Episode 202

Looking After Te Araroa, Hut Etiquette and Trail Fees with Matt Claridge

13 November 2026 58 min

Episode 202

0:00 / 58:21

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Te Araroa has come up on this podcast more than any other trail. So I was really really excited to finally go behind the scenes and find out who looks after it.

Matt Claridge is the person to ask. He's the Chief Executive of the Te Araroa Trust, and he's spent his career in sport, recreation and public safety, getting people moving and getting people outdoors. We met in person a couple of months before we recorded, at Castle Hill, and I'm pretty sure I asked him half these questions then (sorry Matt).

So this one covers the lot. How Te Araroa started as one man's idea, why walkers register and pay, the post-COVID rush that showed where the trail was struggling, and hut etiquette from both sides: if you're walking it, and if you're a Kiwi sharing a hut with someone who is. Plus Matt's take on training, trail legs, gear, and the section he'd walk tomorrow if he could.

In this episode

How Matt fell for the outdoors
The story of Te Araroa
What makes Te Araroa different
The post-COVID rush on Te Araroa
Why Te Araroa walkers register and pay
Hut etiquette for TA walkers and Kiwis
Stories from Te Araroa walkers
Training, trail legs and going home mid-trail
Where Te Araroa goes next
Matt's own Te Araroa, gear and advice

How Matt fell for the outdoors

Matt calls his upbringing typical but lucky, a good Kiwi one. Sport was a big part of it, and so was swimming, which later turned into surf lifesaving. At the Otago University School of Phys Ed, part of the course was a 10-day practicum up around the Greenstone Caples: good friends, good people, doing cool things in a great place. That trip is etched into his memory.

He started in the Te Araroa role in February 2022, and his interest in the outdoors has only grown since. He describes the outdoors as magnetic: you get a little dose and you need more, sometimes a lot more. His bucket list keeps getting longer, and he reckons New Zealand is so lucky to have so much public conservation land and so many walks. There are moments of awe, like massive valleys carved by ancient glaciers, or a couple of whio racing down a river beside you, skating in with their feet out.

All of that feeds his personal mission, which lines up with Te Araroa's: more people in the outdoors.

I'm right there with him on the bucket list. Every trail I walk, there's another valley I want to go up and another place I want to come back to.

The story of Te Araroa

People who've heard of Te Araroa might know it as a walk of more than 3,000 kilometres between Cape Reinga and Bluff. For Matt, the real beauty is in its history.

Back in the 90s, Geoff Chapple had an idea: a walkway from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island. The idea became a line on the map. Then Geoff walked it, meeting landowners, farmers and everybody and anybody on the way, and he did deals for access. Through the early 2000s he explored, mapped and routed Te Araroa, and then the work began of joining the trails up into one big, continuous trail. The name means the long pathway, and as Matt says, it sure is.

There's never been a vision for Te Araroa to be a two-metre-wide, paved, easy path. Matt calls it Kiwi style, with a bit of number eight wire. The Trust doesn't own any land, so it piggybacks on others, and popular trails like the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, the 42 Traverse, the Queen Charlotte Track and the Alps 2 Ocean all form part of it. In some places it's a backcountry tramping track, and in others it's a footpath down Queen Street in Auckland or Lambton Quay in Wellington. You have to be resilient and resourceful, and expect a bit of brutality. With the brutality comes the beauty.

I'd never really thought about how unusual that variety is: a city, then Ninety Mile Beach, the bush, the Tararua Ranges and the volcanoes, every part of New Zealand in one trail.

What makes Te Araroa different

Thru-hikes are growing in popularity around the world, and Matt says they're fantastic for regional economies and slow tourism. What Te Araroa has is time. The average international visitor stays in New Zealand for 12 days. To walk Te Araroa you need 135 days on average, so with a bit added either side, you're here for about five months. Te Araroa walkers stay longer, go further and make deeper connections, to themselves and to the people around them.

When the Trust did some qualitative research earlier this year with people who'd walked the trail, one thing came through from every single person: Te Araroa changes you. A Great Walk has a start and a finish three or four days later. On Te Araroa, you spend so much time with yourself, isolated and resourceful, that you're going to change. For some it's a healing process, and for others it's stepping out to explore or for a challenge. Whichever it is, Matt says you're guaranteed to benefit.

The post-COVID rush on Te Araroa

When Matt started, the borders hadn't quite reopened. Walker numbers had been really low, and so was revenue, because registrations were voluntary and donations were the Trust's core income. Not much work had been done on the trail: deferred maintenance, as anyone who knows DOC would put it.

The Trust made registering simpler, made the donation button easier to find, and put as much time and money as it could into the trail app, its official navigation tool. Midway through winter 2022, the app's analytics showed big numbers in Germany, France, Holland and the States, and the developer told Matt he reckoned they were going to be pretty busy.

He was right. In the summer of 2022 to 2023, the trail was hit with an almost overwhelming number of walkers: 3,000 people walking end to end, let alone everyone walking shorter sections. Matt says 80% of the people who walk Te Araroa are international visitors, and 75% walk from Cape Reinga to Stirling Point in Bluff.

