Having completed both Routeburn and Milford in 2022, Dad had spied Greenstone - Caples as his next venture on the Otago alps / Fiordland area. These two valleys (separated by McKellar Saddle) form a 4 day loop, and represent a blend of the prior tramps - the river flats of Routeburn, and the valley linkages plus glacially scraped valley sides of Milford.
The initial plan had been to undertake the Routeburn / Greenstone trip run by the Otago Youth Adventure Trust (OYAT), which goes up Routeburn and then exits via the Greenstone Valley. Dad had previously done trips with the Trust previously and really rates them as a provider, as do others apparently given the trip sold out within a few minutes.
I was secretly unfussed. Part of the driver to use OYAT was to get the more upmarket lodges in the Greenstone, which in turn was influenced by having Alan and Sandy potentially joining us and their preference for a few more creature comforts. That would have been wonderful for sure, but the OYAT does have its challenges - no real ability to defer if the weather forecast is poor, the repetition of the Routeburn portion which we'd already done and the extended duration (5 days / 4 nights) which would have meant the whole week off work. It was also the more pricey option at $1600, plus the costs of getting to Dunedin - our self-managed trip was roughly a third of that, excluding flight costs.
With the OYAT trip sold out, I got agreement to organise a self-guided Greenstone Caples loop. Alan and Sandy ultimately did not join, so I got the logistics underway for three people. A good Jetstar sale saw us get $200 return fares per person for Wellington to Queenstown, which covered the base fare + 20kg of checked in luggage + FareCredit (i.e. we could cancel and get the fares in credit). Blenheim to Wellington fares via Sounds Air were a bit awkward, but Picton to Wellington fares were cheaper and offered free parking at the terminal. Accommodation was sorted in both Wellington and Queenstown, the DOC huts were booked. The only thing left to sort was the transport to the road end.
This proved to be the biggest headache of the logistics. The Greenstone carpark is a bit challenging in that the final 11km of road is quite rough, and has three stream fords which can be quite deep. The road gets damaged quite frequently - it washed out in November 2024, and then again in October 2025. It closed again due to uncrossable fords a few days before our trip, and while on the walk itself we got an email from DOC warning the road was likely to become impasssable again the weekend we were exiting.
Info & Track do run a Greenstone shuttle (often borrowing the Nomad Safaris 4WD), but the outbound shuttle leaves too early to connect to the morning flights into Queenstown. Kinloch Wilderness Lodge run a shuttle for the final short section (currently $100 each way for up to four people), but in a bout of bad luck they were short of staff and were not running a full schedule at the time of our trip. Info & Track will run a Queenstown to Greenstone charter for around $350 if they have availability, so that is an option (or you can just fly into Queenstown the day before).
For us, we ultimately just got a rental vehicle. This is a bit of a gamble, as most rental companies prohibit you from driving the road to Greenstone and those that do allow it will effectively invalidate your insurance due to the risk of underbody or submersion damage. It doesn't help that there's a large sign at the entrance to Greenstone Station Road warning of the risk of vehicle damage - you will want to read all the fine print to understand your rental situation here. A very rough guide to the fords is that if there's 70mm+ forecast at Harris Saddle or 25mm+ in Queenstown itself, the road fords will be impassable. We drove it in mostly dry conditions and the deepest ford was probably still 6 - 8", but we were comfortable in a rental Ford WildTrak 4x4 - I'd be renting a compact SUV at a minimum for this one.
Anyway, enough of the logistics. After booking in July, December came around surprisingly fast. The preceding couple of weeks were spent mostly refreshing the Queenstown Lakes District Council Facebook page for road updates, and checking the forecasts on Windy. The late spring / early summer forecasting was all over the place to be honest - initially it predicted heavy rain all four days, before blending to a mixture of cloudy days and rain and then lovely sunshine. By the time we left Wellington, it had reverted to cloud all four days with some degree of rain on Days 1 and 3 so we just had to fly and hope.
The logistics of the trip all mercifully worked. I headed down after work on Tuesday, arriving in Wellington around 6:45pm. Matt and Dad were already checked in, so we briefly caught up before heading out for groceries and dinner. We settled on a hole-in-the-wall place for Thai, Matt and Dad got familiar dishes whereas I naturally picked the one I'd never heard of which ended up being quite spicy. It was a brave decision, and one that my stomach protested for over a day - next time I'd just get something a bit whiter.
Back at the hotel, we finished our packing as best we could and headed to bed. A good sleep was followed by a 6am awakening, and we all managed to fit in showers and our remnant packing before getting out the door around 7:15am.