Last weekend Sam, Craig and myself were able to get through a Tararua Moonlight Southern Crossing. I wrote about an aborted attempt to do this jut over a year ago Craig and I were ready to go, but pulled out because it looked certain that the Tararuas would still be shrouded in cloud. A big storm was also coming 24 hours later that could have caused problems if we’d been held up for too long, and it proved to be really bad for a couple of people on the night following the one we planned. That was my first boycotted Moonlight Southern Crossing, and Craig’s third. There’s a tricky set of circumstances that have to come together, and at that point it’s necessary to be able to pick up and go on short notice.

This year, a departing southerly had dumped snow on the tops a day or so earlier, the stormy weather had since passed by, the sky was suspiciously clear (as opposed to clouds that so often dominate the Tararuas), and there was a Full Moon. All of these requirements for a Moonlight Southern Crossing came together at the same time, which is a rare event, and to top it off it was a weekend! And waiting on the road upstairs to be collected at 1pm on the Saturday, I had a phone call where Craig told me his car wouldn’t start. Flat battery.

Dates: 24th – 25th July, 2010
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Otaki Forks to Kaitoke.
People: Sam, Craig and me.
Huts visited: Field Hut (0 nights), Kime Hut (0 nights), Alpha Hut (0 nights)
Route: Otaki Forks up to Field Hut, past Table Top and Dennan to Kime Hut, over Field Peak, Hector, the Beehives, Atkinson, Aston, and Alpha to Alpha Hut, then through Hells Gate to Omega and allllllll the way along Marchant Ridge past Marchant and Dobson, then out at Kaitoke. (Actually out at Kiwi Ranch for our own convenience, which is next-door.)
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I find this type of thing notoriously difficult to pack for, because it’s not something i do very often. The Tararaua Southern Crossing is typically a 3 day tramp, but with some effort and fitness it’s feasible to walk it in a long summer’s day, or (in this case) a long winter’s night, albeit using some basic alpine skills. It helps a lot to reduce weight but I don’t like leaving behind safety equipment in the Tararuas, ever, or generally in back-country places. In the end we all took sleeping bags and bivy bags in case of emergency (but didn’t bother with a tent or any other kind of shelter), and I left behind a few luxuries like extra hut clothes and a ground sheet, and the food was much more biased towards lunch-type stuff. I threw in a few Moro bars purely for caffeine content. I think maybe I saved a few kilograms, even if it was hard to tell after a while. Adding the ice axe after all of this didn’t help with the weight thing, though.

Craig leaves Otaki Forks.

Fortunately Craig managed to get his car running with the help of a friendly neighbour, and having left town an hour later than planned, we were writing in the intentions’ book at Otaki Forks at about 4pm, all ready to leave. This meant a late afternoon start up to Field Hut. We were joking about how Craig was going to get his car back to town later — I’d informally agreed to drive him back to Otaki Forks the next day… maybe fairly late in the day, or on Monday evening after work. As we joked across the field near the junction leading off to Waitewaewae, a lone figure approached us on the way down from Field Hut. Sam and I were busy joking about how we should ask this person to drive Craig’s car back… would Craig trust a random person? Well, it turned out Craig did trust this random person, because as he got closer it turned out to be Spencer — a friend through the trampey club — and we not only trusted him but he was more than happy to drive Craig’s car home for him. Spencer had been up past Kime Hut during the day, but turned around after encountering some slippery conditions earlier in the day, not having wanted to keep going through that on his own. He’d not been able to get the door of Kime Hut open, which was frozen shut. Things may have changed through the afternoon, though, and although we’d not packed crampons we did have ice axes. We’d just have to go up and see what things were like — the opportunity was far too great to not try at all.

We waved goodbye to Spencer and continued on. With the crisp clear skies, and actually being a day before the real Full Moon, we saw the nearly full disc of the Moon above the eastern horizon as we climbed Judd Ridge. During our ascent as the Moon climbed higher, the Sun set in a brief wash of bright yellow and orange light through the leaves.

We made it most of the way to Field Hut by about 6.25pm, almost without torches but succumbing to their use in the last few minutes as the shadows under the trees became too dark to walk safely. Nobody was staying at the hut, which seemed surprising on the first weekend of really nice weather for a while. I wrote a brief note about our plans in the hut book, we re-filled water bottles, and immediately (but too late) discovered the water was contaminated with yucky toxins. Thanks a lot all you annoying people who burn your toxic rubbish in the fire places instead of carrying it out. What happens, of course, is the residue settles on the hut’s roof and runs into the water supply, so we basically had yucky barbecue water.

Looking down on the cloud
from near Table Top.

Anyway, it was too late to worry. Our water bottles remained full in case it was difficult to find later on. There would probably be tarns here and there, but chances are the tap at Kime would be frozen over by now. A short walk further up, and suddenly we were above the bush-line approaching Table Top, looking down on the clouds trapped in the valleys below us. There was still not much snow, the tussock was well frosted over. Things gradually changed as we climbed further past Bridge Peak, and by the time things flattened out the snow was more wide-spread. We mostly avoided the established ground trail at this point, which tended to be covered in ice and not as easy to walk on. Walking beside it through the tussock was fine, though. At 8.45pm we reached the sign-post on Hut Mound that claims Kime Hut is 15 minutes away. As Sam expressed, it’s about the fastest 15 minutes ever because by this time Kime Hut is an easy 5 minutes below, and that’s how long it took us.

Sam operates on the door latch.

The door was frozen shut, which is exactly what Spencer had warned us about earlier. With a closer look it turned out to be the bolt on the door that was the main problem, and the ice around the bolt was no match for Sam with an ice axe and a few minutes of careful sculpting. It was about lunch time by this point, and we pulled out some lunch-time snacks.

Kime actually felt warm inside at first, very unusual. Its reputation as a refrigerator is deserved. Thinking backwards I think the warmth was an illusion, with me having warmed up from the movement in getting here. With ten minutes of sitting down eating my solidified caffeine, I was definitely feeling the cold. As expected, the tap was frozen at Kime so I kept my toxic barbecue water. As Craig and I left, Sam kicked a hole through the ice in a small tarn (maybe a puddle) outside Kime Hut, and re-filled his bottle, but I was already wanting to get moving and warm up far too much to stop and unpack again. Sam caught up after a few minutes.

A very bright planet Venus hung in the western sky behind us as we left Kime to ascent Field Peak, and the Southern Cross sat roughly ahead of us. By now the Moon was fairly high in the sky and lighting our way, with no need whatsoever for torches. There was less snow that we expected, but the ground and was completely iced over. As we moved through the landscape, hundreds to thousands of glittery silver reflections of the Moon shimmered all over the ground around us.

Craig on Mt Hector.

The first slight awkwardness was really getting down the South Face of Field Peak, probably because the southerly would have left more snow on the southern sides of everything. As before we could still stick to the tussock for the most part, which provided much more stable support than the iced-over ground trail for shuffling down-wards. By 10.30pm, an hour after leaving Kime Hut, we stood at the memorial cross on top of Mt Hector that was placed by tramping clubs of Wellington to commemorate trampers and mountaineers who died during the Second World War. Icily-lit outlines of the nearby lower peaks and ridges surrounded us. Light claggy cloud wafted around and above, but still allowed through enough moonlight to let us see ghosts of the surrounding landscapes. Apart from the noise we made shuffling through the tussock, the air was

We sat for a while on Mt Hector.

Getting down the south face of Hector was similar to the south face of Field Peak, generally okay. I think the trickiest section was making our way over both sides of the Beehives, through which there were a couple of short zones where it was necessary to balance on rock covered in black ice. On one occasion I just went down a couple of metres in a controlled slide, which seemed the easiest way to go. The ice axes helped a lot here and I’m glad we brought them with us.

From there on we were at a lower elevation, the air around us was once again clear of any kind of clag, and the ridge-line was more flattened out. With less slow and less steep regions, slipping became less of a concern. For much of the rest of the night, however, I still had my ice axe out simply to use the spike for support, not wanting to completely trust the rocky parts of the track ahead. The snow, on the other hand, was fairly gritty and easy to walk on.

Craig waits on Aston Peak.

At 1.30am we sat on Aston, signposted as 2 hours from Alpha Hut and still surrounded by iced-over tussock. Venus was long gone over the western horizon by now, and to our left (later to be in front of us), another bright object which I presumed to be Jupiter was rising. The southern cross was now nearly standing on its head, having rotated nearly a third of the way around its celestial pole during the past 6 or 7 hours. We sat here for a while, not feeling especially motivated to get up and move quickly. Within about 15 minutes or so, however, we were up and on our way. Alpha Peak was clearly visible in the distance, chaperoned by a long Quoin Ridge leading down to the Hutt River. Behind it was a set of lights from somewhere out in the plains of the Wairarapa. Probably somewhere like Martinborough, but we didn’t check to be sure.

It still took us an hour to cover that distance, and by now the Moon was clearly beginning to fall from its high point in the sky. To the north-east I could see the constellation of Orion beginning to skim the northern horizon. I usually associate Orion with the summer night sky, and it’s unusual (for me at least) to see it in the winter like this. With it rising another 4 minutes earlier ever night, however, I guess it will be high in the sky during mid-evening by the time summer comes around. Sitting on Alpha Peak in the moonlight, I kicked a hole through the ice in a puddle, briefly considering replacing my toxic barbecue water that I’d been sipping since we left Field Hut, but decided not to when the murky mud surfaced amongst my access point through what had previously been a settled and shiny iced-over water point. Alpha Hut wasn’t too far away. Still, we briefly considered simply pulling out the bivy bags and sleeping bags and spending the night up on Alpha Peak. The conditions were perfect for it.

Fifteen minutes down from Alpha Peak, at 3.15am, we reconvened at the bush-line, a relatively short distance from Alpha Hut, which we reached about 10 minutes later. Craig quietly opened the door for a peek inside, as we didn’t want to disturb any inhabitants, but he soon declared that nobody was home and so we took some liberty in entering and relaxing for a while. I have to admit I was surprised that on a Saturday night during a weekend with the first near-perfect weather in some time for both a Saturday and Sunday in succession, we didn’t meet anyone in any of these three huts. I’d have thought there might be a few people getting up to the tops for the weekend. Perhaps they were all outside walking around in the moonlight as we were. From here we’d be leaving the tops, and heading down-hill on our way out. Feeling the need for some caffeine, I ate another Moro bar.

It was 4am by the time we left, needing to either stop properly or get moving, because it was increasingly cold just sitting around. The eastern direction from Alpha Hut leads through a dip called Hells’ Gate. I’ve been through it before on a Saturday afternoon in nice weather, having come up from Cone Hut and Bull Mound. At that time I didn’t really notice it as much more than a dip into a saddle followed by a climb, and I guess I was expecting something similar this time. Unfortunately this expectation was not quite so realistic when approaching the same section on the back of 12 hours of walking, and having had no sleep for 19 hours and counting. It just dropped and dropped, there was tree-fall, slippery areas, and it kept dropping steeply, and then we finally began to climb again. This took well over an hour, and at 5.25am we finally sat next to the DoC signpost at the top of the eastern side of the saddle, ready to head down Marchant Ridge.

I’ve never been along Marchant Ridge before, but it has a strong reputation that precedes it. The first time I visited Alpha Hut, page after page of the hut book was full of people declaring they’d experienced their worst tramp ever, or wasted a day of their life. John Pascoe, a well known mountaineer (and critic of the Tararuas) declared in his 1952 book “Land Uplifted High” that Marchant Ridge is up-hill in both directions. He may well have lifted this quote from the talk of the day — as Craig noted at the time we visited, the ridge has no less than 8 officially recognised spot-heights along it. I think the most potentially demoralising part of Marchant Ridge may be that it carries on for such a long distance just below the tree-line, ensuring that views of the surrounding landscape are limited, and ensuring that little progress is made in actually getting down.

Marchant Ridge is heavily walked because it’s the primary way into or out of the Tararua Southern Crossing — an honour that would likely have gone to the much nicer Quoin Ridge next-door if the Wellington Regional Council hadn’t usurped Quoin Ridge as part of an official water catchment zone, and limited access accordingly, completely preventing it for many decades and even now only allowing people to pass through without stopping.

I don’t want to sound too critical of Marchant Ridge. This visit beginning at 5am having had no sleep for almost a day was my first visit, and I was beginning to feel really tired, especially after Hells’ Gate. Thinking objectively though, it wasn’t really that bad. It’s a nice bush walk, and I think if some time I visited Marchant Ridge for some kind of Marchant Ridge Appreciation Tramp, I might find a lot of things to like about it. For one thing, given how the ridge spends so much time just below the bush-line, there’s a lot of walking through mossy goblin forest. Somehow Marchant Ridge reminded me of the times I’ve visited Nelson Lakes, in the sense that you can walk for a really long time and very little actually changes. If you’re the kind of person with a short attention span, then perhaps it’s not for you.

Signs of sunrise, 7.02am.

Anyway, Craig stepped in a hole somewhere near the beginning, aggravating a knee injury, and so we had a lot of time to take it in for what it was. Under the circumstance, feeling so tired, I was personally starting to wish Marchant Ridge would hurry up let us head down-hill so I could at least feel as if we were getting somewhere. Somehow this changed from about 7am onwards. The Sun began to rise, and suddenly it was daytime. We didn’t need head-torches any more, and I guess a switch flipped over in my brain telling me I didn’t need to feel tired any more. It was a new day, after all, and I’d usually be awake by this time. The objective part of my mind told me that this effect would likely wear off about mid-afternoon, at which point I might just collapse. We should be out by then.

Marchant Ridge has a few officially maintained side tracks that lead down to the Tauherenikau River. We passed the first of these off the first spot-height, called Omega (1118), and it’s a direct way down to Tutuwai Hut. The second, which we passed at about 7.15am, is known as the Block XVI (ie. Block 16) track, which retains its name from the days when tracks were named after the numbered segments into which the range was divided. I’m not sure what the reasoning is for the Block XVI track — on the map, it’s like a track designed to go from nowhere in particular (an anonymous point in a ridge with exit points on either side) to nowhere else really special. I may walk it some time to see where I end up, but at this time there’s not much motivation to walk 2/3 of the way along Marchant Ridge simply to go down again. I’m sure there’s a good reason why it’s still officially there, rather than having devolved into an interesting off-track navigation or hunting route as has happened with so many other old tracks.

Sam in one of the fire-affected
parts of Marchant Ridge.

Maybe one of the nicer things about Marchant Ridge, at least as I write this, is how the trees open up for a while, notably around Marchant Peak. The cleared section of the ridge is covered in regrowth but it’s not high enough to block the sunlight or obscure views. Apparently this is at least in part due to a major fire along the ridge some time ago. Maybe some frustrated exhausted person decided they’d try to burn the ridge down? I wouldn’t be too surprised. As we continued along the relatively open section of ridge during the clear and crisp mid-morning (now about 9.30am), we could easily see the basin of the Hutt Valley ahead of us, completely shrouded in very low and reflective fog. Behind it in the far distance, the towering snow-covered shape of Mt Tapuae-o-Uenuku stood up from its location in the Inland Kaikoura Range of the South Island. It’s often visible from Wellington, but I don’t remember having seen it as dominant as this from the North Island. I guess it’s the altitude we were at that helped.

The Hutt Valley, Tapuae-o-Uenuku behind on the left.

Eventually the track leaves the main part of Marchant Ridge, veering south (from south-west heading downwards) as the structure of the spurs becomes more messy. It’s here that the elevation actually begins to drop, finally. At about 11.30am, we arrived at the track junction at the top of Dobson’s Loop, where an alternative track leads down to Smith Creek Shelter, and finally I was in a place where I’d been before. By now it was about 11.30am, and we were starting to think about how to get away from the dead end of Kaitoke. A taxi was the best bet for us, so we called ahead from here, intending to be down at the road within about an hour. (Hutt and City Taxis would get us from Kaitoke to the Upper Hutt Railway Station for about $50, which isn’t bad when split between three people.) Rather than go the full distance to the dead-end of Marchant Road, where teenagers burn out their cars on Friday nights, we decided to drop off to Kiwi Ranch. Kiwi Ranch is a Youth Camp, which incidentally will let people park their cars in a more secure area for a small fee. Even better, there’s an un-signposted (but very obvious) track that leaves the main track, about 10 minutes from the main road-end, and drops straight into Kiwi Ranch. Very handy.

Sam waits.

It turned out that in the state we were in, an hour wasn’t nearly enough time to get down to the road from the top of the Dobson Loop. Fortunately there’s still very good Vodafone reception from near Puffer Saddle, and we were able to call back and postpone the collection time for another hour. Finally, at around 1.15pm, we stepped out into the sunshine on the main driveway of Kiwi Ranch, with about another half hour to spare before our ride showed up.

And that was it. Tararua Moonlight Southern Crossing completed. Overall it took us 21 hours from start to finish, of which my GPS thinks we spent about 13 hours actually moving. This was about 4 or 5 hours longer than we’d anticipated, having expected to be walking out at around 8am or so, but that was fine. It was a nice day, and to be honest I just felt like sleeping. If and when I do it again, I think I’ll bring crampons. They’d not have been any use on this occasion, so we were lucky, but it was clear once we were there that had there been more snow than there was, there would have been several slopes that could have been tricky to cross, especially in the vicinity of Hector and on either side.

I guess I still haven’t grasped the main driving motivation behind walking a Moonlight Southern Crossing. I’m really glad I’ve done it, nevertheless. There are recurring stories of people doing this in the past, and it’s something for which the opportunity is quite rare with the combination of recent snow, calm clear weather, and a Full Moon. If the opportunity comes up and there’s an interest and ability, it’s best to grab it while it’s available as long as it can be done safely. Getting over the tops through the glittering snow in moonlight was a novel experience for me. On the other hand, it’s not as if it’s necessary to walk a Southern Crossing overnight to see snow glittering in moonlight. We could have simply gone up to Kime, walked around in circles in some kind of awe at 2am, and walked down again the following morning. The transport would have been easier, too. Maybe one of the rewards for me is also that I managed to get some new red line, never having walked a full Southern Crossing in the Tararuas before now. I guess if someone asks me from now on, I could say “yes, but not during the day”.

I’ll have to walk a Southern Crossing during the day some time and see what I’ve missed out on. Maybe I’ll also go back and take a better look at Marchant Ridge, without the lingering problem of it just being a frustratingly long conclusion to something else.

Getting out of Crow Hut right now is one of the more awkward climbs from a valley I’ve personally had. We more or less slid down the hill-side yesterday morning, persistent rain apparently making the topsoil absolutely sodden. A year ago I bought the cheapest Scarpas I could find, part of an experiment with getting cheap boots, but the soles are the best I’ve had on any boots to date and I’ve learned to trust them. Yesterday they often failed. Placing them flat on the soil (usually safe) was enough to trigger random acts of slipping and sliding, or sometimes not. So, now on the way up, and faced with one of yesterday’s 80 centimetre skid-marks on a 40 degree slope and no clear way around the edges, I have some uncertainty about exactly where to put my foot.

Still, in my case with hands poised in front ready to spread myself flat on the ground and slow the slide next time something slips out of place, we eventually get through the worst of it.

