NEW ZEALAND: Getting High In New Zealand

I finally got around to writing the hunt report from our trip in April - been too busy working and hunting.

My son Tom and I hunted together in New Zealand for the first time in 2024 and built a great friendship with enthusiastic Kiwi Hunter Dan (Happy) Gilmore. We promised then, to make this a bi-ennial event and began planning the 2026 trip.

I took the 270WSM to Ripley Range the weekend before the trip and zeroed it with factory Winchester 150gr Powerpoints. My reloading gear was packed in boxes in storage and this would be the first time in my life that I would use factory ammunition on a hunt (with the exception of rimfire calibres of course).

Flights from Brisbane to Christchurch were booked and the requisite approvals/licences for export of firearms from Australia, import to NZ, export from NZ and import to Australia were obtained. I bought a new home in Brisbane after selling my unit in Maroochydore and took possession on Friday 17 April. Tom and I flew to NZ early on Saturday 18 April.
Dan (with his GSP/Labrador “Rudolph” – Rudi to his friends) picked us up from Christchurch airport in his Jeep Rubicon and, after a stop at Hunting & Fishing where I bought stuff that I already owned but was packed in boxes in storage, we drove to Fowlers Hut beside Molesworth Station, the largest property in NZ.

Rudi - awesome dog



We cooked steak & onions and stir-fried vegies on an open fire for dinner and trekked down to the fast-flowing and murky Clarence River to collect water – the sediment settled overnight. My -4oC “comfort” down sleeping bag wasn’t particularly comfortable that night.

Up at 04:00 on Sunday, we had a caffeine injection and walked up the gully from the hut and up and up, using head torches until dawn. We filled water bladders from a clear creek and a little further on, a deer was spotted in the pre-dawn dim light. Tom had never shot a Red Deer and this was one of the objectives of our trip. Tom set up over his pack and waited for sufficient light to take a shot with his Sako 75 in 338 WIN MAG. The LRF in the Swarovski 10x32 binos ranged the Hind at 240m, high across the gully. At the shot, the deer went to warp speed and disappeared over the rocky crag. Tom had shot to the left and was baffled by the miss.



We spotted some more deer on the next face up the gully and climbed and climbed. I couldn’t keep up with the boys and started lagging behind – felt weird and fuzzy-headed. It started sleeting and the surrounding mountains started to turn white with a dusting of snow. It was really cold and I lost feeling in fingers and toes.



Worried about being able to get out if the weather really closed in, we made our way back to Fowlers Hut over the next few hours. The descent down the mountain was excruciating with quads screaming with every step down. I had trained for a couple of months before the trip by walking up and down hills in Brisbane with a 28kg pack on my back and thought I was in pretty good shape and as prepared as I could be for the mountains in NZ. I was wrong. The first day of the trip had taken me to the edge of exhaustion and the limit of my physical endurance. I accumulated a lot of lactic acid in leg muscles and it was a few days before the pain started to subside. And I lost my multi-focal specs somewhere on the mountain – must have been when I took them off to use my binos at some stage.



When we arrived back at the hut, the weather miraculously cleared. We packed up and drove further into public land between spectacular snow-capped mountains. At a river crossing Dan spotted some Red Deer within a kilometre and he and Tom geared up to have a look – when they got close enough to evaluate the stag they abandoned the stalk and returned. Rudi and I waited at the car (walking was not a possibility for me at that time) and endured a dense cloud of Sandflies, millions of the insidious, biting terrorists. The NZ Sandfly is 3 or 4 times bigger than Australian Sandflies and although the bite is painful, it doesn’t seem to create the inflammation and ongoing aggravation that turns into suppurating sores that its Aussie cousins inflict. NZ doesn’t have snakes and lots of the other aggravations that the Aussie bush has, but the Sandfly is infuriating. Rudi hid under a blanket to get away from them.
Tom wanted to check zero on his rifle after missing this morning and found that he was shooting nearly 6 inches left and low at 100 metres. A few shots had him back on zero (1 ½” high at 100 metres). The Sako 75 in 338WM wears a Z6 1.7-10 Swarovski – this is the first time the scope has “shifted” since new (about 20 years).



