Wellington’s Skyline Walkway is an end to end track that’s less than 15km long. You’ll get some epic views, including some of the CBD, yet you’ll feel like you’re hours away from the city.

This post will give you everything you need to know about the Skyline Walkway, Wellington.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Details | Map | How To Get There | Trip Report

SKYLINE WALKWAY WELLINGTON MAP

The Skyline Walkway map is on both Google Maps, and Maps.me. Yay!

Annoyingly, when I embed the map it doesn’t show the correct route, so you’ll need to click this link, it’ll open in a new tab. The 13.2km it lists is pretty close to the official 13.4km on the council website.

HOW TO GET THERE

As an end-to-end walk, one that you’ll most likely only want to walk in one direction, you’ll need to plan this out a little.

DRIVING

Unless you’re planning to do a key swap (or doing the return walk), you’ll be better off catching public transport. With that said, parking is available close to both trailheads (free).

To reach both trailheads is about a 15-20 minute drive from Cuba Street, Wellington.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

I think this is a great option, as both trailheads have public transport going near the trailheads. I prefer catching the bus to the Old Coach Road trailhead to start the walk.

To the Old Coach Road trailhead
From Wellington Station you can catch either the JVL train or the #1 bus. The bus will drop you off less than 500 metres from the trailhead, so while it’s slightly less comfortable than the train it gets you to the trailhead faster. This bus also runs straight through the CBD, making it even more convenient.

To the Karori End trailhead

To get to this end, you’ll need to walk a few minutes from the station to this bus stop (here) where you catch the #2 bus to the terminal stop. From here, you’ve got a 1.2km walk uphill to the trailhead. That 1.2km is quite steep so that’s why I recommend the other option.

MY SKYLINE WALKWAY EXPERIENCE

When I messaged my buddy to plan our Skyline Walkway meeting point, we decided it was easiest if we met at the Simla Crescent entrance to Mount Kaukau. This meant we wouldn’t be on the trail for the first couple of kilometres, but given we’d both walked that section before we weren’t fussed.

It doesn’t matter which path you take up Mt Kaukau, it’ll get your heart rate going and they’re all enjoyable.

We got off to a steady start, and given it was a long weekend there were plenty of people walking up Kaukau. Once you reach the summit, you get epic 360 views. We didn’t spend more than a minute taking them all in. We’ve been here plenty of times and wanted to keep moving.

Just behind the lookout you’ll see a large wooden sign with the directions of the various walks and we found our first purple marker with Skyline Walkway written on it.

These purple markers are seen throughout. If there’s any point where you aren’t 100% sure where you’re going just look for a purple marker in the distance.

As soon as we were on the other side of the summit, the number of people tailed off. The track is well worn and did find it a little slippery early on the first short descent. The landscape had changed from our climb up the hill through the trees, to an open, farm like terrain with shrubs and gorse smothering some of the hills.

The bonus is that you’ve almost always got a good view on this track:

• Wellington Harbour and the CBD on your left
• Makara Windfarm and the South Island on your right

It’s pretty awesome.

There’s rarely a flat section on this hike, but the good news is that Mount Kaukau is the highpoint of the hike so we’d done the hard part. From here it’s gentle undulations across the farmland…we did veer off the trail when we saw some cows standing on the track (one had a nice set of horns).

There’s a short section where you go through a cluster of trees before you roll back open farmland like scenery. This walk is a lot tougher when there’s some wind about. If you wanted, you could cut the walk short and turn off down to Crofton Downs at around the halfway point.

While I think you should do the whole trail, it’s nice to know you can jump off the trail and catch public transport from Crofton Downs to wherever you need to go.

Once the houses of Karori come into view, you’ve still got a few kilometres along the outskirts of the suburb. Again, there’s a couple of points where you could turn off but I do suggest walking the whole way as that’ll mean you can walk through this cool terrain:

After close to three hours, we ended up at the end of the walk. We’d stopped to take plenty of photos but weren’t mucking around. This is definitely on the faster time.

Having experienced the walk down to the buses and Karori Park afterward, that hill to get to the start of the trailhead makes Kaukau the best end to start with.

p.s. There are no toilets along the trail, and minimal good nature spots in the middle portion of the trail. Keep this in mind before you start 🙂

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Like many walks in Wellington, I’d put this in the awesome category, but it’s not something you should feel like you 100% have to put on your list of Wellington activities. Especially if you’re only in town for a few days.

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200+ Things to do in New Zealand

A list of ideas for things to do in New Zealand.

Walking The Northern Walkway

When you reach the top of Mount Kaukau, you could take the Northern Walkway if you wanted that’ll take you into the city.

Exploring the Colonial Knob Walkway

You’ll see Colonial Knob to the north throughout your walk. You could even start here, and make it a super long way and connect to the Skyline track.