There’s snow up here now, which must be from last night.

Dates: 25th – 27th June, 2010
Location: Ruahine Forest Park, Kawhatau Base Road-end.
People: Amanda, Alistair, Richard and me.
Huts visited: Crow Hut (1 night), McKinnon Hut (0 nights)
Planned route: Up and around the Mokai Patea Ridge, down to Crow Hut for Saturday night. Then up and along the Hikurangi Range over Mangaweka, and out past Purity Hut.
Actual route: Straight to Crow Hut for Saturday night, up along and down to McKinnon Hut, back to the Kawhatau River via the main track, then bashing up to a farm.
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Yesterday was a short day. Camping at Kawhatau Base overnight, we’d hoped to get up over Mokai Patea — an alpine ridge which you know you’re on because it’s a kilometre wide (as Alistair put it) — drop down to Crow Hut and stay a night, then up to the tops and along the Hikurangi Range. Another trampey club group sharing our transport, with a shorter plan in mind (walking into McKinnon Hut and back), was set to drive the van further south later today to collect us. We abandoned our whole plan before it began, looking at the weather and everything. Just rain and rain and rain, not entirely claggy tops but enough to limit visibility to about 5o metres or so. We decided to ditch the idea of the Hikurangis, go straight to Crow Hut, and maybe get up early and around the Mokai Patea Range on the next day, ending up back where we began.

The cable-way was fun. It’s the first time I’ve been in one of them. I don’t think I’d ever want to have to winch myself over, but in a group of 4 we were able to arrange things to (usually) have people winching from both ends. It’s good that it’s there, too, because it makes this a wet weather trip for which we don’t need to worry about the Kawhatau River probably being flooded for the next few days. From there it was a very steep climb of 900 metres to the bush-line, with bits of flax to grasp in the steepest parts and token efforts at steps which seem half-buried, but maybe help to keep the slippery track together. We had a brief cruise over the tops in calm but claggy raining weather — the route is poled. Then we skidded into the bush-line down the slope where every foot placement is an entry in a lottery, as I described earlier.

Alistair and Amanda.

Richard and Amanda at Crow Hut.

And yeah, a big sleep-in. We sat down at lunch time, having just arrived at Crow Hut, needing to decide if we were going to cross the bridge outside the hut and continue to Wakelings Hut on the far side of the Mokai Patea Range. Doing so would mean a marginally shorter climb this morning if the weather cooperated enough for us to go that way, but it’d suck if we had to back-track. There didn’t seem much point, especially with a dodgy forecast and with the knowledge that we were already comfortably sitting in a nice, tidy hut. Amanda started tinkering with the wood burner, and we commenced a lazy afternoon. The mud-toned Kawhatau River that we’d crossed earlier via the cable-way continued its rampage below as the rain came and went. We all slept well yesterday afternoon, and last night.

The Kawhatau River outside Crow.

The bridge outside the hut is interesting. It’s a typical New Zealand swing bridge, but without the mesh down the sides. This seems to be an area that gets less people — we’re the first people who’ve written in the book for a month. The tracks to the hut on either side are bordered by side creeks, which apparently can come up. One person wrote in the book that they’d been trapped behind the creek coming down from the Mokai Patea Range, and had to camp out on the far side.

We awoke at 6.30 this morning, in anticipation that we might just be able to walk out around the Mokai Patea. Alas it was not to be so. Glancing outside, things didn’t seem to different from yesterday. Perhaps worse. We went back to sleep, and for brief moments in between we discussed what we thought the others would be most likely to do based on what we thought they thought we might be doing. Eventually, we got away about 2 hours later, on the assumption that they’d hedge their bets and try to get back around mid-afternoon. We figured we’ll head up the top, and try to meet up with the others as they come from McKinnon. If we see footprints we’ll know, and otherwise we’ll turn the other way to catch them there. And thus we’re now climbing back up out of this slippery hole.

Alistair reaching the snow.

It’s snowy though, as I mentioned. This is the first time in a while I’ve been able to get into nice snow on the tops. It feels almost criminal to tread in the frosty covering to create a muddy foot-print. We stop at the bush-line to put on extra layers. It’s becoming colder with elevation, and I’d rather be fully covered before we start getting buffeted by the wind that’s likely above the bush-line. Further up I’m appreciating it. There’s a light but icy breeze coming from the south, although the temperature’s probably not freezing yet because we’re still getting rain.

We’re at the junction just east of spot-height 1471 at around 10am, and it’s good to have the day’s only significant climb out of the way. The tussock’s covered in ice, the poles of the poled route up here are wind-swept with ice, the ground’s covered in snow, and there are no footprints. They must be sleeping in, which isn’t a surprise since for all they know we might not be out until 4.30pm if we were to get all the way around the loop. There’s no point heading down just yet because we don’t have a key to the van, so we set off towards McKinnon Hut, expecting to see them coming towards us soon.

Drizzle drizzle. It’s still foggy but we can see far enough to pick out one or two poles ahead in the route, so nobody’s too bent on navigating. The route climbs up to a large tarn, or maybe a lake, which is frozen over and might have looked very photogenic if there were some more sunshine. It’s not to be. Then we climb further up a gentle gradient towards spot-height 1625. We’re becoming concerned now, because we certainly should have seen them unless they were backing themselves to get out really fast. Still no footprints, until we arrive at the iced-over signpost 20 minutes above McKinnon Hut. There have clearly been a group of people here this morning. They stood around and regrouped, and then went… towards the Hikurangi Range and Mangaweka!

Eh?

Alistair dropping to McKinnon.

Maybe they’ve just headed out to bag Hikurangi Peak, or something like that, and will be back any moment. Amanda suggests that a couple of us should drop down to the hut to check things out, for which Alistair and I volunteer. Amanda and Richard stay up the top, in case the others return. And it’s down again, into the slush. Every few steps I slip and slide sending a big splash of snowy mud ahead of me. My raincoat’s about to have a date with the washing machine, and so are my mittens. They’re sopping and they’re muddy, but they’re keeping off the wind-chill despite my numb fingers underneath. Glancing behind it looks as if Alistair’s having similar issues. We’re getting snowed on now, it’s getting colder. We get to McKinnon in about 15 minutes, a wonderful little hut on the edge of the bush-line, now surrounded by snow.

McKinnon Hut.

It’s empty.

Checking the book. Yes, they’ve been here. Yes, the person who wrote it forgot to write their own name. Yes they were here last night. Yes they’ve left for the morning. Yes, the cable-way pulley is broken. Yes, the cable-way pulley is broken. Yes, the cable-way pulley is broken. Yes, the cable-way pulley is broken. Yes, the cable-way pull… Um, Alistair?

Yeah? Says Alistair. He’s busy putting on another thermal layer.

The cable-way pulley is broken.

What? Oww crap, we’ve got a long day ahead of us now. Alistair says something like this at about the same time that I’m thinking it. Maybe he’s using more colourful language. It’s one of those times when things spin around in my head for moment.

What the hell are we going to do now? They’ve written in the book, and I quote verbatim as best as I can read it: “Pully on cableway broken, take alternate route. Gryzoned End? Try nav to pt 1625, pt 1471, then northern spur to farmland. May if Wx bad take main track, poss try to cross river sth of pt 854.” Er, slight problem. I quickly find a map and try to figure out what they’re doing. It makes no sense. 1625 is the signpost where Amanda and Richard are presently waiting, 1471 is the junction leading down to Crow Hut, and the northern spur would take them direct to Crow Hut by the way we came up. This is not what their footprints indicated, and we certainly didn’t see them on our way here. Enough of this, we’ll figure it out later. Meanwhile we have to get back up to Amanda and Richard and figure out what to do next. The cable-way pulley is broken. Maybe we can get there and discover they’re wrong, but in the back of my mind it seems very doubtful the river’s going down any time soon, within the next few days, given the saturation in the soil. Maybe we’ll be camping out.

With some speedy thinking between the two of us there’s no way we want to try and navigate off the tops in the Ruahines without advance knowledge of where we’re going or a lot of time and good weather on our hands, of which today is not. The range is surrounded by a giant ring of leatherwood, which can slow you to a 100 metre and hour crawl, or worse, if you get stuck in an un-cut section. I note in the book that we’ve passed through, and state for the record that we’re going back to the cable-way, and if necessary we’ll camp out and wait for the river to drop. On the off chance that the others get out some other way, we’ll at least be able to wave to them since the cable-way is practically next to the road. This is probably what we’ll do. Maybe we’ll discover a crossing point.

So what else can we do? Alistair and I struggle up another slippery slope towards where Amanda and Richard wait for us. Maybe we can drop back to Crow for another night and hope the weather’s good enough to get out over Mokai Patea tomorrow. That wouldn’t be ideal because it’ll need a lot of food for the extra energy, and we’re only really stocked with the intent of a short weekend trip. Amanda’s at the top — she and Richard have been walking back and forth to try and keep warm for the last 40 minutes, and experimented with following their tracks to try and get a better idea of where they went.

THE CABLE-WAY’S BROKEN!

What?? She can’t hear me, so I give up and just keep walking towards her.

We take a guess that the others might have been trying to go out over the Hikurangi Range, despite what was written in the book, which would put them at the wrong road (Putaru, below Purity Hut) if they got out, but at least they’d be out if they got there. Or perhaps they meant to write 1468 instead of 1471, which is a spot-height on a neighbouring ridge, and would actually put them on a farm. We’re confused. For us it’s getting near mid-day, and being the middle of winter we only have about 5 hours of light left. What to do. Well, we start by back-tracking. We’ll probably do exactly what we wrote in the book. I pull out a phone to see if there’s reception, but there isn’t. We’ll need to try and get a message out if we can, to tell our contact what’s going on. We’ll try again at the point above Crow Hut.

I took this to figure out what was wrong
with my balaclava, but it didn’t help.
Not a bad portrait, though.

This day is quickly becoming more depressing, and the weather’s changing to match. It’s not a gale, but there’s an icy blast coming from the south-west. The southerly’s coming in. My balaclava’s full up, but it’s not sitting quite right and every so often I suck it into my mouth accidentally and suddenly can’t get any air until I tear it off with my hand. We can still see, and we can mostly follow our earlier tracks, but we’re trudging through the mud. It’s about 12.20pm when we reach the junction above Crow Hut, and fluttering in the wind is a plastic back tied to the sign. It’s a note.

The day is becoming even more confusing. Have they passed by here? That doesn’t seem possible, because we still only see our own footprints and they couldn’t have gotten over here from where they’d gone without some mammoth and ridiculous navigation effort down to a creek and up again. In the end we decide that the note must have always been here, but somehow this morning we looked through it in our enthusiasm to catch up with the others. The note confirms things. They’re aiming to navigate down the spur that heads north-west above the true left of Rocky Creek. This would drop them into a farm which they must be hoping to walk through to get to a road bridge off Smith’s Road much further down.

Amanda, defiantly removing a glove to be able to use her phone, manages to get a text message out to Jackie back in Wellington, or Sydney where she was once before, or wherever in the world she might be. It doesn’t really matter as long as she’s contactable. In the message, we tell Jackie the cable-way’s broken and we might be camping to wait for the river to go down. We continue back-tracking. I’d dropped my pack for a minute as we stood around, but picked it up again quickly because the wind-chill was coming right through the back of my soaking raincoat. That’s Gore-Tex for you. I like being on the tops and I like being in the snow, but right now I’m just looking forward to getting back into the tress. The snow’s horizontal and it’s biting the side of my face. Shelter will be nice.

Further along the ridge Amanda’s phone beeps. We’ve heard back from Jackie to say she’s received the message, and if she doesn’t hear otherwise she’ll assume we’re camping, and let various people know we’ll be late out. Some time after 1pm we finally reach trees, and can drop lower and out of the wind. Amanda has a go at contacting Dirk, in the other group, and eventually gets through with a text message. Dirk sends back a message saying something like “others are at 1200 metres and it sounds a bit hard”.

Amanda and Richard on
the way down.

Another confusing message, not so much hearing that they were having problems at 1200 metres… about where there could be a leatherwood and dracophyllum jungle… but the fact that he said the “others” were at 1200 metres. With some further exchanges and the application of logic, we deduce that Dirk isn’t with them at all, but is actually roaming up and down the road because he never got across the cable-way. We continue further down, and receive news that he’s talked to the farmers below the spur the other group are coming down, and also called the Police and spoken to a Search & Rescue coordinator, presumably not because of any immediate danger, but because it sounded as if there might be a chance the other group could end up stuck somewhere awkward. Fair enough. Search and Rescue should be brought in early so that they can make decisions on whether anything needs to be done or precautions taken. We later hear from Dirk that he was asked the standard 500 questions about the group’s experience and capabilities and gear so they’d be able to tick all the template boxes for their risk assessment, hopefully determining that there’s no imminent risk. It’s amazing there’s cellphone reception up here at all! You can never rely on cellphones.

By now I’m resigned to camping out and missing work tomorrow, quite possibly Tuesday. I wonder if we’ll get a chance to try and build a camp-fire in the rain. That’d be interesting, but only if it actually works. If it didn’t work it’d be depressing. As we continue downwards, we get views of the muddy brown squiggles of the flooded Kawhatau River to our right and begin trying to pick out places where it might be crossable. It doesn’t look any better. On the other hand, we get a view of the farm-land to our left, on the far side of Rocky Creek. Alistair’s behind me, and he’s inspired. If we could get off the main track, and somehow to the base of Rocky Creek (another muddy brown gutter that’s flowing into the main river), then maybe we could cross the creek and figure out a way up to the farm-land, much of which overhangs a bluff above the main river. It sounds like a possible option, and we still have a few hours of daylight left.

Busted! (Look closely at
where the cable goes.)

Finally reaching the bottom of the spur at half-two, after a controlled slippery slide through the flax, we can see the extent of the damage on the cable-way. It’s still there, which is a relief. It didn’t collapse with anyone in it, and if that’d happened you’d assume the others would have set off an emergency beacon rather than continue on their weekend tramp. On the other hand, it certainly wasn’t anything we could fix, either. The drive cable, which fits over the large pulley wheel, has sliced right into the groove of the wheel so that it now hung around the spokes. They’ve left a plastic bag on the end with a note warning people not to use it, in case it wasn’t obvious, and wrapped a bunch of chains around the end to fully cripple it. The cart that hangs underneath is at the far end, and we later find out that although in its crippled state and with Dirk on the other side, they’d had to write a note and force it over to Dirk so he knew what was going on. The distance is too far to shout clearly over the flooded river below.

Well that sucks. My unlikely back-of-the-mind fantasy that they’d been grossly incompetent when they assessed the damage, and had only thought the cable-way was broken, was not to be. We’re still stuck.

Amanda, Alistair and Richard.

Plan B is to drop down to the river, and survey it for any possible crossing points. This doesn’t seem likely either, but we have to look. A hundred metres down-river, there’s an island in the middle that we think we could get to, but there’s little point because the far side of the island just has a much more forceful flow, plus a steep bank that we’d have to be clambering out of, and a possibly un-climbable bluff to climb up to get back to the road afterwards. Plan C is more inviting, though less instant. We follow the main river around looking for Rocky Creek, eventually having to clamber up an old land-slip to get over a hump, push through lots of stubborn scrub and drop into the creek. The creek is running muddy, but turns out to be completely crossable. We cross in pairs, now finding ourselves at the base of a short 100 metre climb to a flattening plateau, which would be the farm-land. This could take some time.

And it does take time, because the spur’s very overgrown. Amanda’s leading up the front, basically forging a path through all kinds of yucky stuff. There also the occasional sprinkling of Onga-Onga (aka Stinging Nettle) hidden amongst it all. We stop for a few minutes some way up grabbing a bite to eat, Amanda remembering we haven’t had any proper lunch and by now it’s mid-afternoon. As time goes on and we force our way higher, the bush gives way to some more exposed bluff-like clay faces, which we’re lucky enough to be able to find a way to clamber up after Richard figures it out. Finally we spot some possum carcasses, which look suspiciously as if they’ve been thrown overboard. Sure enough, there’s just one more some-what awkward clamber up an over-hanging tree root, and we’re on the outside of a fence made of number 8 wire!

Not a proud moment, but one I’m resigned
to accept in the circumstances.

This is such a great feeling. Hopefully the scatterings of what we’ve heard of Dirk talking to the farmers gives us some kind of informal permission to walk over their land. I don’t care if it gets dark now, I could walk over farm-land for ages, because being here means that getting out is under our control once again. Amanda checks her phone and actually has reception, so she sends a message to Dirk to let him know we’re coming through here. We have no idea if he’s received it, though. And we walk. And looking to the road on the far side of the gorge, we see the van sail back towards the Kawhatau Base road-end. Dirk can’t have received our message, and he must be going back to check if we’ve shown up at the end of the cable-way. And we keep walking.

An hour, about five kilometres, a flock of cows, several sheep, a curious horse, a pig, and a herd of excitable farm dogs later, we arrive at the farm-house and knock on the door. The sun’s low and we’re just reaching the hours of darkness, and these guys have had mis-placed trampers coming out of their ears all day. Well, Dirk and 6 other people at least. They’re very well tempered and accepting about it. The others were doing better than we thought they were, having made it down about half an hour earlier. Dirk had even managed to convince the guy to drive to the back of the farm and give them a lift. It was very nice of them. The guy’s wife pokes him and says he should give us a ride too, and very soon Richard and Amanda are crunched in the front of the ute. Four packs, Alistair, and I sit on the back with the dog, and we’re screaming down the road back to the camp-site. You can tell when you’re being driven around the back-roads by a local. The guy leans out the window as we’re passing through one of the gates, shouting to someone that they found the lost trampers.

Awesome. We hadn’t realised we’d walked this far in the last hour. The van’s at the end of the road, and they’re very happy to see us. (It means they can go home!) A couple of them have wandered down to the cable-way trying to see if we’re there, and they’ve been concerned that we’ve not yet arrived, but they come back within a couple of minutes. Now it’s just a mess getting out of all this saturated gear — we’re all still in the full storm gear that we’ve not removed since the snow on the tops.

As time goes on we find that Dirk stayed the night in Mangaweka with some students at the outdoor education centre, and it was very nice of them to put him up. Apparently they’re strategy board game and role-playing enthusiasts, and overnight they taught Dirk to play Dungeons & Dragons, or something like that. Very cool. Looking at what we did in the weekend, we didn’t seem to go that far — about 25 kilometres in all, but with an awful lot of steep climbing and descending. Apart from the farm-land, I figure we were on an average of about a 1/4 gradient for nearly the entire weekend. On the map it was like a giant three point turn with a wonky end. It was great weekend for decision making.

It was very nice for Dirk to stick around and keep track of everything, and make sure we could get out over a farm with some kind of notification. A few other people might be rather turned off if they’d organised a weekend tramp for seven people, then lost them all after the first twenty minutes. He was still helping out though, just from the other end.

It’s late, and we stop at Bulls to discover that the re-opened fish & chip shop there is actually really good. The sky’s fairly clear outside during the drive home. Which reminds me — I completely forgot to stick my head outside Crow Hut at 11pm last night and look for the partial lunar eclipse. I guess the southerly’s passed through, and tomorrow could be a nice day on the tops. Perhaps even a good day to walk along the Mokai Patea range. Next time, though. These things happen. The van’s noisy. One way or another everyone had a rewarding time, and everyone has their story to tell tonight. This was mine.

