Distance: 4.5 km (9.0 DOC hours) - Unmarked route, hard - Hard terrain
Altitude: 199m to 239m. Gain: 153m. Loss: 141m . Gradient: 4 deg (Moderate-hard)
Skills: Occasional scrambles (3/7) - Streams (2/6)

Unmarked route, hard (8/9)
Unmarked route, no clear geographic features to follow

minor (5/5)
A viable route, not widely used

Moderate-hard (difficulty: 4/5)
Continuous moderate climbs

Hard (difficulty: 5/5)
Thick scrub-bash / continuous river boulders, waterfalls, or gorges

Occasional scrambles (difficulty: 3/7)
Tramp with some scrambles and exposure to falls

Streams (difficulty: 2/6)
Small streams, danger only in extreme weather

Unknown (difficulty: 0/7)
Not specified

No description

Note: Described in the reverse direction to your journey

About the best you can say about this route is that it is technically possible.

It took me nine hours to go 5km. I was fighting for my life in that bush.

If anyone reading this ever needs to go from the Electric River to the head of Lake Monowai — I implore you, take a helicopter. Get a friend with a boat to bring you. Pack a pack-raft. Don't go on foot if you can possibly help it!

I tried going low, to follow the lake shore: impossible. No beach, only bluffs and dead trees. I tried going high, seeking a terrace in the bush, but climbed over 100 vertical meters and couldn't find one. Everywhere was the same inhospitably thick bush clinging to the steep, glaciated valley wall.

Between the Electric River and Monowai Hut, you will encounter: Thickets of chest-high ferns concealing holes in the ground and fallen logs; unmapped side streams that ran in ravine-like gullies of mossy, wet rock, precarious to scramble down into and back out of; hidden bluffs in the bush some 6m tall; stands of juvenile beech so thick they are like walking through one vast hedge. And so, so much slip debris. Fans of slip debris everywhere, some stretching over a hundred vertical meters down to the lake. Logjams of wet, slippery, sometimes rotten boughs and roots covered in clods of dirt poised and ready to rain down when disturbed. You can find all these obstacles, and more, in the NZ bush, of course. But I have never before encountered a stretch of bush that was entirely obstacles. Every step was like solving a puzzle.

More than once, I came to an area so impenetrable the only way through was to take off my pack, shove it through a void — like a triangle under a fallen tree — and then follow it, squeezing through, nose pressed into the earth, on all fours. This bush humbled me.

It felt like I wasn't walking so much as tunneling. It was so dark in there I saw a possum at 3 pm.

Occasionally, I'd hit a slightly less dense patch of bush, and I could walk as much as a meter or two at a go, but then the bush would close in again and I'd be back to fighting for every single inch.

I do not recommend this route.