With that many people on it, the trail's frailties showed: maintenance, development, a shortage of the trail angels who support walkers, and areas of tension.

Why Te Araroa walkers register and pay

The Trust needed a revenue base for trail maintenance, so it brought in a registration programme. When we recorded, registering cost $60, and you got a pack with a bag tag, a badge, a little pāua shell bracelet (a taonga) and a few other mementos. There's also the Trail Pass, set up with DOC, which works as the backcountry hut pass for the huts and campsites.

International walkers were asked for a donation on top. Not every walker donated, and it was typically international walkers who didn't. Matt calls that an observation and a learning. The trouble was that the trail manager couldn't do the planned work.

The 1% that changed the model

By 2024 to 2025, with 2,500 walkers on the trail, 40% of registering walkers donated when they registered. Of the rest, 55% said they'd donate later. At the end of the season, the Trust went back to that 55%, and 1% of them donated.

You can't run an organisation like that. So the Trust merged the registration, the Trail Pass and the donation into one fee. Matt points out New Zealand isn't a wealthy country with a big tax take, so there's a cost to accessing the outdoors, especially for international visitors. When we recorded, the international fee was $1,350, about $10 a day, and Matt calls it the Trust's minimum expectation and a pretty fair contribution. Te Araroa is hard, and it isn't cheap: you can't do it flying by the seat of your pants.

As I see it, a thousand-odd dollars for four months on a trail isn't that bad. You'd spend much more than that living in a house.

The fees pay for hundreds of kilometres of maintenance, volunteer trail crews (a programme that grew again this year), and new assets, like a bridge that takes out 30 kilometres of road walking and a boardwalk through the Longwoods.

When I had Naomi Arnold on the podcast, the author of the book Northbound, she talked about walking the Longwoods before the boardwalk, and she was both excited and very dismayed to hear it went in after she'd finished. It shows exactly why the Trust needs fees to keep the track maintained.

Cheaper for New Zealanders

When we recorded, New Zealanders paid the $60 registration, which you can come back and do year after year, plus the Trail Pass if you need it and a donation, with the Trust's guidance at $10 a day. Matt doesn't want cost to stop more New Zealanders connecting with Te Araroa, and New Zealanders have already contributed to building it through their taxes and support.

Hut etiquette for TA walkers and Kiwis

One of the Trust's objectives is to connect more New Zealanders with Te Araroa. With 80% of walkers international, Matt calls it awesome and a tragedy at the same time: it should be the other way around. He'd love more Kiwis to know where the trail is and what a Te Araroa walker looks like (they're pretty distinctive). So say g'day and have a chat. Walkers remember the places, and they remember the people.

Busy huts and early starts

People have raised overcrowding at huts with Matt, and TA walkers getting there early and leaving early. The Trust gives walkers a clear, bulleted list of information from DOC when they register, covering the Trail Pass, booking and how to behave in a hut. Its Tiaki Ranger volunteers, the friendly face of the backcountry, also have evening conversations with walkers about hut life and how to cross a river.

He also inherited the belief that TA walkers don't pay. Registered walkers now carry a bag tag, so if you see one, they've paid their way.

For walkers, the message is to behave in the hut, pay, and be mindful of others. For Kiwis, it helps to know TA walkers tend to go to bed early and be up early and gone. Sometimes they don't clean up, maybe because they're trying not to wake anyone. The Trust gives every registered walker a cloth for wiping down the hut bench and table, because nobody from DOC is standing in the arrivals lounge at Auckland Airport to explain how huts work.

There's no manual on what to do in a hut for New Zealanders either. So I think we need to be compassionate to anyone in a hut, whether it's a TA walker or a family getting out for the first time. If you're more experienced, it's a chance to show someone else how it's done.

How you can help a TA walker

On an overnight tramp, my husband took the rubbish off all the TA walkers in the hut, telling them they had 10 days ahead of them, so he'd carry it out.

Matt says it starts with taking an interest. In the Richmond Ranges earlier this year, he met a Te Araroa walker who could barely walk, his feet mangled and wrecked, and gave him the socks off his own feet. He's not saying everyone needs to give up their socks (though some people like to bake scones in a hut for whoever arrives). It comes from the conversation. As he puts it:

"We're all ambassadors and representatives of New Zealand in the backcountry, whether we're meeting other Kiwis or internationals."

It reminds me of one of my first multi-day hikes, the Tongariro Northern Circuit, playing Uno in a hut with a bunch of strangers and trying to explain the rules in a couple of different languages around the table. Such a great human moment.

Stories from Te Araroa walkers

There are walkers who are incredibly prepared, and then they hit Ninety Mile Beach. The first stretch to Twilight campsite isn't too bad, but the next three days get quite hard, and the sand is hard to walk on. As Matt puts it, everyone's got a Te Araroa plan until they walk Ninety Mile Beach.