Rain and rain and rain.

Anyone can sign up to an MSC course, as long as the course pre-requisites are met. For those generally interested in outdoor safety, however, the MSC encourages people to join as instructors. Presently throughout New Zealand the MSC has and handful of paid staff, but its main strength is in over 1000 volunteer instructors. Researching best practices, designing and running the courses and comprehensive training material helps to spread the knowledge further among the outdoor community, but encouraging people to train to be instructors also helps to reinforce and embed what skills are learned. It’s a really cool philosophy and culture in which people continue to use the skills by learning to teach the skills.

I’m not a member of the MSC, and so far I’ve only taken advantage of the First Aid courses on offer because I wanted an outdoor first aid certificate. Until now I’ve focused mostly on being involved in and learning general skills through people in my local club (the WTMC), which sometimes runs its own courses albeit often latching into expertise of instructors who come via the MSC. Clubs are a good way to meet like-minded people and learn from them and see a variety of ways of approaching problems, but they certainly aren’t for everyone, and so an alternative for people who want to learn about outdoor safety and useful skills without joining a club is to get more involved in the MSC. Having seen a hint of how it seems to work, it’s tempting to try and be more involved in the future.

Something that seemed apparent, although I’m not saying this as someone with a lot of experience in the MSC, was that in the original two-day course a couple of years back there were a higher proportion of people attending in similar situations to me. There was a combination of people who’d never had any first aid experience before, people who might have been to a course ages before but didn’t remember much and wanted to do it properly again, and a few members of the MSC itself who were just keen to get started. The refresher course was quite different, in that it seemed as if the majority of people attending were much more qualified and confident from the beginning. With a few exceptions (definitely including me), the culture in the refresher course was more of people wanting to keep their certificate active as part of their personal skills development, rather than just learn about first aid. I think at least half of the people attending were direct members of the Mountain Safety Council, and many also knew each other through the MSC.

I was an odd person out in the group of fifteen, given how I’ve been somewhat lazy in keeping my skills fresh, and without having checked much of what I learned two years before, I felt rusty in areas where others were simply confirming their expertise. It’s neat that the MSC instills this kind of culture in its members. Rather than just learning from the instructor, I learned a lot from everyone present, often people wanting to discuss things and suggest ideas.

So thanks to Bridget (our instructor) and Jane (the admin person behind the scenes), and everyone else involved, including those who attended, in creating and running and being involved in such a great and useful course.

A few times now, I’ve wondered just how many degrees of separation there are between people who visit New Zealand’s back-country. Maybe a few people know nearly everyone, and the whole network is very closely connected. Maybe there are geographically localised networks.

Dates: 12th – 13th June, 2010
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Walls Whare Road-end.
People: Steve, Megan B, Hans, Christine, Kevin and me.
Huts visited: Totara Flats Hut (1 night)
Planned route: Up past Cone Saddle, over Cone and down to Neill Forks for Saturday night. Then back up and around Totara Flats, back towards the road.
Actual route: Straight to Totara Flats for Saturday night, up over Cone and back to start.
[Photos]
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We chased rainbows through the roads of the Wairarapa, and rain finally began to come down on us as we arrived in the parking area at the road-end of Walls Whare. There’s a nice camping area here, but it’d be somehow silly to use it this time given we were arriving at around 9.30am on a Saturday morning. Being a trip organised on behalf of our trampey club, our group consisted of Steve, myself, Megan, Hans, Christine and Kevin — a chap who mostly goes out with the Alpine Club whom Christine had managed to rope in on short notice. Apart from Christine, none of us had met Kevin before, but going tramping with people is a great way to meet people.

Our intent was to get in to Neill Forks Hut for the evening, which I was looking forward to because I haven’t been there before. We shared our van with another trampey club group of people coordinated by Megan S, and their idea was just to walk to Totara Flats alongside the river, stay for the night and walk back. As we drove up a couple of TTC members were about to leave, taking a retired Search and Rescue dog for a walk in to Tutuwai and back to Cone. This was good weather for tramping, despite the rain setting in.

As often happens, I took a little while to get my things sorted, and eventually found myself running over the swing bridge that crosses the Waiohine Gorge, flapping around as I sorted out my pack, camera now firmly attached. The others were waiting on the far side, having been away from the van two or three minutes before myself. We all left the far side as soon as I arrived, heading along the relatively obvious track and hoping to soon be at Cone Saddle. I had a strange moment there glancing at the end of the bridge, wondering if maybe everything wasn’t quite right. It was just a little rain . . . great tramping weather. As the minutes wore on, we discovered that Kevin wasn’t so unknown to us after all. Soon after we left, Hans had an enlightened moment where he exclaimed something like “ah, you’re that Kevin”. It turns out they’d anonymously come across each other a few weeks ago.

Within twenty or thirty minutes we’d spread out somewhat. It wasn’t a bad track, actually, gentle sidle above the Waiohine moving in and out of the trees and with the occasional view out over the Waiohine below. That was the problem, actually, and maybe why something hadn’t seem quite right. We weren’t going up, and surely we shouldn’t be anywhere near the Waiohine at all.

Kevin, Christine and I found and consulted each other near the back of the group, wondering if there was something wrong. Pulling out and checking a map, it became apparent that yeah, we certainly shouldn’t be where we were. Oops. A minute or two of continuing and we soon caught up with the others, who were having similar thoughts. This was certainly a problem, and it was about now I had one of those enlightening “ah yeah” moments, during which memories flooded back of the three previous times I’ve been to Cone Saddle. On every one of those occasions, the track went straight up a spur leading directly off the end of the bridge. The most recent time hadn’t even been that long ago. Some quickly performed in-the-head logic suggested that the track junction we were after would probably have been exactly where it was a year previously, which was more or less where we’d started from. Somehow we’d wandered off the end of the massive Waiohine Gorge swing bridge and missed a major junction.

As an aside, I’d like to note that some people would call this a “navigation” error, and possibly even an idiotic and embarrassing one. I wouldn’t. If you never tried to navigate, it can’t possibly be a navigation error, after all. If anything it was just a small mis-judgement of vectors that mis-placed us a little. Consequently instead of directing ourselves towards Cone Saddle and eventually Cone Peak (which should have been more vertically inclined), we were gracefully sidling towards Totara Flats.

Our first order of business was to decide how to avoid embarra creating disorientation and confusion for other groups of people enjoying the range. Obviously back-tracking to walk straight into Megan S’s group behind us was out of the question — they would have been very confused, possibly even dying of confoundedness on seeing us re-appear. Assessing our situation, we could probably divert up an alternative route to Cone Saddle, the base of which we’d yet to reach, but it’d be a big diversion that would take longer. In the end we decided to press on to Totara Flats, and possibly continue up and around the long way to Neill Forks Hut if we had time. Even if we stayed at Totara Flats, we’d have a while to get our story figured out before Megan and co showed up.

Kevin and Megan at Makaka Creek.

Pleasant Tararua rain continued to fall, but not so much as to flood the side creeks and prevent us from getting to our newly chosen destination. We wore raincoats, but were also under trees in general. Exposure to wetness was only average for the Tararuas. Good tramping precipitation. The route this way towards Totara Flats has at least a couple of significantly sized side-creeks that may flood dangerously — Clem Creek and Makaka Creek (aka Long Flat Creek), although neither was very full at this point. The main Waiohine River was high enough, however, for us to decide on the high water route around the slip two thirds of the way along. Having a hill to climb was rather a nice change, even if it was only for a short distance. The far side of the slip leads into a third creek on the southern end of Totara Flats, unnamed as far as I know, which is also prone to flooding and I’ve seen it in the past in a state which I wouldn’t enter it, but today, as we found on reaching it at about 12.30pm (three hours after starting), it was still perfectly crossable.

Totara Flats, and the site of the (newer)
old hut towards the back left.

We eventually drifted along the approximately 2.5 kilometre length of pretty river flats, sparkling with lively grasses and generally photogenic as places often are in the rain. The site of the old Totara Flats Hut lies part way along here, towards the back of the flats in a raised section. It was moved a few years back due to a determined flooding risk, I think, and is now reduced to a few sheets of corrugated iron left in the trees. The area now seems to make a popular campsite, being raised above the rest of the flat. The naming and positioning of Totara Flats Hut can be confusing when comparing different maps. Some maps label the now-missing hut as the “new Totara Flats” hut, as it was new when it was built as recently as the 1970s. The really new (and current) Totara Flats hut is back where the very old Totara Flats hut used to be, a few hundred metres further north, opposite the confluence between the Waiohine and Totara Creek, and very close to the bridge over the Waiohine. Some maps still label the location as the “old” Totara Flats hut, including the map on my GPS which is based on late-1990s data from LINZ.

Hans and Megan arriving.

Within a minute or two of us walking into Totara Flats Hut, the rain started persisting down with real cats and dogs force. Perhaps it was just the verandah amplifying the rain. Still, overall, a good Tararua day and great tramping weather. We’d walked in at about the same time as a trio of people from the Hutt Valley Tramping Club, who’d come from the Holdsworth Road end, and had a chatter with them. It turned out Kevin knew a couple of them really well through the alpine club.

By now it was lunch time, but we still needed to decide what to do from here, and if necessary get our story figured out before the others showed up. Being situated in a large cosy hut like Totara Flats with rain hammering on the corrugated plastic roof does strange things to people’s judgement which are sometimes difficult to understand. Weighing the prospects of staying against the prospects of continuing towards Neill Forks, possibly walking the final hour in the dark (being a week or so before the shortest day and everything), we elected to sacrifice travel in the good tramping rain and remain here for the night. Kevin’s declaration that he’d been to Neill Forks a few weeks before, and that it was a dank and soppy hole in the ground, or something to that effect, sealed the deal. His description reminded me of an entry I’d seen in the book at Powell Hut on the late Saturday morning of a few weeks before, of a group that’d left to go up Holdsworth in yucky weather before heading down to Neill Forks. Okay, so he was that Kevin, as I confirmed with him. I guess you quite often run into the same people in the hills.

With the decision now made, I quickly snatched my favourite Totara Flats bunk, which is the top level bunk next to the window overlooking the Waiohine River. Last time I was here I’d spent some time gazing out the window waiting to see a large tree or two floating past. That had been great Tararua tramping weather, too. This time we’d not had as much rain as last time.

Kevin and Christine fighting
with a crossword.

Steve also hovered towards the bunk room, but in his case it was to hide himself away in his sleeping bag for a snooze. We waited and waited for Megan S’s group to show up, and as time went on Christine eventually roped us all into helping with her crossword puzzles, which took a while. I read a few more pages in my book, and as we waited we were joined by another single person from the direction of Walls Whare. It turned out she was someone Steve knew through his work, and I guess the degrees of separation are rather small in the tramping world.

The Waiohine went up and down with the showers, rising and falling, speeding up and slowing down very noticeably during the several hours as we waited. One of the Hutt Valley club guys was paying close attention to it, and kept us updated as to the state of the marker rocks he was watching over in Totara Creek as it poured into the far side of the Waiohine. In the space of a few hours, Totara Creek rose by perhaps 30 centimetres, and then dropped by the same amount. The main river was certainly full enough to be a dangerous crossing for the whole time we were there, but not as flooded as it could be. Earlier as we’d coasted along the flats, I think I’d been able to see the stones below the water within a metre or so of the river’s edge. I suppose there probably hadn’t been enough rain in the past few days to fully saturate the soil, and the river levels were much more reactionary to heavy showers passing over the catchment than they would have been after a few days of persistent rain.

As for getting our story straight, we didn’t really. I think it was some kind of justification about having decided to come this way around our loop in case the creeks were flooded by the following day. Whatever it was, it was enough to satisfy Megan S and her associates. They showed up about three or four hours after we had, having coped with some higher side creeks, I suspect. They weren’t too late to help with some of the harder parts of the crosswords. Before long we were chopping veggies, figuring out how to open tins of tuna without a can opener, and eventually Steve slunk out of bed and cooked a nice Green Curry meal, which was topped off by some kind of cream and apricot on ginger cake dessert whipped up by Hans. Good food by all accounts.

I took a look outside and counted three stars in various directions, generally through cloud, and the rain continued to clatter on the corrugated plastic verandah. On announcing the stars when I returned indoors, Kevin raced outside appearing quite enthused, soon returning with a muted look of disgust on his face. Maybe I hadn’t been descriptive enough. I slunk into bed at around 8pm, I think. It was dark out side and the rain continued to clatter on the roof. Classic tramping rain.

Me, Hans, Steve, Megan, Kevin and Christine.

We’d discussed our options for Sunday, which amounted to either walking out the quick way (side-creeks allowing), or following around the loopy way up to and along Code Ridge. The second option had won convincingly, with nobody really wanting to go back the way we came, and we estimated it’d probably take about 7 hours looking at the topology and using standard group timing metrics. It was about 9am by the time we left, after a relatively casual pulling together of things. I’m fairly sure Steve would have won any competition of the most sleep at Totara Flats that weekend, having clocked up around 16 hours as we figured out. He must have been very tired, but didn’t hold anyone up. I killed some time as people got ready by going out to find some firewood, having felt somewhat guilty about not having contributed much to the HVTC people’s effort to keep the fire going the previous evening.

Christine clambering around the track.

During our climb up to Cone Ridge, which starts steeply, the rain continued. It looked as though it could be rather cold higher up, but I was one of the few to take a gamble and stick with only wearing my shorts, and no thermal long-johns just yet — I sometimes find I can get very uncomfortably hot otherwise, I guess. Cone Ridge becomes a more shallow climb at around 600 vertical metres, and in several places we found ourselves clambering around small ponds and bogs that had collected on what might normally have represented a track.

Two hours after we left, we passed the turn-off that would have led down to Neill Forks Hut, but nobody felt like running down the hill to take a photo proving we’d been there. An hour later we found a smidgen of snow, indicative of the relatively cold temperatures at this higher elevation.

We were sleeted on through the trees as we approached Cone, and I finally caved in and got my overtrousers and balaclava on. It wasn’t windy, though. Just great Tararua weather. As we approached the wacky antenna thingee on Cone some time after midday, which the most obvious route avoids by about 100 metres, the sleet even let up and allowed us to see some of the surrounding range in relative comfort as it hovered in the midst of the glinting cloud that settled in the valleys. Still quite cold, and kind of murky, but also very cool. It was nicer than last time I was here, when the wind chill made things less comfortable. We celebrated, each having a toffee pop. Cone Peak (1080m) lies just above the bush-line, and the three-way route junction is marked by a standard 3-way DoC signpost. I was the last to head back down into the trees, and took a minute just for myself.

Looking towards Alpha, Aston and Hector.

The track from Cone Peak down to Cone Saddle is a fairly normal walk down a spur in the Tararuas, offering the occasional vantage point to gaze out towards much higher peaks such as Alpha and Aston and Hector to the west. That part of the range, up to 500 metres higher than Cone, was well covered in a white blanket of snow, and made a good sight despite also being blanketed by cloud. As we descended, Kevin explained how he was now up to his seventeenth day in the Tararuas, and had been rained on every time. This contradicts my own experience. Still, I think we’d timed our visit to Cone Peak nearly perfectly despite the amount of rain. The cloud had parted, albeit briefly, during the short time we’d spent above the bush-line and had made for a relatively pleasant visit. Awesome Tararua Weather. With the rain holding off, I even managed to remove my raincoat for a while.

There are a couple of notes about this particular spur that come to mind, from Cone Peak down to Cone Saddle. The first is that I was in a group where we saw a kaka screeching and flapping in the trees around here a couple of years back. By itself this would not be significant because I’m sure kakas get to many random places, and they’re known to live in the Tararuas. I think someone up the front of our group on this occasion also mentioned seeing a kaka, though, so perhaps there’s a kaka or two that especially likes this region. The second note that comes to mind is that although my relatively modern map only shows the two “official” maintained tracks down to Cone Hut… the first directly off Cone Saddle and the second from slightly further down… Kevin’s map showed a third track labelled as the Block XIX track, heading down the spur from spot-height 812 directly towards Cone Hut. I forgot to look out for the likely starting point of this route, but it could make a fun navigation exercise some day.

Cone Saddle is easily recognisable.

We re-grouped at Cone Saddle at 1.30pm or so, an hour after our visit to Cone Peak and probably about 4 horizontal kilometres of travel back to the Waiohine Gorge bridge. Cone Saddle is within reasonable reach of a Friday night walk, which was nice to know for me at least. As we dropped further, nearing the road, the weather situation changed quite suddenly. Within minutes, the ambience of light below the tree canopy dramatically diminished, and soon more rain set in. This was a fresh southerly front finally on its way through, but fortunately not one we’d need to spend a lot of time enduring. Overall we spent about 2 hours getting down to the road from Cone Saddle, a journey that becomes fairly steep and slippery near the bottom. We emerged at the bridge from the opposite direction to where we’d headed the previous day’s morning, somehow amused to re-discover the track junction we’d walked straight past, and quickly made our way back to the van where Megan S and three others had been waiting for about 90 minutes. It took us about 6.5 hours in the end, so thankfully our estimate hadn’t been too far off.

The Waiohine from above.

There are many things I think I enjoyed about this trip. I was able to see the Waiohine River, one of my favourite Tararua rivers, in relative flood once again. I still haven’t seen it much close-up out of flood, and maybe that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. I also got to climb up a hill, which was fun and rewarding as usual. Oh, and I’ve now met Kevin, which seems to put me less degrees of separation away from knowing many more people who visit the back-country.

I think the Holdsworth Jumbo Circuit (AKA the Powell Jumbo Loop, the Jumbo Powell Loop, the Jumbo Holdsworth Loop, and so on), is by far the most popular tramp in the Tararuas. The circuit is typically walked over a couple of days, and the three back-country huts spaced around it are supposedly responsible for some insanely high proportion of hut ticket revenue for all of Tararua Forest Park. (Higher than 50% at least.) The Holdsworth road-end is one of the Tararuas ‘ most accessible, and the loop attracts people from all sorts of backgrounds. For many people it’s their first experience outdoors.

Date: 15th May, 2010
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Holdsworth Road-end.
People: Megan S, Megan B, Richard, Christine, Katja and me.
Huts visited: Holdsworth Lodge (0 nights, camping nearby), Mountain House Shelter (0 nights), Powell Hut (0 nights), Jumbo Hut (0 nights), Atiwhakatu Hut (0 nights).
Route: From Holdsworth road-end up to Powell Hut, over Holdsworth to Jumbo, down to Jumbo Hut, down the alternative track north of Raingauge Spur, then past Atiwhakatu Hut back to the Holdsworth road-end.
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We walked the Holdsworth Jumbo Circuit as a daywalk, which is very feasible if you’re reasonably quick, and easier if you’re taking daypacks rather than tramping packs. We’d heard of others walking the loop in about 8 hours, but without much context to go on. With nobody being certain exactly how long it’d take, we drove to the Holdsworth road-end on Friday night to camp in preparation for an early getaway — staying at Holdsworth lodge would have been preferable, except that it’s closed for maintenance at present.

