No. This website doesn’t document many of the 140 backcountry huts found on the West Coast between Karamea and Haast.
Well, there aren’t many easy, or even hard loop tracks on The Coast.
The rivers are steep, and a real boulder festival. Often the route is just following the riverbed where rock hopping over car, bus, house sized boulders, and getting your feet/undies wet are required, even when the weather is good. The mountains are also very steep. It ain’t so easy popping from one river valley into the one adjacent.
With a few relatively easy exceptions, Welcome Flat, Cedar Flat, expeditions into the West Coast hills are, err, expeditions.
You need considerable experience in trail finding as the tracks can be poorly marked, you may be required to cross hair raising slips, or wait out flooding in rivers, etc. It is not simply a step up from the Great Walks, it can be demanding, energy expending tramping at its purest.
Due to the high rainfall, 10 m a year is common, and the steepness of the terrain, the rivers get up super quickly. That also means they can drop almost as fast. A 300 mm deluge in 24 hours happens often enough.
The remotehuts.co.nz, remotehuts.co.nz/huts/, website documents 66, err, remote huts or bivvies on the western side of the Southern Alps. Many are the most difficult/strenuous/foolhardy huts to access. Some are therefore seldom visited. The 66 huts/bivvies are no longer fully maintained by DOC and are now cared for by the hard working volunteers of the Permolat Trust, remotehuts.co.nz/about. Thanks for not allowing DOC to demolish these refuges, as was proposed by DOC back in 2002.
Here’s a few huts and bivvies from The Coast . . .
