Looking for companions on more difficult tramps

If you are wanting more challengng terrain, you might wanna throw away the 'tourist' guide books, get some maps of the Ruahines, Kahurangi, Arthurs Pass etc and plan some routes. There are some quite good 'proper' guide books for the south island, Moors Guides, and Brabyn if you can find them still. Thats assuming you know what you are doing. Otherwise better hang on that copy of lonely planet for now.

For the southern regions of the South Island, the Moir's Guides (North and South) offer extensive, detailed and reasonably up-to-date coverage. https://alpineclub.org.nz/product-category/guidebooks/south-island/ And LINZ (Land Information New Zealand) topographical maps are free to download in electronic form. The Topo250 give a good overview, the Topo50 (1:50000) more detail for smaller areas. Websites such as topomap.co.nz and nztopomaps.com present the LINZ topo map data in a form that is easy to browse seamlessly and allow you to print out selected areas. This should assist in looking out for promising areas of interest and then for planning routes. You can then make more specific enquiries on this or similar websites about track conditions, likely amount of snow on passes, etc, when you have particular areas or routes in mind.

Have look at the 3 Passes "trek" near Arthur's pass or the 5 passes down near Queenstown (near the Routeborn) these are a little more challenging.