It’s amazing how much extra junk it’s necessary to take just for camping overnight, or perhaps it simply spread out because we didn’t have nice structured packs to stuff it all into. At least we were able to leave it behind in the morning. Christine and I both still forgot to bring inflatable mattresses in any case, so had to get used to sleeping on the harder ground, although it fortunately wasn’t too cold.

By morning we still hadn’t finalised which direction we’d walk the loop, the choices being to either head up past Powell and get onto the tops immediately, or to stay in the valley until Atiwhakatu Hut and then head directly up to Jumbo Hut at the bush-line. The weather systems were fairly complicated with a couple of fronts on the way through, the first of which hit overnight with some rain. We hoped to avoid too much wind, though, and when the rain held off for a while in the morning we elected to go straight up to Powell in the hope that we might get through the section on the tops during a break in the weather.

After a wake-up at six am (ten hours of time to sleep but it’s never quite enough), we managed to get away and walking at around ten past seven, passing Holdsworth Lodge a few minutes later in it’s partly-renovated state. With the doubt about how long it might take, we also took torches just in case we were walking out in the dark. As-ever pessimistic, I personally threw in my bivy bag, but never expected to need it.

Views towards the road
from Rocky Lookout.

The track up the hill is very well maintained, sidling around as it climbs slowly. We reached Rocky Lookout a few minutes before eight, having overtaken a collection of happy guys on their way down to Totara Flats for a hunting exhibition. (We heard them and smelt the cigarette smoke five minutes before catching up.) They were having a great time and were fun to chat to briefly. With another twenty five minutes up the hill, we reached the sign-posted track junction that splits off to Totara Flats. It’s a few minutes after this where things flatten out to Pig Flat, and DoC has installed some lengthy boardwalks… not always the nicest things to walk on, but I guess it makes sense with the amount of people this track gets. Pig Flat was also the first view of Powell Hut, perched as a small dot up on the spur ahead of us, chaperoned in a way by the dominant shape of High Ridge out to its left. We passed Mountain House (just a shelter these days) at about eight forty.

Mountain House Shelter.

From Mountain House, the track up to Powell becomes more steep. It’s still well graded at first, but eventually it’s necessary to clamber up a few small rock faces that require a moment’s consideration. The rain had begun again, too, which meant that by the time we reached some of the more exposed rocky out-croppings, we began to get decidedly wet. No matter, though, because Powell Hut wasn’t too far away. We walked in at twenty past nine. The hut is sign-posted at four hours from the road and this is probably a realistic time for many groups who walk to Powell Hut, but with daypacks and generally being reasonably quick, it was a little over two hours.

Richard nearing Powell Hut.

Nobody was home, although the book indicated some people had left earlier in the morning on the way down to Mid-Waiohine. Sitting in Powell Hut and regrouping, we spent about half an hour deciding what to do next. Rain was coming through intermittently and the wind outside was icy, not strong overall but every so often coming in ominous gusts that caused the windows to rattle. We also had one member of the group feeling a little queasy, with the climb apparently having made it worse.

Katja, Megan S, Richard and Christine.

In the end we put on full storm gear to deter the wind and carried on, with possible bail-out plans of either heading back the way we came, or going down the East Holdsworth track. Mt Holdsworth itself is about a 270 metre climb from Powell Hut, which we thought could possibly take nearly an hour going by standard metrics, but it was surprisingly fast. We stood at the trig on the top at half past ten. Perhaps the speed was due to the wind lashing us for much of the way up, but I bet the daypacks helped. Then a funny thing happened, and the sun broke through the clouds.

The East Holdsworth spur
(from near Mt Holdsworth).

The wind was still cold and occasionally gusty, but with everyone covered up that wasn’t too much of an issue, and the walk along the tops towards Jumbo became an increasingly nice jaunt. It’s very well marked simply by the amount of people who walk it, especially in these conditions when there’s no snow around. One thing I regret is that I forgot to look out for the plane wreckage on Shingle Slip Knob, which is supposed to have been placed back in its original location after having been illegally and bizzarely removed last year by the New Zealand Sport and Vintage Aviation Society and Wairarapa Helicopters. (For a more complete explanation see: [1] [2] and [3].) It must have been clearly visible from Mt Holdsworth, but by the time I remembered we’d walked too far, and the site was hidden by the jutting-out shape of Angle Knob. Oh well.

Christine, Megan S and Richard
nearing Jumbo Peak.

From Holdsworth to Jumbo (Peak) took about an hour of procrastinated walking between half past ten and half past eleven, which we tried to spread out because we didn’t want to leave the tops too early. After ten minutes of hanging around on Jumbo in an increasingly nice weather window, we veered to the east back down to Jumbo Hut (about thirty minutes away), to find three pot-smoking guys sitting around having a good time. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the pot-smoking thing (or even the smoking thing) but they were out having a good enough time — they’d walked here from Powell Hut this morning, in worse conditions than we’d done. They commented on how covered up I was, which I’d completely forgotten about until this point, so I sat down to remove my beanie and my balaclava and my mittens and my raincoat and my overtrousers, and suddenly my daypack was much more full. As they left to head down Rainguage Spur to Atiwhakatu Hut, where they planned to stay the night, the six of us settled into lunch.

Looking back to Holdsworth from Jumbo.

Looking down on Jumbo Hut.

Checking out the look book at Jumbo Hut demonstrated just how popular-a-circuit this is, and why it’s responsible for so much hut ticket revenue. The past couple of weeks had seen two large groups (one school and one scout, I think), as well as countless other casual groups of visitors in between. These huts must be packed to overflowing at times, which I think makes me more glad we were walking the loop as a daywalk.

The thirty minutes of sitting around for lunch gave us more time to consider options. The “official” Holdsworth Jumbo Circuit (if there’s such a thing as official) follows Raingauge Spur from Jumbo Hut. It has a reputation of being one of the stinkiest worst steepest and most horrible climbs in the Tararuas, although I think this may be a combination of it being fairly steep, and having so many people walk it — I don’t personally remember much about Raingauge Spur from last time I went up in late 2006. With time on our side, it still being merely twelve forty, we elected to head down the alternative track that’s north of the main Raingauge Spur track, which has a reputation of being a much nicer walk, although it drops to about two kilometres north of Atiwhakatu Hut rather than going there directly.

Cute goblin forest.

The alternative track is sign-posted from just behind Jumbo Hut, although it almost looks as if the sign is pointing down Raingauge Spur when the track actually leave directly behind the sign. It is a nice track, too, with pretty goblin forest near the top. I’ve come to dislike Crown Ferns in general (the knee-high ones that hide the ground underneath), but this particular track showed me they can actually be very nice when there’s a good track through them. The walk to the camp-site on the Atiwhakatu River at the bottom of the track took about an hour, after which we commenced following the more yucky (but still walkable) track for the remaining two kilometres to Atiwhakatu Hut, arriving shortly after two pm. Despite having walked past this hut during five separate stages of its being re-built last year, this is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to visit it since its completion, and it was nice to see it. After a year the hut’s still vaguely sterile — it’s not yet covered with ad-hoc clothes-lines and other bits and pieces that people have brought in, but it’s getting there.

Atiwhakatu Hut.

The timing was going really well at this point — we’d been walking for about seven hours, not especially rushing, and completed the better part of the loop with only a flat walk out remaining. The three smoking chaps we’d met up at Jumbo were already relaxing on the picnic table out front, and they greeted us happily. A few others were also hanging out in the hut, including a group of young children having a great time spreading out on the platform bunks inside. As we were there, another group of people showed up and carried on towards Mitre Flats, before yet another couple of small groups drifted in. It must have been about that time of day.

We left Atiwhakatu Hut at about half past two, and from here the track out to Holdsworth is really well graded and hard… not such a good thing for tramping boots or feet, but probably much better for the track’s ability to cope with the amount of the people it sees. This section of track must also be very interesting for a person who wanted to see a variety of different kinds of New Zealand back-country bridges. Nearly every tiny side-creek is bridged, and there are a plethora of different styles, including the odd bridge that looks quite out of place but does the job perfectly well.

On our way out, we passed a couple of other quite large groups of adults and children walking in. Needless to say, the twelve bunk Atiwhakatu Hut was going to be very packed this Saturday night. It’s a very accessible hut, though, and a great target for such groups since the original hut was replaced last year. I guess the main thing to take into account, which of course applies everywhere in New Zealand, is that you should definitely be prepared to camp outside if you visit a hut like Atiwhakatu Hut.

It was ten to four as we arrived at Donnelly Flats, which would have been a great place to camp if we’d intended to take all our camping gear with us. Twenty minutes later, we arrived back at the road where the cars were parked. Not a bad day in all — almost exactly nine hours, although from that experience I’d expect it could be done in a couple of hours less by someone who didn’t bother so much with stopping, and a crazy mountain runner would probably knock it off in half the time. On the other hand, it also makes a pretty good overnight weekend tramp.

Things began with an idea of a weekend expedition over the Tararua tops to Tarn Ridge Hut. Somehow, even with the weather cooperating for such an idea, things didn’t quite work out that way. It was the opposite, and we spent the majority of our time navigating off-track below the bush line.

Dates: 7th – 9th May, 2010
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Kiriwhakapapa Road-end.
People: Illona, Richard and me.
Huts visited: Blue Range Hut (1 night), Mitre Flats Hut (0 nights), Mid King Biv (1 night)
Planned route: Up to Blue Range Hut for Friday night, over to Cow Creek, navigate up to Table Ridge, along around Mitre and Girdlestone, and to Tarn Ridge Hut for Saturday night. Down over Mitre, then up Donald Spur and past Blue Range Hut back down to the road.
Actual route: Up to Blue Range Hut for Friday night, over Te Mara and down Donald Spur to Mitre Flats, then up to Mid King Biv for Saturday night. Back to Mitre Flats, up onto Blue Range near Stoney Creek, along to Bruce Hill and down a spur to the south-east to the old bush tram track that leads back to the road.
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Originally there were going to be four of us, but Paul unfortunately had to drop out with a foot problem, which left Richard, Illona and Myself. We stopped for a Friday night dinner at Carterton, which has a fabulous kebab shop, then continued to the Kiriwhakapapa road-end. Along the way we discussed the original plan, which would have been to walk from Kiriwhakapapa to Cow Creek, up to Table Ridge, along to Girdlestone, and then on to Tarn Ridge Hut… then come down over Mitre and up Donald Spur (a more direct way back to Blue Range Hut) on Sunday. The more we thought about it, the more that this idea seemed to be skimming the edges of available daylight at this time of year. Consequently, we thought we might try doing it in reverse instead, which would make Saturday the longer day.

The Tararua Main Range
under a blanket of cloud.

By about a quarter past eight, we’d begun our walk up to Blue Range Hut, eventually to arrive at about 10pm. The solar powered lights are back, which is nice, given they’d vanished last time I visited — perhaps they were just out for maintenance.

With a long day in mind for Saturday, we were up about 6.30am, and out the door at a quarter past seven to walk past morning views of a sliver of cloud sitting on top of the Tararua Main Range. Our 7.15am departure might have allowed enough time for our day’s plan, except that we had more trouble than anticipated in finding the top of Donald Spur — the spur to the north of Donald Stream that heads west of Te Mara (1104), and a known short-cut down to the Waingawa River and Mitre Flats. The informal route up to Te Mara is marked off the main track up from Blue Range Hut with a ribbon tied to a tree branch, but after this we muddled around for some time, and possibly wasted about an hour in confirming we were actually walking down the right thing.

Illona near the top of Donald Spur.

The delay wasn’t too bad in essence. All three of us have done reasonable amounts of off-track navigation, but none had been in a proper position of responsibility. I think the experience helped to boost everyone’s confidence because we all knew that decisions we made would actually have consequences. We did eventually find the top of Donald Spur, having back-tracked to Te Mara peak, which we’d originally sidled around (trying to be smart). Then we just trusted the bearing to let us sidle up the side, making sure the terrain around us matched what was expected, and eventually confirming with the GPS just to be sure we were correct about our assumptions. Once on Donald Spur things were fairly easy going, although there was more tree-fall than I would have expected given how often I’ve heard it’s used. The tree-fall might be left-over from a storm a year or three back, and maybe not completely cleared out.

Tree-fall on Donald Spur.

Richard crossing the Waingawa.

Donald Spur drops into Donald Stream, a couple of hundred metres in from the Waingawa River. We reached the Waingawa at about 11.20am, which is probably about an hour and forty minutes after we’d become confident we were near the top of the right spur. After a five minute stop for a snack, we crossed the Waingawa (which was running very low) and carried on for a little over an hour along the main track towards Mitre Flats from the direction of Cow Creek. By now we were really starting to realise that we’d need to hoof it if we were going to get up Mitre, around Girdlestone and on to Tarn Ridge Hut before dark. It isn’t a terribly nice track. incidentally. Very muddy in a few places, and also just one of those tracks that weaves around the inside of little gullies, involves clambering over logs, and other annoying little things that make it slightly slower than might otherwise appear. The LINZ map data also doesn’t clearly indicate that much of this track also sidles fairly high above the Waingawa. (To be fair, however, it possibly does show the track on the appropriate side of the contour lines if you look closely enough.)

Arriving at Mitre Flats.

It was lunch time, about half twelve, as we walked into Mitre Flats. Very coincidentally, within a minute of us walking up, two guys arrived from the direction of the Pines — it turned out to be Adrian and Robert, both of whom we knew. It’s a small country, I guess. They’d camped at Kiriwhakapapa last night (apparently turning up after we left, and they’d seen our car), then driven back to The Pines entrance, and were now on their way to walk to Cow Creek Hut and eventually meet up with the car they’d left at Kiriwhakapapa. As for ourselves, we were beginning to have doubts about whether we still wanted to go all the way up to Tarn Ridge. With a little over four hours of reasonable daylight remaining after we’d finished lunch, standard metrics suggested it could take us about 3.5 hours just for the 1100 metre climb up to Mitre, before carrying on around Girdlestone. The area wasn’t familiar to any of us, and if we were lucky we’d be walking up to Tarn Ridge Hut with torches on the edge of darkness. To add to this, we were having some doubts about the length of time it might take to navigate down to Cow Creek Hut on Sunday, especially if we ran into similar problems as that morning, and once we finally did get down we’d have at least another four hour walk ahead of us.

Illona had a rather good idea, though, of going up for a look at Mid King Biv. It hadn’t been obvious at first, because Mitre Flats is one of those areas that’s on the edge of all the maps. Once we were looking at the correct maps, however, and had some time to absorb the idea, it looked feasible and interesting. Mid King Biv is named after Middle King Peak (1521) underneath which it sits. It’s sheltered just below the bush-line and accessible from the tops, but (it turns out) is also very accessible from a spur that leads up from the confluence between Baldy Creek and South Mitre Stream — just south of Mitre Flats Hut. With this in mind, we wrote some notes in the Mitre Flats hut book about our adjusted plans, convinced Adrian and Robert to leave a note on the car after they walked out, and (eventually) Illona would send out a text message to inform our emergency contact. With the new plan, we wouldn’t be able to walk out the original route, either, so we made alternative plans to come back to Mitre Flats the following day, and find another off-track route over Blue Range.

Studying maps around
South Mitre Stream.

At 1.30pm we began walking straight up the South Mitre Stream, beginning from the small bridge that leads towards Atiwhakatu Hut, but we soon found an easier ground-trail on the true right. After a small (but obvious) creek shown on the map, there’s an informal marker tied to a tree about 5 metres up Baldy Creek from the confluence. Inside the trees, it’s a short hop up a slope, then a cairn. After this, although we continued to have maps and compasses out for most of the climb, things are relatively easy heading up the spur on what is often a well-defined ground trail. We decided it was probably safer to stick with the ground trail when we could, as long as it didn’t suddenly veer away, since it looked as if the contour lines get rather close in a couple of places. At a high enough point, Illona was able to get out a text message to indicate our adjusted plans.

Things gets tangly nearer the height of Mid King Biv, above about 1000 metres. Apparently Mid King Biv was quite difficult to find until very recently, but it’s now quite well marked off the main route along the spur since a couple of years ago. At first we reached a point where we could stick our heads out on the Baldy Creek side of the spur, and noticed a couple of cairns, but they might have indicated an older track or a less common route around that side. After pushing around a lot, Illona spotted one of those giant orange Department of Conservation triangles up ahead, and we found it much easier to reach by going back under the trees and continuing to bash our way through. The triangle primarily indicates where a short, DOC-marked track leads off to the Biv, which is obscured just below the bush line and not very visible from far away. It’s also necessary (or at least sane) to follow this route a short distance to continue going up, since otherwise there’s no obvious way straight ahead.

Turning off the spur to Mid King Biv.

Mid King Biv.

We reached Mid King Biv at about 4.30pm, and it’s cute. We filled a handy bucket from the stream behind the biv. There’s a good space for camping out front, and a nice fire pit in an area that would be sheltered from the wind coming over the ridge. The biv itself is basically just a box, with 2 mattresses — one of which sits on a platform about 20 cm above the floor. I lifted the lid of the platform to find a scummy old billy, and a few sheets of broken glass that looked as if they might once have been in the small solitary window on the end opposite the door. The hut book’s very cool. It dates back to 1999, and is probably only about 20% full. It looked as if someone might visit every month or two, although some people certainly don’t write in the book. The person who’d come down from here and written in the Mitre Flats book the day before certainly hadn’t.

It also makes some of the bureaucracy that surrounds back-country recreation fairly obvious. When a hut is so small and remote, the three required signs that cover DoC’s perceived legal liabilities really stand out. On opening the one and only door of the biv, we were greeted with a proportionally large FIRE EXIT sign, which mostly overlapped the standard DoC “environmental care code” sign to make it look as if the environmental care code ends where the FIRE EXIT is. Below the two of them was the giant sign stating “DANGER — Only use your gas stove in ventilated parts of the hut!”, never minding that there aren’t any unless you have your stove running in the middle of the fire exit. Completing the lower section of the door was the regular sign to say “WARNING — the water we provide here is probably okay!”. Incidentally, the water is provided by the Department of Conservation’s well-engineered and very natural looking stream behind the biv that’s a tributary to Baldy Creek down below. All of these signs are spaced on the door of a box in which it’s not possible to stand up straight.

The base temperature on Saturday night wasn’t too bad, but there was a lot of wind chill coming over the ridge and down to meet us, which made things uncomfortable when sitting outside to prepare dinner. We spent most of the time wrapped up well to keep off the light but icy breeze. Illona did most of the preparation of Paul’s green curry recipe, which worked nicely, and then produced an interesting dessert based around berries, chocolate, and some weird kind of spongy italian biscuit. Very nice.

Nobody felt like camping. Once the dishes were out of the way, we squeezed into the biv, abandoning the second mattress to lean it against the wall. Richard and I head-to-tailed on thermarests on what remained of the floor. We also briefly made more specific plans for getting out on Sunday. Plan 1 would be to cross the Waingawa opposite Mitre Flats, then attempt to get straight onto Blue Range. Plan 2 would be to find a route up to Lookout Point (on Blue Range) which Richard had come down about a week before. Plan 3, if the first 2 failed, would be to go back up Donald Spur to Te Mara, and down past Blue Range Hut. If we were really in trouble, plan 4 would result in a long and tedious day following the main track out to Cow Creek, then up past Blue Range Hut.

