Longwood summit (764 m) (Southland)

Easy track inside Longwood range to the Longwood summit.
To get to the start of the track take Cascade road and drive for about 3 kilometres on this gravel road. This is as far as Google Maps takes us so we decided to stop and start the hike from here. You could continue a bit more, the road seems OK most of the time, although more suitable for a 4WD in some spots. It looks like it was a good road suitable for all sorts of cars but at some point they decided not to maintain it anymore. In fact a few kilometres further up there are so many logs on the road that not even a 4WD car will be able to get through. See the picture with the title "Gravel road full of logs".
I will mention here that to get to this point we had to go through two gates, we found both open. See the pictures of each of these gates. This could make you think that Cascade road is private but since Google Maps takes you here and it also leads to public DOC tracks and hut I came to the conclusion that the road must be public.

We walk on the gravel road for about 2.5 Km, point at which we take a track. We marked this point with a waypoint named "Leaving gravel road".
About 500 meters later we find another split and a signpost indicating 30 minutes left to Martins hut.
We continue walking inside the dense forest, we pass Martins hut, and about 5.5 Km from the beginning of the hike the vegetation starts getting lower and lower until we get out of the forest.
We continue walking for about one more kilometre, and when we get to the ridge we take a 90 degrees turn to the right following the ridge for another 1.5 Km until we get to the summit at 764 meters.
Once you get out of the forest you can enjoy nice views of the coast but unfortunately for us the day we went up there were too many clouds and we could enjoy the views only very briefly.



Full description and more pictures at Back from Summit: Longwood