainwater collection tank outside where you could get water right from the porch. The sign said it was good to drink so I drank lots of it. There was also a portable toilet a few meters away from the hut. We stayed up for awhile eating and drinking the boxed wine and a few beers we'd brought with. On an interesting note, it turns out that our friend Julie is the 2nd ranked women’s tri-athlete in the world. That's pretty crazy.
On Saturday morning we got up early and had breakfast, packed up, and cleaned the hut out. We hiked back up the ridiculous first uphill and continued on pretty rapidly. Unlike Friday’s nice weather, Saturday was cold, windy, and foggy so we headed back to the car quickly. It was a really cool hike- it had some pretty intense parts where the trail was basically the same as the rest of the bush. Good stuff.
The rest of the weekend was uneventful- sitting around doing homework for once, etc.