As we extinguished our torches and darkness enveloped the interior of the tiny box, I noticed for the first time that those Department of Conservation FIRE EXIT signs glow in the dark! For the entire night, every time I opened my eyes to what might otherwise be total blackness, I could bathe in the warm glow of the FIRE EXIT merely 2 metres from my face. It continued to glow just as clearly at 6am.

Departing under the
Main Range.

On Sunday morning, we were once again up at 6.30am, but this time things took a little longer to arrange and we weren’t away until an hour later. Following the initial part of the track that sidles around the main range ridge from the biv and back to the spur, we initially began to follow it upwards by accident towards the main range, but soon noticed our mistake and headed back into the trees to where we’d come. We mostly followed the ground trail to get down, although we probably relied on maps and compasses more frequently than on the way up. The spur broadens in a couple of places which resulted in a few minutes here and there of searching around to find the optimal way down without going too far from our bearing.

Baldy Creek as it meets
South Mitre Stream.

It was 9.20am when we reached the confluence of South Mitre Stream and Baldy Creek, and 30 minutes later, after some shuffling around on the edge of the stream trying to figure out just how far the ground trail on the true right went, we were back at Mitre Flats Hut to note in the book that we’d passed through again. After this we backtracked to the main bridge over the Waingawa, and quickly found our route up to Blue Range.

The proper spur that we’d had in mind starts at Stoney Creek and heads a little north of east, but we didn’t follow that far because there’s an informal track that begins from behind a big obvious sign. In one direction the sign points towards Mitre Flats, in the other direction it points towards the road (The Pines). At first glance it seems fairly pointless having this sign at all, given that it only offers a backwards and forwards option, and most people probably want to go to wherever they didn’t come from. On closer inspection, it probably exists because directly behind the sign, a third informal ground trail climbs the hill and it stands out very well. I think this is what remains of the track to the old Mitre Flats bridge, which was further along the river, and we even saw an old orange marker some way along it. Apparently there’s also an unmaintained and rougher track along the river, so there may be some connection.

In any case, we followed this ground trail for a few minutes looking for an obvious route up the hill, based on vague memories I had of doing something similar about three years ago. The trail mostly runs parallel above the river, but we spotted a few options for heading up-wards and soon decided on one roughly opposite the hut, just north of the top of a slip, at least as we discerned later once we’d figured out what spur we were on. This took us up a small bubble of a spur heading south-east, almost at right angles to the main spur, and briefly well defined at about the 500 metre contour. There was even an occasional axe-blaze chunk taken out of the odd tree, and we figured that as we couldn’t possibly go past the initially planned spur (one would think) we may as well follow it, and they eventually met nearer the top. After a brief sit-down followed by a little extra climbing, we found ourselves on the southern-most of the two nearby spot-heights at 865 metres. It was nice to be on Blue Range.

The main Blue Range ridge has a ground trail along much of it which, if you don’t mind sharp Totara branches regularly slapping you in the knees, and occasionally face, is superior in many ways to some of the more official tracks around the Tararuas. (The one I mentioned earlier near Mitre Flats comes to mind.) We pushed north along the range towards Bruce Hill (975), taking guesses every so often at where we were, and confirming with the GPS once we’d placed our bets. The range veers to the north-east as it nears Lookout Point (725), which we didn’t visit because it’s off to one side but which is reportedly not a very impressive lookout point, but is the top of another common route down to the Waingawa River. Very soon after Lookout Point, the going became much tougher and more overgrown. It was still very doable and there’s still a ground trail, but things were certainly slower. After a kilometre of bashing and climbing, we arrived at a small plateau just south of Bruce Hill to stop for a snack, maybe ten minutes before 1pm.

From here we’d had an approximate idea to navigate down a wonky spur to the east, then south-east, into Mikimiki Stream, and I hopped up to the top of Bruce Hill, about 100 metres north, to calibrate the altimeter. We debated for a little while about exactly where to go to find our east-ward spur. I managed to confuse myself because there’s a very well defined, and marked, ground trail that heads south-east off the plateau, which I thought might twist eastwards soon after it left. I think Illona had it most correct when she suggested we’d need to simply push eastwards off the plateau and follow a bearing, even though it wasn’t very well defined at a first impression. In the end, we looked at the time of day and considered there were only a few hours of daylight remaining, and followed the markers, leaving at about 1.10pm or thereabouts.

It quickly became obvious that the markers were leading us straight south-west down a spur towards spot-height 535 and onto the same old tram-line track we’d have been aiming for anyway, albeit a few kilometres further from our destination. We knew from past ventures, however, that the tram track was very fast, and figured we may as well just hit it further back, possibly adding half an hour or an hour to what we might have otherwise had to walk out. It’s actually a really well defined and easy to walk hunters’ trail down that spur. It’s marked frequently with blue milk bottle caps and white plastic covered in reflective tape, and even hops out onto rocky knolls between the dracophyllum for short stints, affording some nice views of the surroundings both out towards the Wairarapa, and in towards the Main Range. Overall it’s far superior in quality to many official tracks, and we hit the main track a little before 3pm. Not too long after, about 4.15pm or so, we stepped back out to Kiriwhakapapa Shelter where we’d left the car.

What a great weekend. As places go, the Blue Range in the Tararuas isn’t a bad place to get lost. There’s not a lot to fall off, there are plenty of spurs going to interesting places, and it’s on the side of the range more sheltered from the rain coming off the sea to the west, which among other things makes it just a little easier to push through the bush, and probably to find a reasonable campsite if necessary.

It’s strange that our initial plan had involved little if any navigation, because I think this is perhaps one of the most worthwhile navigation trips I’ve had so far. All three of us had done some off-track stuff in the past, but none of us was too confident beforehand. Realising that we were all about equal with navigation skills, I think, helped us all to take the responsibility more seriously and it was a good confidence booster. As Illona pointed out, we each tended to look at similar problems in different ways, and it helped to learn from each other without immediately having to feel as if one person was more of an expert and authoritative over anyone else. I’m hoping I have an opportunity to get out on a similar trip again some time.

Sitting in the claustrophobic corner of our van, also known as the back seat, I’m struggling to keep my dinner down. We stopped some time earlier at Levin, where I visited one of my favourite feeds for Friday nights, Thai Taste Express. Very unusually, I couldn’t even get through all my dinner. I have a theory that a lack of sleep over the past few days has played badly with my system, and it would also explain my headache. Most vans aren’t made for a nice back-seat experience, especially not on windy unsealed country roads. We’re aiming for possums every couple of minutes though, so hopefully something good is coming out of it for New Zealand. Eventually we’re at the end of Renfrew Road below Rangiwahia. Stepping outside, into the rain, I suddenly feel much more able. The fresh air certainly helps.

Dates: 30th April – 2nd May, 2010
Location: Ruahine Forest Park, Rangiwahia Road-end.
People: Alistair, Hans, Mika, Pete, Bernie and me.
Huts visited: Rangiwahia Hut (2 nights)
Route: Walk up to Rangiwahia, go for a wander around the tops, then down Dead Man’s Track.
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It’s about a quarter past ten in the evening when we begin our walk up by torchlight, and will be a further hour and forty minutes before we reach Rangiwahia Hut, situated just over the bush-line at 1300 metres above sea level. Along the way, I notice that what was by far one of the Department of Conservation’s best ever signs (the “Worst Is Over” sign that used to decorate the top of the detour around the major slip) has disappeared, either removed or taken by someone who wanted a souvenir. Near our destination, I begin to feel queasy again which may not be a good sign. We arrive, however, and the only occupant on this Friday evening is the one person we were expecting to find, who’d driven down from Tauranga to join a trip that Sam was organising, and this helpfully means we don’t need to be as discrete when settling in.

Sam and two others plan to head over to Howletts tomorrow, which is more than the rest of us will probably be bothered with. Alistair had an idea that if Saturday was perfect, we might drop packs and coast around the tops on a daywalk over Te Hekenga, Sawtooth, down into the valley and then up to Pourangaki, then back to Rangiwahia. Alistair calls this idea a “womble over the tops”, which translates to meaning whatever we feel like doing at the time. It would be extraordinarily optimistic. As the rain continues to splatter on the roof, which (by the way) is consistent with the heavy rain warnings for the weekend, it seems extraordinarily unlikely. I packed a big fat hard-cover library book before I left home. It’s great to get out again, though. For me, this is the first time for a couple of months — the first time back to the Ruahines for over a year, and I’ve missed it.

Early, but not too early, on Saturday morning, Sam and his two chums awake and rattle around. From what I can see of the light shining through the windows, it’s still fairly yuck outside. Being able to just lie here for a change, without concern about getting up to leave, is actually quite nice. I find my book and browse a few pages, and meanwhile Sam figures out the exact plan so we’ll know where to collect them tomorrow afternoon. They’ll be coming somewhere off Toka and meeting us at a car-park down that way at 3pm, which should give us plenty of time. They leave, which is motivation to finally rub my eyes and slink off the mattress under the window, then search for my breakfast which has been hanging up (away from rats) since last night. I’m feeling much better now. The sleep seems to have helped a lot.

Bernie, Mika, Hans, Alistair
and Pete ready to go.

It’s still raining outside, but other than that things aren’t too bad. We’re not prepared to be anywhere except here tonight, but everyone’s keen to get out and do something. After all, as Bernie put it, we could think of it as just a little liquid sunshine. It’s around a quarter to nine in the morning when we eventually leave, walking the only obvious direction from Rangiwahia Hut that isn’t back down the way we came. This means a walk of roughly an hour along the slowly elevating ridge. The chin-deep ditch, as it starts out, reduces to a knee-deep ditch after a while. Just in case there’s any doubt about which direction most people will want to go, someone’s even built a tidy little cairn next to the ditch about four fifths of the way there. We eventually arrive at a well-frequented track junction that offers a choice of heading down Deadman’s Ridge (again to where we started) or further into the range, towards peaks like Maungamahue (1661)

Alistair above Rangiwahia.

Nobody really feels like going as far as Manugahuia. At one point the wind might be picking up, but it nevertheless withholds itself from the full unchallengeable force of which it’s capable in this sort of area. We just want to get outside to do something, and can easily make up stories to impress others later on if it seems appropriate. Spot-height 1635 is a more enticing target, but not until we’ve already gone past the most direct way to the top, which is straight up a spur off the track fairly early on. Instead we begin with several minutes of clambering up a combination of scree and tussock, but eventually manage to intersect with the spur and from there things are much easier. At a quarter to eleven, roughly two hours after we left the hut, we stand on the anti-climatic top of spot-height 1635. It’s rather flat, actually. Hans and I both spend a short while trying to find the highest patch of tussock that wouldn’t sink into the earth when we stand on it. From the map it looks as if it’s possible to follow the north-west facing spur (not the west-facing spur!) from here down to a track into the bush-line, ending at a road called Titirangi Road that I’ve never visited. Following down to the end of a dead-end road doesn’t appeal to any of us, however.

Pete behind one of the many tarns in this area.

It’s overcast, reasonably windy and with recurring rain. Looming sunshine threatens very occasionally as infrequent gaps open up, but always submits. I like this kind of weather, and especially on the tops. It brings out the reddish colour in the alpine tussock that isn’t nearly as apparent in simple sunshine. There’s also a nice appreciation of the environment and how animated it can be. It’s pretty cool. We turn back the way we came, towards Rangiwahia Hut, stopping to admire the tarns and the tussock and the wind-whipped clouds as they blow around us and over the range. It’s nearly lunch time, and thirty minutes short of Rangiwahia Hut the horizontal southerly hail sets in. At this point I begin to regret having left my legs exposed as they start to get a mild hammering. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have worn those long-johns after all, but I don’t especially feel like stopping right now to sort out that kind of thing. Surely the ditch will protect my legs.

Rangiwahia Hut remains empty when we return, but it’s literally within a couple of minutes that an Australian (though whom we later discover lives in Palmerston North) by the name of Nicola pops her head in the door. She’s just walked up over the slip from the road. It’s her birthday tomorrow. Lunch time.

Cloud formations from Rangiwahia.

We laze around the hut all afternoon. Rangiwahia Hut is warm compared with the freezing conditions outside, although the clouds give way from time to time to reveal a pathetically ineffective sun. As time goes on the hut’s transitory population reaches thirteen, and then fourteen happy people as the sun sets. A few will probably be on the floor this evening. Hans and Mika produce some kind of travel Monopoly, but it’s not really Monopoly except in name. It looks more like Yahtzee with tiny green houses. As time goes on, people begin preparing their dinner.

Mika and Bernie help Alistair prepare.

Alistair enjoys cooking. If he coordinates a trip with twelve hour days, you can be sure you’ll be carrying lots of good food to go with it. This trip was always likely to be cruisy by comparison, and tonight he’s complemented us with a menu we can boast about. A curry that’s simmered for about an hour and rice to go with it, some kind of giant chocolate thing and a giant slurry of custard. Bernie, Hans and Mika help him out, and it seems Pete and I will be on dishes tonight. As we sit to eat, another three people, this time cheerful hunters, roll up through the door in search of a night’s accommodation. Their first order of business is to figure out where to sleep. I offer them my second hand thin three-quarter length thermarest that I bought off Trademe some years ago.

Alistair is a culinary genius.

So, the hut contains six of us, an Australian named Nicola, two young couples, an Auckland man and his young and enthusiastically talkative son (who presently engrosses Mika’s attention with the detailed description of how to play a game that involves shaking tiny plastic animals to see which stands longest), an American backpacker who walked in as I was taking photos of the sunset, and three fairly big guys with grunty looking guns. One of them is busy explaining to another about something to do with being able to attach a camera to his scope.

Pete and I go outside with a map and compass and argue about which sets of lights are Mangaweka and Ohingaiti. Somewhere along the line we get most of the dishes done, and eventually I’m my sleeping bag and reading. Time goes on and the lights go out.

I’m lying in bed half awake as the three hunters, around the corner from where I lie, quietly pack their things and leave. It’s still dark outside, and I drift back to sleep for an uncertain amount of time. My next memory is the sight of Alistair, on the top bunk opposite, reading his book with a torch. Some light enters the window, and I collect my things to crawl out of bed. I find my thermarest standing against a wall, and pull it back with my things. Others are stirring now, too. On Sunday morning it’s still freezing outside, but the sky is clear. The sun glints near the horizon, provoking early morning refractions in the condensation on the window, and on stepping outside it forms patterns through the frosty icicles that cover our outdoor surrounds. The slopes of Ruapehu mostly hide under cloud in the distance, fronted by the township of Taihape.

We boil a billy full of water, and as we’ll be leaving properly today I begin packing up as I wait. It’s hard to get used to this lack of need to leave early. I look up and see Alistair still lying in his sleeping bag, perusing his book. I tell him there’s hot water when he wants it, and he says thanks.

Mika on Sunday morning.

Meanwhile everyone is stirring, and the atmosphere of a crowded but reasonably spacious hut is becoming less dormant. It’s the last day of a weekend, and everyone is preparing to leave. Having downed my ad-hoc porridge, I return to sit on my bunk, and examine my feet. The tape that I’d put over my little toe yesterday isn’t sitting quite right. I pull it off, and the whole nail comes with it. Grrrr. That one’s been loose for a while, I suppose, but hopefully it’ll seal over sooner or later. A band-aid will have to do for now, to be held together within a few minutes with wet socks. Yeah, wet socks. Others optimistically dry their socks in front of Rangiwahia’s sophisticated gas heating system. Actually, it was happening last night and there have been endless streams of steam vapourising from in front of that heater.

It’s nine am when we leave, having taken a some time for everything to become organised. The hut’s been swept out (such that I now feel guilty for having stood around outside all this time), and virtually everyone else has either left or is standing outside. I think I pulled my wet socks and boots on a little too early. Despite the luke-warmth from the sun, still low in the autumn sky, I’ve now been standing outside in the frosty grass for ten minutes. My feet are solid frozen bricks, and it’s not very comfortable. Hans points out that I can stand at the end of the hut, which due to its upright orientation has absorbed some of the heat more directly, but there’s still no way the warmth is getting inside my boots.

Actually walking somewhere, as we finally leave, quickly nulls the pain. My feet are soon warmed by their own traction, as is usual. We follow the same ditch we followed yesterday, this time carrying a little more. So far we only have a loose plan of going for another wander around the tops, then returning to the van via Dead Man’s Track. Nicola, the Australian woman whose birthday it is today, heard we planned to go down Dead Man’s and asked if she could hitch along, not being too confident about going that way on her own. She left a while before us, but might wait somewhere up the track.

Te Hekenga and Sawtooth had
a dusting of snow overnight.

Despite the sun still being low in the sky, and not yet very warming, prospects of a sunny day seem quite good. The sky is mostly clear, for one thing. It’s been a cold night, however, as demonstrated by the frost that covers everything. Crystals of ice have formed over the puddles in the ditch we now walk through, making an interesting light show for anyone prepared to get down for a look. Nicola is waiting at the junction with Dead Man’s when we arrive, and with a quick poll we discover that nobody really feels much like dropping packs and going for another walk. We’d rather see what Dead Man’s Track is like, and take our time with it, so Nicola comes down with us.

The ground is quite muddy.

Hans and Bernie near the
top of Dead Man’s.

Dead Man’s Track is a very nice route. It begins with a gentle climb up Mangahuia, and then we weave around down into a saddle to the west, covered in tussock with occasional obscured holes in the ground, and also full of mud. Once out of the saddle, it’s a gentle and long descent in a westerly direction. I don’t know specifically why this track is called Dead Man’s, unless it has something to do with the chainsaw massacre that must have taken place to cut through such a long line of Leatherwood — the scourge of a lost tramper in the Ruahines. With the day becoming increasingly bright and warm as the sun lifts its elevation, the walk slowly down-hill surrounded by such a landscape makes this entire weekend worth it.

Pete on part of the track that’s been cut
through the Ruahines’ Leatherwood Belt.

Along the way, we pass a couple of very nice campsites. I think that next time I come here, if it’s a nice evening, I might prefer to walk up Dead Man’s and camp rather than walk to Rangiwahia Hut. I heard a rumour a few years back that there are informal plans to move Rangiwahia Hut and make it more accessible to Dead Man’s Track, especially with the problems of the large land-slip on the other track. If this ever happens, there are at least a couple of very nice potential sites for a hut. Somewhere along the way, Nicola and I stop to wait for others to catch up. During the five or so minutes of quietly standing there, a Tomtit hops down from the trees and flutters around me for a minute or so. I think it just wants to see who I was, and as soon as its interest is satisfied, it flies away.