We then drove to Ahuriri Base Hut, arriving at 02:00 on Monday. The hut was occupied, so we camped about 500m downriver. Huge day! We didn’t need rocking to sleep.

Day 2 - The dawn brought sleet and the tops were receiving snow (continued snowing on the tops all day) and it got really cold.
The occupants of Base Hut departed early and we moved in and stoked the fire and had a hot breakfast.
We tooled up and drove to the end of the road and walked deep into the river system to the base of the mountain where Tom shot his Tahr in 2024. Really rugged terrain. We spotted 3 Tahr, high up, about 2 ½ km away, but none of us were enthusiastic and our first objective was Red Deer, so we turned back. When we were about 1km from the car, Dan spotted a really good stag holding 2 or 3 Hinds to the East on the opposite bank of the River, less than 1km up on the “easy” slope.
Dan said “if you want to have a crack at him we’re going to get wet feet”. The stalk was on!
Dan had said that if we saw Deer near the River, with a low degree of difficulty for retrieval, it was my turn.



The deer were 2.5km away when we started the stalk. After fording multiple ice-cold streams across the kilometre-wide river bottom, we reached a small knoll below the group of Red Deer at 500m range and 45o angle uphill. As I was finding the stag in my scope (Swarovski Z6 1.7-10 on the Blaser 270WSM), I spotted movement to the right – a monster 14-point stag heading downhill toward the group that we were focussed on. This is the biggest Red Stag that I’ve ever seen in the wild!

The group – extreme range photo with the camera.


We couldn’t get closer and the group of Reds was onto us. The approaching Monarch didn’t seem to be aware of us though.
The stag stopped at 550m uphill and I took a deliberate prone shot with the Blaser resting on Dan’s day pack. Under recoil I thought Dan said “He’s down” and I was mentally buffing my fingernails on my chest for the longest hunting shot of my life, but he actually said “He’s coming down”. At the shot he ran downhill towards me and then did a U-turn and ran directly uphill away from me. I tracked him in the scope and Dan called the increasing range as he ran. He stopped again at 650m and I attempted another shot. Missed again! I wasn’t good enough to calculate the correct shooting solution quickly enough.
I had allowed for the 20-knot Southerly blowing right to left across the slope and it was nearly twice as far as I had ever attempted a hunting shot and the first time I had ever shot uphill at such an angle. Analysing my failure to connect (replaying the shots in my head over and over) I later realised that I had allowed windage and elevation for flat shooting – shot over him both times. Some will question why I even attempted the shots at that range? Because I would have regretted not having a crack at this magnificent stag, forever. You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.



We got back to the hut on dark and started drying our wet gear and boots in front of the wood heater – got really steamy in the hut. I cooked Pork rump steaks with broccolini, honeyed carrots and fried sliced potato for dinner – went down well.

Day 3 we were up and out before dawn after inhaling some coffee. I usually drink coffee black but Dan introduced me to cream – with the calories we were burning, it made sense to add some fat to our diet and it tasted great in the cold weather. We drove a few kilometres downriver to the south with Dan scanning the slopes with the thermal. He spotted 5 or 6 deer “low on the slopes” to the west, just under the snow line. We parked the Jeep and left Rudi in the back so he wouldn’t spook the deer (later regretted this).
Deer were spotted in the circle on the left and we shot from the ridge on the right. The snow moved down and intensified as we made our way up the ridge, until the flakes were falling on us.



