Mt Grey is a pretty popular hill to climb for Cantabrians. It’s a reasonably easy and straightforward walk. As trampers are always looking for a challenge, our ancestral trampers came up with a twist – climb Mt Grey and return via the Grey River. Or should I say, in the Grey River?

We walked up Mt Grey from Okuku Road. This run-down road is labelled as 2WD, but my car wasn’t happy at all driving along it, and I’d prefer not to take it up there next time. Anyway, from the road end, it’s a fairly straightforward walk up to Mt Grey on Mt Grey Track. From the top, we continued along the Red Beech Track and down to the Grey River. At the intersection of the Red Beech Track and the Grey River, we started heading downstream.

The river is fairly mellow at the start. There are a few deep-ish pools, but reasonably flexible trampers can scramble around them on large boulders and slippery rock walls. The river progressively offers more and more challenging sections, and from a certain point it reaches a “point of no return”, where a tramper needs to jump into deep pools from small waterfalls (see my photos), and it would be very hard – if not impossible – to scramble back up. There aren’t many escape options either: both river sides are very steep and, although the Red Beech track looks very close on a map, it’s tricky to scramble up to it.

My group eventually got cold enough that the members were keen to climb back up to the track. I descended again and continued solo in the river, which proved to be doable all the way back to the car park. After a series of compulsory swims and jumps into deep pools, the river eventually becomes mellow again and manageable for average trampers.

I believe it would be very hard – if not impossible – to do this trip in reverse, so do yourself a favour and follow the river downstream rather than upstream.

Doing something like this in summer provides a great opportunity to practise pack floating or swimming with a backpack. In any other season it would be much more challenging, as the water temperature isn’t very high even in summer. Great fun during a heatwave!

Stats: around 14 km, 700 m ascent, 7 h (chilled pace). No GPX this time but there’s a rough map of the trip between my photos.

Participants: Michal Klajban (leader, scribe, GPX), Cary van Vorsselen, Clare van Vorsselen, Monika Bratownik, Mark Nicholls, Alireza Mokhtar, Ashley Beijeman, Rachel Hunt, Sushil Poudel, Merel Swart, Carmela Terrobias, Bill Johnson, Kim Milson, Yurii Kotok, Peter Vetcher, Kylie Dawson

Tramped on 7th March 2026.

Photos

Wee video from the trip