It’s about lunch time when we finally emerge from Dead Man’s Track, almost immediately at the parking area. What a nice cruisy weekend. We have some time to kill before collecting Sam and the rest of his trio from somewhere below Toka (near the Heritage road-end), so go for a drive to a place called Apiti. Apiti has a golf course which, from the road, looks as if it’s spread over flat sheep paddocks. Each hole is fenced to prevent the sheep from messing it up too much. The guy at the pub enthusiastically tells us how the Apiti Golf Club has a membership of about four hundred, about twenty of whom are active locals but most of whom are from Auckland and who have never visited Apiti. Supposedly the $80 annual fee makes it the cheapest way to stay affiliated with whatever New Zealand golfing body it is that lets them play on all the rich and swanky Auckland courses. Apiti’s a nice place, an alternative to the good pub/cafe at Kimbolton that’s helpful to remember, and a good place to wind down a nice weekend.

Lack of getting outdoors has been catching up to me over this time, though. A couple of weeks back, I got bored and went for a 30+ km walk around Te Kopahou Reserve and the nearby coastline. It helped me recharge a little, but was still fairly suburban, and so most recently I’ve been for a daywalk into the Tararuas.

Dracophyllum near spot-height 656.

Date: 18th April, 2010
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Kaitoke Road End.
Route: Start at Kaitoke, walk to Smith Creek Shelter (via Puffer Saddle), then up to spot-height 656 and back to Kaitoke via the main Southern Crossing track.
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I’ve never entered the Tararuas at Kaitoke before, just north of Upper Hutt, and I’m unsure why it’s taken so long. I think I considered it once, but was put off by the prospect of leaving a car overnight at the Kaitoke road-end, which has a reputation for being very insecure. In retrospect it’s usually possible to leave vehicles at the Kiwi Ranch Youth Camp, not far away for a nominal fee, and there’s even a connecting track up to the main route of Marchant Ridge. This time, given it was a daywalk (and also a Sunday), I figured it’d be okay to just leave the car parked on the side of the road for a while, and it worked out okay.

Hard, often slippery clay near Kaitoke.

I left the car at about 9.45am or thereabouts, taking the first 10 minutes to walk up the unsealed road to where I probably should have parked but didn’t. From straight inside the park gate, the track remains quite hard on the feet around here, and it wasn’t long before I felt some painful rubbing on the back of my heels. In hindsight I’m starting to regret my decision to have bought a pair of cheap Scarpas, which seem to have made very little progress towards wearing in, despite a lot of wearing. I think perhaps I bought them half a size too small, and I can’t get into socks of the sort of thickness that I should really be wearing with these boots. Oh well. I probably should have stopped and taped up my feet, but couldn’t be bothered.

Young Rimu.

A further 10 minutes and I passed the track junction where I’d need to choose between heading up Marchant Ridge, or on to Smith Creek Shelter. I hadn’t known exactly where I wanted to go as I left, or even how far I’d get, but had at least made up my mind to start by aiming for the shelter (so I’d at least get somewhere well defined) and then assess my options, choosing between continuing to Tutuwai Hut, heading up and back around the Dobson Loop, or simply coming back the way I came.

The track from here heads around Puffer Saddle, then drops to the true left of Smith Creek as it flows towards the north-east aiming at the Tauherenikau — one of the major rivers to come out of the Tararuas. The track itself along here generally stays under trees, and although it’s not right alongside the creek it’s never far away, and there are a collection of minor side creeks. There’s one notable detour (well signposted by DOC) that’s put in place due to a slip. I didn’t bother to check out what sort of slip damage it refers to, and once climbing up a short distance the detour is fairly flat and not much extra effort at all.

Smith Creek Shelter.

At 11.30am I reached the junction with the track up the side of the ridge to spot-height 656, but for now at least kept going literally just one more minute to Smith Creek Shelter, where I stopped for some lunch. The shelter itself isn’t exactly the nicest place to have lunch on a sunny day. It’s more or less a hut, even with a sleeping platform for maybe 6 mattresses, but there are no mattresses and there’s no glass in the windows and there’s no door. Unfortunately the shelter is close enough to the road that it’s more vulnerable than usual to vandalism, and I guess this is one reason why these kinds of comforts have been removed.

The Tauherenikau.

Anyway, having pulled out a map and done some quick measurements, I decided that if I wanted to get to Tutuwai Hut and back, I’d most likely be walking out in the dark with my torch and it probably wouldn’t be terribly interesting either. I made up my mind to stick with the Dobson Loop, and in turn this would mean I could be quite relaxed about the whole thing, so I ended up wandering out through the trees to the Tauherenikau to kick some water around and enjoy it for a while. It’s a very nice river, especially in the sunshine. From about 12, a couple of other people wandered up on their way back from Tutuwai, and after a quick hello I waved goodbye and started up the hill.

The track up between Fell Creek and Canyon Creek climbs about 450 metres to SH 656. Getting up hills is something I quite enjoy, and getting away from the flat was some good relief for my heels for a while. I stopped for a few minutes on the way up, picking out a few birds (a North Island Robin, and either a Kaka or a Kereru… probably the latter), and 45 minutes later I reached the thinning trees. It’s not a land of tops at this height, but the trees thin out into a Dracophyllum sort of region, allowing for the sunlight to wash in and regular sights out to the sides. In the distance, a helicopter buzzed around — apparently part of a Search and Rescue training exercise due for the weekend within the Eastern Hutt and Tauherenikau catchments.

Views from the ridge.

At 1pm I arrived at the junction with the main track down Marchant Ridge, near this end of the Tararua Southern Crossing. For a few minutes I tinkered with the idea of searching through the bush to bag the nearby spot-height 705, but all I found for my few minutes troubles were caches of old roofing iron hidden in the trees. I couldn’t quickly find any obvious places where people had pushed through so I stopped short of going too far.

So my loop walk continued with another 80 minutes of casual strolling along the ridge, including 10 minutes to simply sit and listen to the surroundings. I think this walking up to and along the ridge was the much nicer part of the day, plus romping around in the Tauherenikau for a short while. All of these certainly beat the prospect of another long flat walk through the valleys, which I’m not terribly fond of. I reached the initial junction leading back to Smith Creek at about 2.20pm, with just a further 30 minutes back to the car.

For some reason I never got around to posting about a walk around the East Harbour Lakes Block back in July 2009, so this report will be more photos and less report. The future mother in law was paying a visit, which was reason enough (as everyone involved agreed) for me to escape and do something else. Back in January 2009 I’d been for a walk out to one of the lakes shortly after hopping off a plane, and I thought I might go and do it properly.

Date: 27th July, 2009
Location: East Harbour Regional Park.
People: Just me.
Route: Walk along the coast to Pencarrow Head, walk clock-wise around both lakes, then back along the coast to the car-park.
[Photos]

Pencarrow Head, with the older
lighthouse in the top left.

The only down side of the East Harbour Lakes Block is that there’s a good 90 minutes of walking along a long, flat, coastal road on the eastern side of Wellington Harbour, almost to the Pencarrow Head Lighthouses. There have been two lighthouses since 1906, when a second was built lower to the ground after it was noticed that the original 1858 lighthouse would sometimes be obscured by fog. Due to the long hard road, it’s probably nicer in some ways on a mountain bike than walking, or the getting there at least. Once actually to the lighthouse, the ground gets softer and the terrain more diverse, and the walking’s fascinating. Many people stop at the lighthouses, however, and make it a walk to the lighthouses and back. If you’re up early, though, there’s a wonderful walk around the Parangarahu Lakes Area of East Harbour Regional Park.

Wetlands at the northern end
of Lake Kopangapiripiri.

Lake Kopangapiripiri on the western side, and Lake Kohangatera on the eastern side, are both low to sea level but lakes in their own right. They’re the main features of one of the few remaining wetlands left in New Zealand that’s still quite accessible. There’s a lot of bird and insect life evident all around.

Looking up Gollans Stream, the wetland
that flows into the top of Lake Kohangatera.

The area’s well tracked, and in some places this is necessary due to the swampy regions where it’s necessary to cross. For most of the time I was thinking it’d been pointless to’ve had gaiters, but I finally appreciated them for short stints on the eastern side of lake Kohangatera, where it became fairly muddy in places. To get around both lakes at a casual to reasonable pace, it took me about 3.5 hours, though not including the 1.5 hour walk along the coast on either end.

The southern end of Lake Kopangapiripiri.

A south island alpine back-drop.

The lower lighthouse, built on the rocks in 1906 when the old lighthouse at a higher altitude was sometimes obscured by fog.

The Inter-Island Ferry passes in front of Barret Reef, exiting Wellington Harbour.

More photos are here.

If you followed his blog, you’d think that Craig never leaves his bike behind these days. He occasionally gets out in tramping boots though, which is great because he’s probably one of the most skilled people at off-track navigating who I know. Last week Craig mentioned that after riding his bike around Ruapehu in one of those cycling events, he intended to take advantage of a truly awesome weekend weather forecast and wander up to the crater lake of Mt Ruapehu for a look. I’ve not been up that way before, and it piqued my interest enough to convince me to gatecrash. The basic plan was to go up the easy way, which is to drive to the top of The Bruce (that road up to Whakapapa Skifield), and head up from there. As a side note, we visited in the middle of summer. In winter you’d likely need alpine gear and it’s nowhere near as straightforward. It’s an un-marked route in which people can and do get lost and have accidents, and I guess in alpine environments even small problems can have serious consequences.

Date: 7th February, 2010
Location: Tongariro National Park, from the top of Bruce Road.
People: Craig and me.
Huts visited: Dome Shelter, aka Dome Equipment Shed (0 nights).
Route: Walk up from the end of Bruce Road to the top of the Waterfall Express chair-lift, then continue up Knoll Ridge to Dome Shelter at the Crater Lake. Down via Restful Ridge.
Related bits: Craig also wrote about this walk.
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Early morning Ruapehu from
near Ohakune.

Various weekend scheduling issues meant I couldn’t leave on Saturday, and the arrangement meant dragging myself out of bed to leave Wellington at 3am, so as to reach Ohakune at about 7am and wake Craig at DOC’s Mangawhero camp-site. I really wanted to stand outside his tent and blow a whistle really loud, but he was already packing up when I arrived, and nearby campers might not have appreciated it the same way I expect Craig would have with his understanding sense of humour. At least there was still a nice climb ahead during the day. A chap visiting the camp-side from Auckland, whom Craig had befriended, seemed to think we’d knock it off before lunch time. With a 1000 metre climb, I certainly wasn’t confident we’d be up and down within that time.

It’s roughly an hour’s drive from Ohakune to the Whakapapa Skifield, and after miscellaneous preparation (things like breakfast) we arrived at about 9.15am or so. There appeared to be some things happening in the parking area as we drove up, including some police and a helicopter buzzing around. We didn’t find out until later that it was all to do with a search and rescue operation for a Greek man who’d become lost the day before, and spent the night wandering on the mountain. It fortunately eventuated happily as they found him about half an hour after we left, which would have been a combination of good search coordination, and an element of luck from the overnight weather.

Anyway, the two of us elected to not use the chairlift from the top of The Bruce (we were out for a walk and didn’t want to pay for it). At our pace this meant an extra hour of walking to climb the 400 metres. It was quite easy to pick a route, in which we mostly stayed roughly under the main t-bars and waved to the rich spenders cruising overhead, occasionally informing them of the great things they were missing by choosing not to walk. The whole area around here is reasonably built up, with a combination of ski-field structures and mountain lodges that generally belong to various tramping, alpine and skiing clubs with occasional exceptions. It’s unusual for a National Park, but doesn’t bother me here as much as it seems to in some other places.

The Waterfall Express from below.

Craig and I took photos of each other after an hour, where a new cafe is being built, thus documenting evidence that we’d been able to reach the top of the chair-lift and had made it at least as far as most other people that day. From there on, we took another look at the map in an effort to figure out where we should actually be going. There are two particular routes which we’d read about, neither of them marked but both often walked. One is the Knoll Ridge T-bar, which is the ski-tow route slightly to the right when heading up and out of the chairlift. The other is Restful Ridge, further away to the east. Neither of these is marked by name on the LINZ Topo50 map, so we applied some intuition as to which ribs our written description was referring to, and followed the route up Knoll Ridge.

Shortly above Knoll Ridge.

Knoll Ridge is easy enough to follow for the length of the tow-line. On our right, to the west, a creek flows down the valley beside Knoll Ridge, eventually becoming Whakapapanui Stream. Much of the way to the top of the mountain, Pinnacle Spur dominates the view to the east, with its ominous jagged edges, and we saw at least three distant people silhouetted against the sky up in that direction, although I suspect they didn’t walk along the spur so much as climbed to the upper end of it where it’s flattened out. At the point where the ski-tow ends, Knoll Ridge drops into a slight valley, where having dropped off the end we began to encounter our first mild patches of icy snow. For much of the time we hopped along the moraine alongside, which I often personally prefer because I find it easier to walk on, but the snow itself wasn’t too awkward.

Someone sidles around towards the
saddle into the summit plateau.

Climbing starts getting more steep after Knoll Ridge, and the route curves slightly west of south underneath Glacier Knob, towards a saddle that eventually enters the Summit Plateau of Ruapehu on the western side of Glacier Knob, although at the time we didn’t have this information too specifically. During the summer season when we visited, it’s a climb up scree and moraine, and remaining patches of snow also added to the walk. The snow wasn’t too bad and although it took a few minutes to get back into the swing of kicking steps into the snow, which I’ve not had to do for a while, it was generally an easy walk.

We stopped for a break at about the 2450 metre contour, at the time not being certain of the actual route. A chap ahead of us who didn’t seem terribly confident had decided to sidle around over some more ice towards the gap next to Glacier Knob, but on the limited information that we had, and with neither of us having been here before, the two of us weren’t certain at the time that it was an optimal route. Following some lazing around at about 11.30am, the two of us decided to follow some gut intuition, which suggested getting to the top to walk along a ridge sooner rather than later was likely to make more sense than sidling around for a long time. The outcome of this decision was a very direct line busting straight up the scree.

The summit plateau.

With a start and stop scrambling effort, I reached the top at about 12.30pm, delighted to see the ice-covered plateau below me on the other side, with the top of Dome Shelter showing in the distance. As I waited another 15 minutes for Craig, I had a chat with a visiting British couple, whom we later found were named Jane and Graham, and who’d somehow found a route that dropped them on the eastern end of Te Heuheu Ridge, possibly up the Te Heuuheu Valley somehow. On seeing me arrive straight up the scree they commented that I must have come the “right” way, which I take to mean that their on route hadn’t been much less labour intensive.

Craig circumnavigates the
summit plateau.

Despite being a calm day, some thick-ish cloud was drifting in from the north, behind us as we’d climbed. When Craig arrived in front of the foggy back-drop, we followed a few minutes behind Jane and Graham, and met them once again at Dome Shelter — the small hut on the edge of the Ruapehu Crater Lake. Strictly speaking, I think it’s now called “Dome Equipment Shed”, probably as part of efforts to discourage people from sheltering there, as the shelter itself (which contains volcano monitoring equipment) is supposed to be for emergency use only. Although it’s known for people to stay at Dome Shelter overnight, the rule against doing so is for good reason. Despite its popularity, Ruapehu is still an active volcano. Its last major eruption, which sent minor lahars flowing down several valleys on the mountain, was in 1995. Even outside major eruptions, however, the region around the crater lake is dangerous. Dome Shelter has a history of being destroyed and damaged by volcanic activity, most recently in September 2007 when the volcano burped, boulders landed on the shelter and a tramper who’d been sleeping there eventually lost his leg. He was a very lucky guy.

Dome Shelter contains volcano monitoring
equipment, and is for emergency use only.

With the cloud not playing nicely, it was a while before we had a reasonable view of the crater lake, and even longer before we could see the high point of Tahurangi (2797) behind it, which we didn’t plan to visit on this occasion. As we ate lunch, the clouds parted and features gradually began to come and go. The crater lake itself is currently bright blue, with acidic water. On seeing it, it’s hard to imagine that it’s been used for swimming in the past. The acidity of the lake varies over time.

Craig and myself in front of
a bright blue crater lake.

All four of us sat around for some time, discussing topics such as boot retailers in Taranaki. Graham was having problems with the soles of his 10 year old boots beginning to fall apart, apparently after an encounter with the scree. Graham and Jane eventually left, and 15 minutes later, about 2.15pm, Craig and I picked up and left too. I think we may have been the last people at the crater lake on that day.

Leaving the plateau.

The Summit Plateau is a fascinating sight in the looming cloud with its dirty ice and volcanic-shaded rocks, and I took it in as we walked back along the ridge above to the eastern side of Glacier Knob. It was tempting to wander down for a walk around, but it looked as if it could potentially be tricky to get back up without a lot of time. At the small dip below the knob, we joined the walked track that we probably should have followed to come up. (It was nowhere near as exciting as our own route, however.) Rather than sidle around to the top of Knoll Ridge where we’d left off on the way up, we instead followed the walked track slightly west-wards, into a snow basin that allowed some fun skidding down the snow, and eventually onto what we later confirmed was Restful Ridge.

There are some wonderful orange and brown colours in the volcanic moraine of this region, and I think I could quite easily just sit and enjoy on another occasion. During this time we caught up with Jane and Graham, however, who were not completely confident walking through the snow and moraine. The boot problem wasn’t helping, and combined with some exhaustion, they were beginning to realise there was some risk of missing the 4pm closing time of the chair-lift. Consequently we walked down with them, since although the current conditions were fairly calm, both Craig and I were of the opinion that in such conditions it’s a very bad thing to leave people behind.

Pinnacle Spur in the distance.

This was a good thing in the end, because after some intermittent separation around rocks and small ridges of moraine that obscured vision, Craig and I noticed that they had probably headed a bit too far down the ridge without veering off towards the top of the main chair-lift, not having realised that the one they needed to aim for wasn’t in view, and that they were actually dropping into somewhere quite different, so we dropped down through some rocks and caught them. Jane in particular wasn’t feeling the best, to the extent that getting back up the ridge to a good turn-off point wasn’t much of an option, and also that movement was by now probably about a third the rate that it would normally be. Over the next hour or so, I eventually hopped ahead and found a quick-ish route through the moraine, dropping down in front of the NZ Alpine Club hut and then running to the top of the Waterfall Express (chair lift), fortunately managing to catch the chair-lift guy a couple of minutes after closing time, and managing to convince them to keep it running for a little longer, while Craig stayed with them and made sure they didn’t get into trouble.

The chair-lift operating people at Whakapapa Skifield in the summer were very helpful with their consideration, and they stayed behind long enough so that when Craig, Jane and Graham eventually walked up some time after 4.30pm, there was still a chair-lift able to get them down the rest of the way. Craig and myself had intended to walk the rest of the way down, as we’d come up, but Jane convinced us that we should go down with them so they could make us some tea in their camper-van, which was perfectly wonderful. It turns out that the chair-lift at Whakapapa Skifield is free if you’re going down instead of up, which is excellent news for future reference because I enjoy chair-lifts. I just happen to dislike paying for public transport if I can walk as an alternative. It was 5.30pm by the time Craig and I actually left the top of Bruce Road, and with some dinner and a brief snooze along the way I arrived home just slightly before midnight, thereby reinforcing my belief that this had been a daywalk.