We worked our way up the next ridge to the north of the deer and after a lung-busting 2km climb with the slope increasing as we went, we worked up to the top of the ridge from the reverse slope, about where we thought the deer would be on the next ridge to the south. Sure enough, there they were and there were two reasonable 10-point stags amongst them. Ranged at 350m and at about the same elevation, I rolled the first stag with the 270WSM and Tom the other with his 338WM. They both disappeared from sight as they rolled down the steep ridge, mine behind a rocky outcrop high on the ridge and Tom’s behind some scrub lower down. We then negotiated the climb down from our ridge, through the dense scrub and fast-flowing creek and then climbed the terrifyingly steep slope (it didn’t look that steep from a distance) on the other side and made our way up to where we expected to find the stags. After an exhausting hour or so, we reached the rocky outcrop where my stag dropped and found a blood trail but no stag! Then we went looking for Tom’s stag with the same result – blood trail but no stag – WTF?



We spent the next 2 hours working our way around the minor gullies and ridges looking for the 2 stags. It was snowing lightly but constantly and getting colder and the rocks and grass increasingly slippery. At one point my feet lost purchase and I found myself sliding on my arse toward about a 10m drop into a side gully but fortunately got purchase on some rocks with my (excellent) Crispi boots. It was at this point that the 2 boys said that I looked shattered and I should make my way as safely as possible back to the Jeep, a tiny speck (circled) about 2.5km away at the bottom of the valley.



I made my way down to the bottom of one of the side-gullies that fed into the creek below us and then worked my way down to the creek. Above the creek was a band of Bracken Fern about 100m top to bottom and the top of the bracken was about the height of my chin, so I could just see over the top but I couldn’t see my feet. My feet were continually tangled in undergrowth and it required energy-sapping effort to make headway. Then I stepped into nothing and plunged down into a hole with sheer sides and about 40cm deeper than I am tall. After a moment of panic while I doubted that I could get out, adrenaline kicked in and I somehow scrambled out. During our After Action Report back at the hut later, I learnt that both Tom and Dan had a similar experience. After a nerve-settling rest under the canopy of the bracken, I continued on. When I could see I was getting near the bottom of the band of bracken, I took one more small step and again plunged into thin air! This time I fell for what seemed a long time and I thought “this is it – I’m gunna die”. I landed on a small patch of dirt and fell back onto the cliff that I had just fallen from, about 3 times my height. An inch either side of where I landed was jagged rocks. If I’d landed anywhere but the exact spot that I did, I would have been in serious trouble. I didn’t move for a long time and I was pretty shaken. I explored feet and legs and the rest of me and found nothing broken or even seriously bruised – I had been very lucky. I resumed my journey down the creek, rock-hopping down the easiest path. When I was a young fella I could have run down that creek hopping from rock to rock, but I no longer have that agility and my descent was painstaking. When my brain started functioning again, I reached for the handheld UHF radio to let the boys know that I was OK and heading for the Jeep – to find that the radio was no longer on my chest rig! I reckon it’s at the bottom of the pit that I fell into. I eventually reached the Jeep but it was locked and Dan had the keys. The wind was getting up and I realised I couldn’t remain exposed and unmoving. Although I was pretty exhausted, I decided to walk back up the creek to make contact with the boys.
Just then, they appeared at the bend in the creek within sight of the Jeep (less than 2km away) and started hand-signals asking why I wasn’t talking to them on the UHF (looking at them through the binos). Eventually I was able to communicate that I didn’t have the UHF and they turned around and made their way back up the creek. I started walking back up to where I had seen them and I was a few hundred metres away when they reappeared with Tom carrying a Red Stag head over his shoulders.



After failing to locate either deer on the slopes, they had decided to pull the pin on the search and head back to the car. They both fell into holes under the bracken, as I had, and reached the creek to find that Tom’s stag (by the direction of the blood trail) had come to rest in the water after falling over a 5 metre cliff and smashing his nose on the rocks below. I don’t know how I didn’t see the stag in the water during my exfil from the mountain but I was pretty shaken by the time I reached the creek.
Tom carried out the head and Dan carried out the meat from the stag. When we got back to the hut, Rudi ate a hole in the Hunters Element meat bag to have a feed, LOL. I spent the last of daylight preparing the evening meal – lamb cutlets, fried onions, cauliflower and chips. The boys went for another look around and saw a big group of Tahr to the north but too far away to attempt before dark. Dinner was appreciated by all.