Most people overprepare. Matt once met a walker coming down towards Whangārei Heads, an ex-army man in his mid-60s, who'd started out with his old army pack, loaded to the brim. Halfway through the day after Twilight campsite, he left a pile of goodies on Ninety Mile Beach for the next person. A day later, he left another. Back in Kaitāia, he went straight into Hunting & Fishing and bought a new pack.

The advice Matt has heard most:

"Don't over plan it. Test your gear, try and get fit, harden your feet up, but train with wet feet, wet socks."

Then there are the magical stories. Walkers going southbound especially form a trail family, shortened to tramily, that moves south in a bubble, maybe spread out over a few days and together for a night here or there. Matt says those connections run deep because of what you go through together. That's the duality of Te Araroa: brutal and beautiful, with moments of isolation and incredible times of connection.

Training, trail legs and going home mid-trail

On our two-month sea kayak expedition last summer, I found that once you're out there, the spreadsheet doesn't mean much, because you're bound by the weather and how your body feels.

Matt agrees. People divide 3,070 kilometres by 20 kilometres a day and it doesn't work out like that. At one extreme, someone walked Te Araroa in 31 days for the fastest known time, 100 kilometres a day. At the other, an 82-year-old walked it two years ago. Matt's advice is to start small and slow: your body adapts, but the body and the mind need to adapt together. Don't set an expectation of big kilometres early on, because:

"it can take anywhere from three to four weeks for your trail legs to really kick in"

Give yourself a time window with room to go off trail and recuperate. Sometimes you need more than a zero day, or you might need to seek treatment, and it's a chance to catch up with people down the country too. Don't rush it, so you can enjoy it.

Should you go home mid-trail?

Matt has no reason to say don't. He knows a few people who did, including Naomi Arnold, and he hasn't noticed people liking home so much they don't go back. He caught up with Anurag Sharma, who walked northbound a couple of years ago, when Anurag was taking a week at home in Wellington. By day four, he was itching to get back out there.

I walked the Auckland section with Anurag, which was so cool, because I've always wanted to do the Auckland coast to coast walk. He made time for everyone who stopped us to ask why we were carrying packs through central Auckland. It was never a rush to finish the day.

On our kayak journey, we did go home, and it was such a conflicting question for me. It ended up being the end of our trip, because the weather packed in and we were running out of time. Going back to that safe space mid-expedition felt jarring.

Matt's answer: the trail will call you.

Where Te Araroa goes next

The Trust has a really significant partnership with DOC, and two philosophies:

Trail first. What does the trail need? Whoever's land it is, the Trust coordinates volunteers and contractors to do the work.
Regeneration. The Trust wants the trail corridor redeveloped. In the Longwoods, it's giving everything around the trail time to heal.

Matt couldn't tell you the trail's carrying capacity, because it's so variable. So the Trust is going to develop shelters on the trail, with toilets, running water and cooking facilities, to spread walkers away from the huts at busy times and a little off the key routes New Zealanders want to use too. With more internationals and more New Zealanders interested every year, he says the Trust can't keep taking registrations without ways to cope with the load. That's one of its biggest priorities, along with securing some government funding so the crews and contractors can deliver a trail of at least a minimum standard.

The other part of the vision is people. Four million New Zealanders live within 75 minutes of Te Araroa. It goes through 21 cities and towns, the smallest of the small and the biggest of the big, and in a long, skinny country with a long, skinny line down the middle, you're never far from it.

I love that New Zealand is a place where someone can have a vision for the outdoors and bring it to life. A couple of episodes ago, I talked to Till Middelhauve, who set up the first via ferrata in New Zealand: another guy with a vision.

Matt's own Te Araroa, gear and advice

Matt has walked 21% of Te Araroa. He knows because he's ticked it off in the trail app, which he'll plug until he's blue in the face as the best tool for planning and exploring the trail. When we recorded, you could book huts directly through it with one touch. He started out section walking, but his dream is to walk the whole thing: his personality suits staying longer on trail.

A listener asked which section he'd skip and which he'd never miss. He'd go northbound, as 20% of walkers do, because he grew up in the South Island and would like to explore it first (and he doesn't believe starting at Cape Reinga means walking downhill). He wouldn't skip a section: the highs and lows form the experience, so he'd do it all. The one he's busting to do tomorrow is the Richmond Ranges. You've got to book it, and you kind of want to book the weather too. It's top of my list as well.

Gear: your shoes, your sleep system, your pack

The ultralight trend has well and truly coincided with the popularity of thru-hiking, and for some it's a race to the bottom on weight. Matt says there's compromise with everything, so work out what you really need and test your gear. His big three:

Shoes. You'll be on your feet for up to nine hours a day, so get good ones, test them and wear them in.
Your sleep system. Sleeping on the ground takes a few nights to get used to. Make sure you're warm and as comfortable as possible, so you recuperate.
Your pack. Not all packs are the same, so test them and get one that fits you.

Advice for this summer

Matt calls Te Araroa the experience of a lifetime. Let the noise fade away, be engrossed in every step, and let things unfold around you. Use the trail app, share your location with the people close to you, and embrace the chance for random, grounded connections that might last a lifetime.