It was certainly an interesting daywalk, partly from the volcanic landscapes but also with the events that unfolded towards the latter part of the day. It guess it emphasised just how easy it can be to become confused on the side of what’s a very accessible mountain near the tourist trail, especially given how many people who are encouraged to visit are often expecting something more graded and artificially safe. Despite the immediate area being relatively built up with T-bars designed for the ski season, the area is still massive and a person in slowly moving through it in the distance can be missed quite easily. Undulations in the terrain make it easy to completely lose sight of landmarks, potentially wander off on the wrong bearing, then end up in places that aren’t necessarily easy to get out of. Then all it’d really take is for darkness or clouds to drift in reducing visibility, and one could end up completely disoriented.

The remains of Graham’s boots. They did actually start with soles, which came off through an encounter with scree and then he was walking on socks.

Wellington Anniversary Weekend meant an opportunity to have a slightly longer trip in the Tararuas than the usual weekend, and we used it to visit the middle part of the main range, beginning from Otaki Forks and ending at Poads Road near Levin. The forecast leading up to the weekend was uninspiring, suggesting several large splodges of rain would position themselves all over the lower North Island, especially on Saturday, but perhaps clearing a little after that. There was no forecast of strong wind and we went ahead with the plan, but somehow boasting about a lack of strong wind didn’t convince my work-mates not to laugh at me when I left to visit the Tararuas on Friday night.

Dates: 22nd – 25th Jaunary, 2010 (Wellington Anniversary Weekend)
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Otaki Forks to Poads Road.
People: Amanda, Richard, Tim and me.
Huts visited: Waitewaewae Hut (0 nights), Nichols Hut (1 night), Dracophyllum Biv (0 nights), Te Matawai Hut (1 night), South Ohau Hut (0 nights).
Route: Walk up Saddle Creek and camp on the plateau, then past Waitewaewae Hut and over Shoulder Knob to Nichols Hut for the next night. Then to Te Matawai Hut via Pukematawai, and out to Poads Road via the South Ohau River.
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We left a van at Otaki Forks a little after 8pm, intending to swap it with another group on their way along Oriwa Ridge. A few others had signed the intentions book so we weren’t the only people braving the rain, but most going elsewhere. The only people who’d written about going our way, up towards Waitewaewae, having left earlier in the afternoon, had abruptly scribbled out their plans for a 4 day trip and written OUT. Apparently they’d changed their mind for some reason.

With an hour of light left and wanting to get ahead of the rain, the four of us began walking towards Waitewaewae with an idea of camping on the plateau above Saddle Creek. Despite the rainy forecast, it was still a calm evening without much rain scheduled until early morning. The only small delay was around the significant active slip on the Waitewaewae track, but we figured it out after a few minutes. The last light of the day held out until we were well into trees near Saddle Creek, and from then on we walked with torches. In this creek in the past, during the daytime, I’ve found it easier to simply walk up the creek than to figure out the entire criss-crossing track, though I think it’s a personal preference. By torchlight I think we all decided it was much easier to stay on the track as much as possible. This track is also much more steep than I remembered it. I was too busy looking at the ground ahead of me to properly notice, but others in the party reported that Saddle Creek seems to be a haven for glow-worms. We reached our camp-site at 11pm, which thankfully wasn’t too sodden, and set ourselves up for the night.

The Otaki River, just
past Waitewaewae Hut.

Next morning I found I was apparently the only person to have had a reasonable sleep, and I still didn’t think there had been enough of it. Up at 7am, the forecast rain was yet to begin, although the tent flies were sodden. We were packed and leaving by 8, towards Waitewaewae Hut before continuing on to Nichols for the night. We stopped briefly at Waitewaewae, 90 minutes later, where we met a chap who’d walked in and arrived the previous night. He had an optimistic plan to head up to Te Matawai Hut, then down the entire Otaki River, apparently oblivious to the amount of humidity in the air. Despite declaring his plans he didn’t exactly seem in a rush to go anywhere, and as we left at 10am, he returned to his sleeping bag.

Richard on the way up to Shoulder Knob.

It turns out to be quite a big slog up to Shoulder Knob, which is at the bush-line. It’s a 900 metre climb, taking us 3 hours in all, including an odd stop along the way. We were greeted at the top by a voodoo-doll-like statue tied to the pole on the knob, just one of those semi-weird things in the back-country that I’ve trained myself to appreciate.

Tim borrowed my camera and snapped this
rare photo at Junction Knob which actually
has me in it.

Visibility had dropped as we approached the bush-line, and soon after leaving it we were in at least 3/4 storm gear, with the cold wind coming from the south. Actually the whole thing was very confusing, especially with no rain. It all felt like sou-easterlies but was difficult to tell, so with wind going clockwise around low pressure, perhaps the system we’d expected had gone further north? We were guessing in any case, but as time went on it was all so dramatically inconsistent with reality that we leaned towards throwing out what we knew of the following days, and just focused on getting between points of safety, the next of which was to be Nichols Hut. The wind was still fairly light, and that was the critical thing at the time.

Tim shelters from the wind below Mt
Crawford as he waits for us to arrive.

We arrived at Junction Knob just before 2pm, the point on the Tararua Main Range between Nichols and Anderson Hut, where the signpost informed us that our destination for the evening was but 90 minutes away. For the remainder of the day, we continued along the main range with about 30 metres visibility, tolerating light but icy winds from the south-east between the occasional eddies and sheltered spots. The high point along here is Mount Crawford (1482), ceremoniously marked with a short drainpipe poking out of the ground. For a few minutes we accidentally began to head down the wrong spur off Crawford, but managed to catch it once the route dissipated more than seemed reasonable and we noticed the bearing didn’t appear quite right. In the end, including this detour, it took us 2 hours from Junction Knob before we reached Nichols Hut just off the eastern side of the ridge, and it was a good sight.

Amanda followed by Richard.

The door of Nichols had been barricaded on the outside with a saw-horse, and we soon found this was because the door wasn’t clicking shut properly. A couple of notes in the book indicated that the door had been discovered swinging open when people had shown up. Tim and Richard got a fire going, and we settled into an entree of cheese and crackers, followed by Amanda’s design of yummy Chorizo Couscous.

Nichols Hut.

The hut literature at Nichols was unexpected, especially the collection of 4 wheel drive magazines given that they were at a hut at 1242 metres altitude on the Tararua Main Range. Unfortunately not much to read, in any case. The picture magazines weren’t too enlightening either, though the latest Hunting & Fishing catalogue was advertising one of the funniest looking gun-wielding swamp monster outfits I’ve ever seen. Heavy rain finally arrived at 8.30pm, just after we’d gone to bed and almost 24 hours later than we expected. It also stopped well short of what we’d expected, only raining on and off and with nothing sustained. No wind either, though I guess Nichols is reasonably sheltered given that it’s not tied to the ground as some nearby huts are, and we fortunately had no issues with the door swinging open.

The main range north of Nichols.

Rain had stopped by 6.45am when Amanda dragged herself out of a sleeping bag on the lower bunk and started a billy boiling. We packed up, feasted on brekkie, and I took a few photos of the door latch to forward to DOC at a later date. We also hunted around for replacement firewood, which was difficult. For future reference I’d suggest that anyone visiting Nichols Hut from the northern direction should grab an arm-load of firewood as they leave the bush-line, only about 5 minutes away. We re-barricaded the door, and at a relaxed 8.45am, we left. Once again it was quite a dreary day outside, with thick cloud and little visibility.

Figuring out a route around Kelleher.

The light but icy wind was now coming from the west, for whatever reason, and we’d given up on trying to figure out how it related to the models issued a couple of days earlier. Wind wasn’t as much of a concern just now, anyway, because about 5 minutes north of Nichols Hut the Tararua Main Range dips into the bush-line. It stays there for some time, except for a brief 100 metre emergence to sidle around the eastern side of a peak called Kelleher (1152), which after 90 minutes appeared high and some distance before us. We continued past an obvious track marker below Kelleher, then sat down in a sheltered area for a quick snack, and to figure out which of the apparent routes ahead was most likely to be the intended track. Amanda and I eventually took alternative parallel options along the slope, both ending up on a short west to east spur.

From here it wasn’t clear at all, but through the thick cloud it looked as if we could head towards a little knob not far away, and it’d sidle around Kelleher nicely. Moving to the knob, however, there didn’t seem to be any emergence of Kelleher behind it as we’d expected, even after checking where it should be with a compass bearing, which was actually fairly disorienting. By now we should have been able to see a clear outline, or upward-sloping ground, or something to indicate the presence of anything other than a void directly beyond in a westerly direction. I guess thick cloud can do strange things to perception on the tops. It makes nearby things seem far away, and short climbs appear much further than they actually are, and on occasions like this it causes trampers to summit peaks like Kelleher completely accidentally. Having eliminated the alternatives, and confirming suspicions with a quick reference to a GPS, we eventually determined we were 200 metres off the side of the route we wanted along the range, and re-traced our steps. At least we didn’t waste another two hours heading down the far side, which is what a couple of people writing in the Nichols Hut book had indicated they’d done.

Back-tracking to the previous marker we’d seen prior to having even sat down, and taking another look around, we quickly spotted a giant cairn that led straight back into the dracophyllum. Just over an hour further of walking, we arrived at Dracophyllum Biv, a cute 2 person hut under the trees. It’s also well tied to the ground despite being surrounded by trees, presumably for good reason. We stopped for lunch.

Arriving at Dracophyllum.

It’d taken around 3 hours to reach our lunch spot, the track being peppered with many peaks and ongoing undulation. We thought the next section would be similar, being roughly the same length before emerging from the bush-line, but northwards from Dracophyllum Biv was much faster. An hour or so later we were emerging into more leatherwood and dracophyllum, eventually back into nice alpine scrub. It still wasn’t exactly raining, either, which didn’t stop us from becoming saturated thanks to the fog of tiny hovering water particles that weren’t massive enough to figure out whether they should obey the force of gravity or the force of the up-draft blowing over the ridge. For the length on the tops we could clearly hear the Park River, 300 metres below to the east, and had the cloud lifted we’d have been opposite Carkeek Ridge. We never saw further than about 50 metres, however.

Tim approches the turn-off near Pukematawai.

The main range leading north-wards to Pukematawai undulates with several spot heights, each of which appeared distant, high and ominous, but all of which we found to be much quicker and easier to ascend and overtake than it had first appeared through the deceptively thick cloud… probably because we rarely saw far ahead in the first place. At 3pm we reached a collection of stakes poking out of the ground, just short of Pukematawai, and marking the turn-off point down towards Te Matawai Hut. At Amanda’s suggestion, we stopped on the sheltered side of the ridge for a few minutes and put on over-trousers, in anticipation of being about to walk directly into the freezing westerly wind. It was worth it, too, even just for the first few minutes during which we were most exposed.

Amanda ready to leave.

From here it was time to say goodbye to the main range. When there’s more than a 500 metre vertical drop in the space of about 2.5 kilometres, a track will generally be steep. The last stage of our day therefore became a controlled slippery slide down through the mud to Te Matawai Hut, the highlight of which was the first sign of our entire tramp of the sun finally coming out. It didn’t expose itself completely, but as we left the cloud layer on the main range, we did finally get a vague warmth forcing its way through some clouds above us. At one brief moment, there was even a small patch of blue sky. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, however, standing on the deck of Te Matawai Hut with most of our clothes and gear hanging out in an optimistic attempt to dry them out, that some cloud properly lifted for a few minutes revealing large amounts of the main range in the distance, over which we’d spent our entire day. Much of the range is obscured by trees from Te Matawai Hut, but we could almost see as far back as Dracophyllum Biv, and the undulating shape of the ridge that we’d noticed now made complete visual sense.

The first blue sky of our weekend.

The main range finally emerged.

Tim managed to get another fire going after some effort, and over time we hung out much of our gear inside, actually being able to get it reasonably dry on this occasion. Te Matawai Hut perhaps doesn’t get as many visitors as its size implies. It’s very large as huts go, yet every time I’ve visited (this was the third) there’s been nobody else. On this occasion it also had much better reading material, including a bunch of old FMC Bulletins. I got the one in which several people had written in to comment about an incorrect answer for question 10 in the quiz of a previous bulletin. It was something about the name of a certain kind of 3-pronged nail that was once used in climbing boots.

After more cheese and crackers, we settled into a nice dinner of a certain kind of satay noodle recipe that Amanda had dreamed up. We’d just gone to bed at 9pm, and it wasn’t long after that when we heard someone enter and walk around a little. They weren’t there in the morning and never wrote in the book, but it appeared as if there was at least one other person wandering around. Perhaps they were on their way up to Arete Biv, or somewhere nearby to camp. Weird — I’m not used to people who aren’t me walking into huts at night.

Heading downstairs on Monday morning.

Our last day was a straightforward walk down the Ohau River. We were away shortly after 8am, and 90 minutes later following a skid further down the hill, arrived at the new South Ohau Hut. Last time I’d been here there was nothing but the fireplace of the old hut, which is appropriately the location of the new hut’s woodshed. South Ohau actually looks really nice, and it’d be easy to spend a few days relaxing there. Not being in any rush, we hung around for half an hour before beginning our walk down the river.

South Ohau Hut from near the river.

The South Ohau River itself is a slightly gorgey river, and even when it’s low as it was on this occasion it has a few tricky sections. If it were up even 20 centimetres further, it’s likely some parts would be waist deep (as Richard had experienced a few months before), and beyond that it could be very challenging if possible to follow at all. This morning however, it just took time. It took 90 minutes to reach Deception Spur, where the South Ohau meets the North Ohau, and we stopped briefly for our final lunch. The remainder of our river walk, about the same distance again but much more easily navigable, towards where it meets the track out to Poads Road, took only half that time.

Just over an hour later, having walked the last section of track as well as having met the second and third people we’d talked to in three days — a couple out for a short daywalk — we were standing next to our van at the end of the Poads Road entrance to the Tararuas, nice and early to beat the holiday weekend traffic.

The South Ohau River.

Sue crosses one of
many side creeks.

Dates: 31st December, 2009 – 5th January 2010 (one day late)
Location: Mokihinui River, Mokihinui Forks Ecological Area and Lyell Range-Radiant Range Conservation Area (south-east of Kahurangi National Park).
People: Steve, Allen, Sue, Dmitry, Mark, Robert and me.
Huts visited: Mokihinui Forks Hut (0 nights).
Route: Start at Lyell, walk up the gold mining route to the head of the south branch of the Mokihinui River, follow the river to Mohihinui Forks Hut, then out along the route on the river’s true left to Seddonville.
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Day one, 31st December 2009

We’d stayed the night at the Lazy Cow Backpackers in Murchison, which incidentally is a very nice backpackers. They gave each of us a small paper bag of sweets that reminded me of the 20 cent mixtures I remember buying when at school. I never got around to eating mine, so threw it into my dry bag, which was handy at the time, to munch on later. After a drive down the road, we began our tramp at Lyell at around 8.30am, intending to sidle up the hillside to the north and end at the saddle at roughly NZTM252805 for that evening, possibly pressing on depending on how long it took to arrive there. Lyell is an old gold mining town, but today none of its original structures remain, and it’s entirely a sandfly-infested campground. From Lyell begin a net of short walking tracks, eventually converging into a single track that sidles upwards to nowhere in particular, approximately northwards. The track is an old gold mining route, which the Department of Conservation now seems to be restoring as a well graded mountain bike track. It doesn’t really go nowhere, as it provides access both to the ridges nearer the top, and also to the head of the southern branch of the Mokihinui River, for which we were aiming. Still, it felt strange to see such a major effort being expended on this track on which we saw no other people, and which (as I said) didn’t really seem to go anywhere specific before petering out.

Up from Lyell.

Being an old mining track, the route is an impressive engineering feat in places, given how parts of it have been cut into steep and sometimes bluffy hillside. As part of the restoration, particularly from 8 mile creek and onwards, relics of the mining era have been intentionally left beside the track (sometimes locked down) to help provide an historic experience for visitors to the area.

3 hours after leaving, we took an early lunch at what we thought might be the crossing point of 8 mile creek as marked on maps (though we later discovered a more likely candidate). This was shortly after a slip on the track that would likely prevent most bikes from getting past, and from then on the grade of the track took a step downwards. It’s still a good track, however, as tramping tracks go.

DOC’s vacant fly-camp.

Some time after lunch, at around 1pm, we arrived a vacant DOC fly-camp full of covered supplies, probably to be occupied again by workers after the new year’s season was over. Walking through the camp it quickly became obvious why they’re here. Immediately around the corner, a large section of the hill-side had fallen away, roughly east of Mt Lyell (1092). There must be continuing plans to extend mountain bike access at least as far up as here, because DOC seems to be cutting a well graded track into the side of the slip. Such a track would keep the same gradient and I presume the relevant engineers believe it to be a workable idea, though we came away wondering if the slip could just take away the new track again in the future. Allen ran ahead and discovered that there is a thin route around the side at the moment, but markers still re-direct trampers upwards and over the top, via an ad-hoc route through the bush. After a short rest, this is what we followed and the sudden up-ness and softer ground made a nice change to everything up until then.

Robert, Steve and Dmitry.

An hour or so later at about 4pm, we were high enough to have entered the vicinity of dracophyllum. About the same amount of time again later, we finally reached the saddle near the top, quietly marked by a couple of pink tags, and decided to camp having considered the chances of finding reasonable campsites further down. The nearby ground was spongy and leaked water as a tiny stream emerged from the ground, one of several that would converge into the Mokihinui River below, and this was to be our main source of water. We were pretty much at the high point of the entire trip at about 840 metres, however, and water certainly shouldn’t be an issue after this giving we planned to walk the length of a major river. Between seven of us we set up three tents on the track, with Allen and Sue, Dmitry and Mark, and Robert and myself. Steve decided to bivy out in the open, wrapping his sleeping bag in a blue tarp and his pack liner. The weather was playing nicely and allowed us to cook up a brew, and dinner from fresh vegetables and pasta without and problems before bed. Robert and I celebrated the arrival of the year 2010 at 9pm, then fell asleep. Some time during the night, a forth tent had mysteriously materialised over Steve.

Day two, 1st January 2010

Steve followed by Allen at the
upper southern Mokihinui.

We were away shortly before 8am, and discovered that past the saddle on which we were camped, any remnants of a marked track quickly disintegrated. A photocopied description of the area that Steve had obtained indicated that we should be able to follow a bearing more or less north-west, however, which was consistent with the map, and then drop into the head of the south branch of the Mokihinui. With about an hour of careful sidling and eventual dropping down what became a rib, we eventually hit the very modest creek that was well smothered with fallen branches through which we needed to clamber. The occasional South Island Robins and Fantails followed us, as they do, taking advantage of our kicking up the insects that they enjoy. It was probably a good thing we hadn’t carried on the previous night, because apart from one possibility, there wasn’t much camping down here at all.

Mark, followed by Steve and Dmitry.

The creek became decidedly easier to walk along over the next 30 minutes as it opened up slightly, but still with regular obstacles that required some thought. The occasional footprint indicated that someone else had been this way in the past few days, but we never met them. We still weren’t moving as quickly as we’d hoped, which was a concern given the forecast was for some rain to be coming that night, and we’d hoped to be a long way along the river before that happened in case flooding became an issue. We stopped at 12pm’ish for lunch at a small side catchment coming down from Mt Montgomery (1332) to the east, and by now enough side creeks had come in to have built what was initially a tiny creek into a respectable waterway.