Day 4 we were up at 05:00 and had Bumper Bars and coffee, packed up and left the hut.



We drove to the end of the road, crunching through frozen puddles. Dan spotted 3 deer to the west and we went for an “easy” walk, about 1km and 200m elevation, but the deer winded us. It was a crisp, clear -2oC morning and by 10:00 the temperature was still in single digits.
We did the tourist thing and went to Mount Cook and walked up to the Glacier and then drove to Dan & Sam’s place on the east coast at Oamaru, had a shower and charged batteries and had a good sleep.

Day 5 we left at 05:00, bought hot pies from a bakery in Oamaru and started hunting for Chamois at Oteake before dawn. We saw many Red Deer but no Chamois. Dan and Tom started stalking a good 12-point Red Stag on the other side of a ravine but it took off before they got to the bottom of the first descent. We drove a track through incredibly picturesque steep country, above the snow line.

Day 6 we took Dan’s plate aluminium boat to Shag Point, not far south of Oamaru and motored out to a reef (called Danger Reef) about 2km off shore. We fished for 3 hours and caught about 60 Blue Cod, Trumpeters and Wrasse (2 types). We kept 16 Blue Cod and 3 Trumpeters and as we were releasing smaller fish and unwanted species, we were soon surrounded by large sea birds called “Mollymawks”.















We had a great feed of Fish n Chips that night.

Day 7 we had a sleep-in, then packed up and went into Oamaru and explored the town – once a whaling village.





We had pies and coffee in Victorian Old Town and then to Hunting & Fishing when it opened at 11:00. Then headed for the Hobson River valley.
As we drove into the Hobson, Dan spotted some Red Hinds “low down” on the left and then I saw a good stag about 800 metres up the slope to the right of them. He was big-bodied and had 10 or 12 points.



We closed the gap to 400m at the base of the steep slope and I set up behind a rock with Dan’s pack as a rest, aimed at the top of his shoulder and squeezed off. A satisfying thwock came back to us and the stag staggered, stumbled and ran down the near vertical face into the heavily timbered and choked gully. After a difficult hour of climbing through the Beech forest and several arse-clenching moments, we reached the spot where I shot him and found bright arterial blood. Confident of finding him, we followed the blood trail – but not very far! This was terrifyingly steep and not dying became the priority.
Again, we didn’t find the stag, even with Rudi the GSP/Lab cross on the job. I think he got confused with the huge amount of deer scent in the gully. It was a mission getting off that mountain safely.
The view from where the deer was hit:



After losing a second Red Stag, I decided to retire the 270WSM and use Tom’s 338WM for the rest of the hunt – we know the Woodleigh PPSN bullets are reliable. This was the first and last time that I will hunt with factory ammunition.
It was a long weekend and there were 4WD vehicles in big numbers throughout the Hobson system, so we drove 3 hours back to Dan’s place. Imagine that, 3 hours to go hunting in country like this!

Day 9 we went back to the Hopkins, hopeful that the long-weekend tourists had headed for home. Stopped at Otematata and enjoyed some renowned Jalapeno Steak Pies. We drove deeper into the river system than we had in 2024, past Monument Hut and stopped to look at Red Hut on the East bank of the Hopkins. This is one of the oldest huts maintained (poorly) by DOC (Department of Conservation), built in 1916.



We watched 2 jet boats forging up one of the many shallow Hopkins River streams while enjoying the afternoon sun at Red Hut. We passed Elcho Hut on the opposite bank of the River and then forded the River to Colours Hut on the West bank. It was at this point that we discovered the Jeep had developed a leak from the radiator. Some idiot design engineer thought it would be OK to have plastic load-bearing seals on the radiator. It was going to be a long, slow trip home – we were now deep into the Hopkins with many difficult 4WD crossings to negotiate on the way out.



We stopped frequently to top up the radiator from the river and saw good numbers of Red Deer stags and a lot of Tahr, including a couple of big bulls, all too far away to attempt in the late afternoon – the days are not long this far south.
We went past Elcho Hut (because there were people already in residence), the Taj Mahal in the Hopkins system that is maintained by a mountaineering club and went on to Cullers Hut, the least salubrious hut in the Hopkins.

Elcho Hut


Cullers Hut

Day 10 was the biggest single day of the trip for distance covered on foot. We had hot soup followed by Bumper Bars (only available in NZ) for breakfast and headed out at first light.
We headed west up Elcho Stream from Cullers Hut, that apparently links up with the Ahuriri system that we hunted in the first week. Within 500m we had wet feet from fording Elcho Stream. According to my Garmin smart watch we did 19,500 steps today, at least 19,000 of them with squelching boots. We saw a heap of animals, Tahr and Red Deer, including a big Bull Tahr on a 100o rock face nonchalantly strolling along, and a big 14-point Red Stag. All of the animals seen were inaccessible.
We crossed a well-built suspension bridge to the northern side of Elcho Stream – the facilities provided free to the public on DOC land in NZ are amazing.





Around lunchtime we diverted up a small stream feeding into the Elcho and the going became increasingly steep and treacherously slippery. Looking back now, it was something of a highlight, but at one stage we were several hundred metres up a near-vertical scree slope with moving loose rock underfoot and looking, seemingly vertically down into the swift-flowing creek, when Tom and looked at each other and saw the fear in the other’s eyes. Simultaneously, we said “let’s not risk life and limb attempting to climb further” (or expletives with similar meaning). Another of the many times that we could’a died. It is intensely energy-sapping when involuntarily sliding, with arse clenched, towards a cliff with the ice-melt torrent far below.
Every time we stopped for a breather, Rudi tried to find a flat spot to curl up and sleep – he was knackered by lunchtime but he battled on and had a big sleep that night.





We continued to see animals between 1500 and 3000m away but all up impossible mountains.



Tom below me on the terrifying climb – photos don’t do it justice, this is looking almost straight down:


We carried on up the Elcho after that and came to an ice cave formed over the stream by the snow sliding of the mountain and compacting in the valley below. We didn’t try crossing the ice field after a recce determined that there were too many unstable fissures to fall down. Tom flew his drone to explore the ice cave.





We returned via Elcho Hut through a mystical Beech forest with every surface covered in moss. The boys informed me that scenes from “Lord of the Rings” were filmed here. I didn’t understand a lot of the banter between the two Lord of the Rings nerds.



We cooked dinner while our boots and wet gear dried on makeshift clothes lines in front of a fitful open fire – there’s no quality hardwood to be found around the huts. I cooked up a big feed of steaks, mushrooms, onions, broccolini, honey carrots and potato slices – went down well.

Day 11 was our last hunting day and Dan was keen to get me an animal. The boys were keen to sleep in after yesterday’s exertions and I annoyed them by getting up early (old blokes wake up often to answer the call of nature) and getting the fire going and boiling water for coffee. We packed up and started heading out of the Hopkins system, stopping frequently to top up the Jeep’s radiator. Each time we stopped, we noticed that the wind was getting stronger. We went past Monument Hut to check out the slopes on the western side of the valley, that had been productive for Dan in the past. Dan spotted some animals about 2km away above a Beech forest and we got out of the Jeep, the wind was so strong that it was difficult to stay on our feet. I took a video of the waterfalls coming off the mountain being blown to mist and not reaching the bottom – awe-inspiring.

You can see the river getting whipped into mist in this shot.


A still from the video – we hunted the ridge to the right of these waterfalls.


We tooled up to make our way up the relatively benign-looking incline (never as benign as they look!) beside the Beech forest to get within shooting range of the group of Chamois, the first that we had seen where there was a chance of getting to them. We donned many layers to ward off the horizontally driven sleet that stung every exposed surface and started the stalk. Thus commenced the most challenging hunt of my life.
It took us several hours to zig-zag up the ever-steepening mountain beside the Beech forest with quads screaming and much huffing and puffing (from me anyway – the boys seemed to be doing it easy). The ever-intensifying wind sounded like a 747 taking off beside us as it screamed through the Beech trees. We didn’t have to worry about noise giving us away to the Chamois (French word for “Rock Goat”) – my loud puffing was nothing in this Force-10 gale!
We made it to the edge of the Beech forest where we could see the small herd of Chamois females bedded on a tiny, mostly covered bench. Dan ranged the most visible one at 280m and I used Tom’s 338WM with 225gr Woodleigh PPs to take the shot at a 45o upward angle. At the shot, she fell backwards down the cliff towards us – the Woody had done its job and I was chuffed with the shot in those conditions. We climbed up to where she fell and took the obligatory photos. The photos didn’t capture the horizontal sleet and my chest harness under my raincoat was one of 5 or 6 layers.

Dan recovered the Chamois from its final resting place






The view from the top




I started the climb down the mountain with the head while Dan and Tom took the meat – I knew they would catch up to me and I didn’t want to slow them down. Wind chill was a serious consideration whenever we stopped moving. I was blown off my feet 3 times during the descent! Going down is much harder on the quads than going up and I found myself yelling with the pain of cramps. I stopped to drink some water with Hydrolyte and relief was rapid. The quads were still screaming but at least I wasn’t cramping anymore. Dehydration is a trap for young players in NZ – because it’s so cold, you don’t sweat but because it’s so cold the air is really low humidity and every breath carries moisture out of your body. Several times on this trip I found my mouth so dry that I couldn’t raise enough saliva to wet my tongue. At the bottom of the valley it was only rain being blown horizontally – doesn’t hurt as much as sleet.



We drove back to Dan’s place and I cooked a Chamois Curry for dinner. The meat hadn’t even set by then and I knew it would be tough, so thinly sliced into the curry made it edible and the flavour was fantastic.

Day 12 was our last full day in NZ. We slept in and woke late after 9 ½ hours of much-needed sleep. We packed up and drove to Timaru and picked up Tom’s 12 3/8” Tahr head (shot in 2024) from Calibre Taxidermy.



Some of the mounts on display at Calibre Taxidermy




Dan dropped us off at one of the airport hotels in Christchurch and we flew back to Brisbane the next morning.

What an amazing trip!

Thanks to Dan for making it happen – love your enthusiasm for hunting and fishing mate!

Until next time 2028!







Tom's video of our NZ adventure

That was a great adventure, congrats

Congrats on getting the chamois.
Seems you had one awesome adventure.
Too bad you couldn't retrieve the other 2 stags.

Ridge Runner said:

Congrats on getting the chamois.
Seems you had one awesome adventure.
Too bad you couldn't retrieve the other 2 stags.

Click to expand...

Losing animals like that causes "lying awake at night" moments.

If you're contemplating a NZ hunt, get the best boots you can. Regardless, the best boots will not survive more than a few months of hunting NZ high country. I thoroughly recommend the Crispi boots. I've used Meindl, Zamberlan, Lowa, and 3 or 4 other brands whose names escape me at the moment over 60 years of hunting and these are head and shoulders above the rest.

Nothing like dangling off the sides of mountains to create perspective on life.
Congratulations to you all for surviving those slopes.
Thanks for sharing the adventures.

458JCE said:

Day 12 was our last full day in NZ. We slept in and woke late after 9 ½ hours of much-needed sleep. We packed up and drove to Timaru and picked up Tom’s 12 3/8” Tahr head (shot in 2024) from Calibre Taxidermy.

Some of the mounts on display at Calibre Taxidermy

Dan dropped us off at one of the airport hotels in Christchurch and we flew back to Brisbane the next morning.

What an amazing trip!

Thanks to Dan for making it happen – love your enthusiasm for hunting and fishing mate!

Until next time 2028!

Tom's video of our NZ adventure

Click to expand...

Totally should have set the video to lord of the rings soundtrack
Looks like an epic hunt.

Great idea - I'll suggest it to Tom

Great adventure mate