Steve gets wet.

At 2.20pm, we reached the confluence with Granite Creek, which comes down to meet the Mokihinui from its true right. We spotted a giant DOC triangle marking the beginning of a route up the hill-side on the true left, and initially thinking it might be related to getting around some bluffy areas further along the river, we followed the markers. The track doesn’t follow all the way over the bluffs, but instead drops back down the the main river just on the south side of where Silver Creek comes down to meet the Mokihinui from its true left. It wasn’t immediately clear why this track led up above the river for that short stretch, but looking through the trees it appeared there could be some difficult-to-negotiate rapids in the main river.

Checking out the markers near
a vacant worker camp.

We ceased for several minutes as we came back down to river level, because on the opposite side of the Mokihinui (the true right) there appeared to be another vacant worker camp with a massive stack of firewood, and a roughly marked track leading perpendicularly away from the river. If we’d contacted DOC beforehand we might have had more information about this track, but we weren’t sure so we didn’t follow it. It may be a route that veers around north-wards behind spot-height 383 on the true right, so as to get around some very bluffy areas on the main river. Without knowing exactly where it went, or for how long it’d stay on the true right, however, we elected not to follow it. By now, despite some very sunny weather to date, we were beginning to feel conscious about the coming rain, and not wanting to risk stranding ourselves on the true right of the Mokihinui River lest it come up too high for us to cross back. Instead we decided to try and remain on the true left, or at least within clear reach of it, and this would possibly mean we’d miss staying at Goat Creek Hut further down, located on the true right.

A dyslexic marker arrow.

As might be expected, avoiding the most likely track around the limestone bluffs, which begin on both sides of the river at about NZTM 284877, did nothing to solve our problem of getting around these bluffs. Steve’s photocopied instructions implied that there should be a route somewhere up high on the true left of the river, though it was sketchy about any specifics. After a lot of messing around and clambering up some fairly steep slopes with the help of sturdy trees, we worked our way along an approximate route above the bluffs. It wasn’t a marked route so we were following our noses for a time, and it was also unclear when we should be heading down-wards — Steve’s photocopied instructions simply indicated we should continue to follow our noses down once we were past the bluffs, but even after we thought we were past the end, we couldn’t see any obvious way down for some time. We finally discovered an orange arrow marker nailed to a tree at NZTM 286885. It was a very old marker, and furthermore it was a dyslexic arrow that pointed left-wards, away from the river into a ditch (after which there was one further marker and apparently nothing else), rather than right-wards down the hill towards the river. This was really a set of markers intended for getting up the hill, but we found it easy enough to follow the other way. Within 20 minutes we stood back on the bed of the Mokihinui River, which was becoming increasingly impressive in its ability to channel water. By now it was 6pm, and we had around 3 hours until sunset.

There’s a wonderful geology along this stretch of the Mokihinui on the north side of the bluffs. Huge slabs of limestone rock line the banks, having been thrust upwards during past earthquakes. The river now surges over them eroding a smooth channel. Occasionally a giant house-sized monolith has toppled from the gorgey walls and slammed into the riverbed below, to be slowly eroded away by the water as centuries and millennia pass by. That’s what it looks like to my untrained eye, at least, though I may be very wrong. For practical purposes, the river walk in this region involves walking along the flat slabs above the river, generally okay except there’s often a covering of slippery slime for which obtaining friction is tricky. In the rain it could be treacherous, so it was a good thing for us that the rain hadn’t yet arrived.

We discovered another track marker leading away on the true right at roughly NZTM300900, but once again it wasn’t clear where it was heading. Despite following the first couple of markers into the bush, we lost it very quickly. It’s possible that it headed further back and eventually to Goat Creek Hut, although to get there it’d still have to cross a major side-stream (Stern Creek), or perhaps it was the returning marker of that other track we’d seen leaving to go around the bluffs on the true right much earlier in the day. We never found out for sure. By 7.45pm we were debating how much further we should go, given that it was forecast to be raining by the following day. Ideally, we really wanted to not just be on the true left of the Mokihinui River, but also past as many significant side creeks as possible. By the start of the day we’d intended to get at least as far as Goat Creek Hut, opposite Hennessy Creek, but we were still nowhere near it, and hadn’t even reached Owen Creek that entered on the true left about 3 km earlier.

Approaching sunset.

We continued a little further and eventually established our camp-site for day 2 at NZTM303905, on a sizeable vegetated peninsula jutting into the true left of the Mokihinui. We named it dead goat island, after the discovery of two dead goats. As Steve noted, goats rarely drop dead spontaneously in such situations, so it seemed likely a hunter had shot and left them. We didn’t check.

Steve toasts a marshmallow.

And we chopped our vegetables and cooked our dinner on the campfire, then toasted marshmallows on a clear, calm and quiet night. High above us the occasional cloud slowly coasted through the sky. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, twinkled violently. Some wild turbulence was brewing in the upper atmosphere, and it was soon to cross our path.

Day three, 2nd January 2010

Steve, shortly before leaving
dead goat island.

The front must have finally arrived and rain began some time in the early morning, perhaps 3am, prompting a low key getaway at about 6.30am, without messing around. The main Mokihinui River was not flooded and we were still able to cross back and forth, but only in strategic and carefully decided places with aspects of caution. We spent more time carefully edging along the side of the river than we might otherwise have bothered with.

Our final crossing, from the true right to the true left, occurred an hour after we left and shortly after the entrance of Owen Creek into the main river. It was an awkward crossing which may have been more straightforward except that the surface under the increasingly swift current was almost entirely boulders, providing virtually no flat ground on which to stand. Technically the river was still not flooded, but we decided there and then to not cross that river again until it had gone down. This decision was the end of any hopes to visit Goat Creek Hut on the true right, but in many ways it was a relief because at least we were on the side we needed to be on to get out.

For two further hours we remained on the flats. There was one difficult clamber up a bank for which we needed to remove packs and pass them around to get up, but generally we spent the time bush-bashing through trees on the true left. It was 9.30am, 3 hours after we’d left that morning, when we finally reached Hennessy Creek. Given the way it was surging it could have been the end of the day already, but we were relieved to find a useful fallen tree that allowed us to walk or shuffle to an island of scrub half way over the creek’s mouth. Unfortunately the other side of this small island was another raging torrent, but it did enable us to sight a larger tree further up the stream, spanning the entire waterway, and we were saved!

Reaching the small island.

Hopping and walking and shimmying over the mossy knee-friendly green carpet of this sturdy tree trunk that spanned the surging water below, we patted ourselves on the back and continued pushing through the river-bordering bush… for about ten minutes or so… and then we came to the enormously demoralising realisation that the Hennessy Creek we’d just crossed wasn’t Hennessy Creek at all. It was an un-named minor side stream that flowed into the Mokihinui River about 200 metres to the south of Hennessy Creek. The real Hennessy Creek really did spell the end of our day, and it was game over. Time to camp. Oh krud. Goat Creek Hut was now about 200 metres away behind the trees on the far side of the flooded Mokihinui River, yet completely out of reach. For all the time that we spent so close, we never saw Goat Creek Hut.

And so we waited. We even had a day up our sleeve in the original plan which had been set aside for lazing around in the sun. All the environment needed to do was to stop raining on us.

Not a great idea.


Home for two nights.

Having arrived at about 10am, Hennessy Creek, quite a thunderous and constant surge of water, was at its highest point that we saw (at least during the day) at around 3.30pm that afternoon. There were a few gauges we could use to measure this. For instance, I took several photos of the far side of the creek to help document the visible rocks, few as there were. A mid-sized horizontal overhanging tree dipped its branches into the creek, and completely stripped of leaves those branches were getting a severe walloping that also caused much turbulence in the water immediately past it. The “creek” happily forced its way over the trunk of this tree at its base which stuck out from the high side of the creek bed. My favourite measuring device was a couple of metres further down-stream, where a smaller tree that I mentally nick-named the Loopy Tree was looping furiously as its thin lower-most branches held an elastic pattern of becoming caught in the torrent’s surface. It was then launched erratically into the air before reaching its maximum extent and bouncing hard back to the surface of the turbulent water, only for the pattern to repeat over and over again.

From mid afternoon the rain would sometimes hold off for short whiles, giving us false hopes before beginning again and dashing them. The level dropped about 20 centimetres from its high point before finally settling on a constant state of flood that it most preferred. The top-most rocks of its true left bank were now visible on the far side, the water merely frequently lapped over the trunk of the horizontal tree rather than blasting over in a constant surge, and the Loopy Tree reduced from a frantic explosion of craziness to a hypnotic loopy pattern of an impressive radius.

We optimistically hoped this was a sign that the level would decay further overnight. Allen and Sue, banking on their past experiences, were smartly locking themselves down to half rations already at that point, but the rest of us had complete meals that evening, optimistically hoping things would improve by the following afternoon. With the size of the catchment and the sheer amount of rain that we later discovered was falling, not completely consistent with the forecasts we’d earlier seen, our optimism was unfounded. Robert and I did our best to keep water out of the tent, but with limited success. Some time that evening, Mark knocked on our tent door and asked if we’d seen Dmitry — it seemed he’d gone for a walk and not returned. It rained for the better part of the night.

Day four, 3rd January 2010

The rain continued. We discovered where Dmitry had been, though, and yes he had returned. Dmitry, who despised the idea of being so trapped, had been up river looking for possible places to cross, and he’d actually found something promising. On the morning of day four, everyone bar Allen and Sue went up the creek to check it out, and it was quite a cool concept. Despite the creek being in flood, Dmitry had discovered an underwater island that stretched about 30 metres down the middle of Hennessy Creek. From the true right bank at which we were stuck, we could reach the top end of this island relatively safely due to the shallowness of the water flowing over the gap. The water directly on the other side of the island was surging even more violently of course, since all that water in the river has to go somewhere. Due to the shape of things underneath, though, the surging water was gradually filtering over the top of the entire length of the island from the true left to the true right, taking the complete 30 metres to do so. By walking the length down the middle of the creek to the far end of this underwater island, we would then be at a point where the gap to the true left was now shallow, with the bulk of the water now surging on the true right side of the island behind us and from where we’d come. Dmitry in fact, who’s very well balanced on his feet, had already done this completely by himself the previous evening, and come back again. Looking at it collectively, however, we didn’t reach a positive consensus about everyone in the group being able to get through safely. The water was still reasonably swift over the length of the island, and so we decided to wait things out for longer.

I checked the level using my measures when we returned. There was no difference from yesterday’s settling point, with the mesmorising Loopy Tree in its comfortable circular pattern. As I stood and stared at Hennessy Creek, trying to picture a good landing space in case I might somehow construct a giant pogo stick from the available raw materials, one of the many South Island Robins fluttered past and landed on a low branch on the far side. It looked back and chirped, demanding to know why we weren’t on the far side of the creek, kicking up more insects to ease its foraging.

I went back to the tent, and that’s where both Robert and I spent most of the day enduring increasingly annoying back-aches from so much lying in a confined space, phasing in and out of consciousness. I spent some time browsing FMC Bulletin number 178, and came to realise just how much I take for granted all those moments when I have the freedom to mix a cup of chocolate chips, a cup of drinking chocolate, half a cup of strawberry jam, a litre of gooey raspberry ripple ice cream, 3 cups of couscous (to make the whole thing acceptably healthy), and then eat it. In fact, I couldn’t believe I’d never ever done such a thing, and it seemed absolutely wrong that I hadn’t taken the opportunity during any of the many times I’ve been able to. Thus I made a private resolution that I’d mix this recipe once we finally emerged from the mess we were in, but meanwhile I daydreamed that I was swimming in chocolate ice-cream mush. So thank you Warren Wheeler of the Palmerston North Tramping & Mountaineering Club, for your Mt Doom Chocolate Volcanic Cake that allegedly serves 12. Your submission inspired my imagination that evening, and took my mind to a distant land in which I wasn’t hungry, even though it sounded like pitiful-sized portions if dividing it between so many.

Strangely I didn’t feel much like eating any of my 2 day expired pita bread that day, and satisfied myself with a couple of slices of cheese. Robert and I went to sleep to the frequent claps of a thunderstorm, but I soon noticed inconsistencies. There were no lightning flashes through the tent, the thunder invariably originated from the same directions, and the volume wasn’t as variable as it should typically be as a storm passes over. It soon dawned that the ambient thunderous thuds were localised to the raging torrent within about 30 metres on two sides of us. We were surrounded on both sides with the echoes of heavy river boulders being driven down the flooded rivers and occasionally torn from the banks. I learned later that Allen had been concerned enough to rise during the dark and scope out potential alternative camp-sites lest we quickly need to evacuate our residence on the forested river rocks. The thuds continued throughout the rest of the night, as the Mokihinui continued its constant evolution as a wild river, eroding the environment around it in a way that only such an aquatic juggernaut can.

Day five, 4th January 2010

The Mokihinui — a flooded Hennessy Creek
comes in behind the trees on the true left.

The rain had slowed, and even largely stopped by the morning of day 5, but the rivers on both sides remained high, with such large catchments and possibly with more rain occurring further up. We couldn’t tell for sure. Robert and I spent some time sitting on the rocks next to the bank of the Mokihinui, which we’d by now figured out how to reach through the trees, and were even able to dry a few things during intermittent sunshine. Some time around 8am, a helicopter came completely unexpectedly from the south, swooping low along the river and directly over us. It looped around over the river and down to the ground behind the trees on the opposite bank of the Mokihinui, almost exactly where Goat Creek Hut should have been. The helicopter sat for several seconds in its obscured position before suddenly lifting off and flying away further down the river, the fumes from its engine silently drifting down to where we stood.

We had no obvious explanation for this, and despite having tried to wave from our positions in our colourful polyprop, we had no idea if anyone in the helicopter had seen us to be able to note that we were stuck here. It occurred that perhaps the hut over the river had occupants, maybe even someone with a mountain radio, but there was no way to tell and if such people were there, they weren’t coming down to the main river where we could see them. Probably we should have found some brightly coloured pack liners or similar and anchored them out in the open, so that any future aircraft cruising along the river might realise someone was camped in the trees behind Hennessy Creek, just in case we were so late for there to be a Search and Rescue alert. We didn’t think of it at the time, however.

I went back to the tent, deciding to empty my miniature dry bag from the top of my pack, and try to dry out some of the items inside that had collected water. That means things like a wallet, cellphone, head torch, GPS, and all those things that absorb water really well when there’s a lot of it. Fortunately though, I discovered the two most absorbant things in my dry-sack were a spare cotton handkerchief, sopping wet, and a sticky mish-mash splodge of white goo. I couldn’t figure out what this was until I pulled it out and realised it was the 20 cent mixture of lollies I’d been given at the Lazy Cow Backpackers at Murchison. On another day I might have thrown it away (or at least not eaten it), but right now this was a treat! I managed to peel away the layers of paper gunk (well, most of them), and get at the sticky marshmallow. The splodge included at least a couple of jelly beans and a jet plane, and if I handled it carefully enough it was possible to un-twist the wrappers around the toffees. All in all, a good bonus meal.

Free energy.

With the rain receding but the rivers taking their time to go down, Allen took some initiative to start a campfire. Doing so with so much drenched wood isn’t an easy task, but Allen showed us a valuable trick, which is to find vertical wood. If the wood is standing up rather than lying on the ground, it won’t have absorbed anywhere near as much water, and thus becomes much easier to burn. So we spent late morning and early afternoon scouring the surrounding bush for dead wood that hadn’t settled on the ground. We soon had a large pile, and Allen had a good fire going that we could use to repeatedly boil water for perpetual brews, toast 3 day expired pita bread for a reasonable lunch (much nicer than raw pita bread), stand around to keep warm and pass the time, and (at least in one person’s case) dry out underpants.

By mid afternoon, Hennessy Creek was still up some way, but we decided we’d finally try Dmitry’s suggested crossing location. It took about 30 minutes to pack up, 15 minutes to walk up river, a few minutes of careful crossing in pairs and one group of three, an amount of trawling through a deep bog on the far side where I personally found myself thigh deep in mud having taken a wrong step, some extra time to scramble up a miniature bluff to the flats of the higher ground, and it worked. At 5pm we were across, with another 4 hours of daylight.

From here we took a bearing roughly north, walking over the flats inland from the river. The flats in this vicinity are a nice composition of greens, but there’s little camping as the area’s full of shallow sink-holes between the tree roots and swampy regions. We avoided some of it by sidling up the slope towards the west. As we followed our bearing through the shin-deep aquatic wonderland, we began to encounter ribbon-tied survey markers of some sort, with occasional blue ribbons that anchored specific points (perhaps for regular bird counts), and with pink ribbons leading trails between them. We spent some time trying to follow these ribbon trails on the pretext that they probably went approximately where we were trying to go, but were careful to maintain an appropriate north-ward bearing whilst doing so. At around 7.15pm, we emerged above the now impressively widened Mokihinui River, looking down over a giant flowing channel of water. The late evening sunshine waved goodbye to the land from somewhere above and behind us. At a distance below, a convoy of six Whio — New Zealand’s endangered and unusual Blue Duck — swam by in formation, occasionally diving underwater to feed as they saw fit to do so.

A troop of Whio swim below.

We soon dropped to the level of the river to look for a reasonable camp-site, and eventually settled on a grassed region slightly above the main river at NZTM324981, on the edge of the second of the Mokihinui River’s two giant meandering horseshoe-shaped bends in this region. As we were about to set up camp, however, we had a brief debate about whether we’d be better to continue. Eventually, keeping in mind that we didn’t know for certain whether more rain was coming, we decided to press on to Limestone Creek, or possibly even Mokihinui Forks Hut if it proved easy enough to reach. The creek was the main problem though. Steve’s photocopied notes indicated it was complex to cross, even on a dry day. With an hour of daylight remaining, we decided it may be easier to approach before any possible rain arrived, if we could make it in time. Thusly we packed up again, headed up the hill, and pushed through more bush and swamp until finally reaching the creek. It was not a go-er at all, being too late and too deep.

Checking out near the
mouth of Limestone Creek.

Limestone Creek is a very slow moving waterway, effectively a deep, dark and wide ditch full of water. At first glance, it could require swimming or pack-floating because there isn’t a bottom to walk on, and the steep and high sides would potentially make this even trickier. Furthermore, with the Mokihinui River still in some state of flood, back-wash from the main river was causing the creek to come up even higher. One option might have been to have sidled around above the top of the creek’s catchment earlier in the day, which to be fair Sue had actually proposed early on though we hadn’t done so. We walked to the mouth of the creek where it meets the Mokihinui, but couldn’t see any easy way through there, either. We discovered much later, from a local hunter, that there’s apparently a limestone shelf not far under the water near the mouth of the creek. Reportedly it’s straightforward to simply walk across for those who know where to go. We weren’t in the know at the time, though, and perhaps the state of flood meant this bridge was too far underwater to be usable regardless. Instead, we returned to a reasonable camp-site we’d spotted on the way down to the mouth, and set up camp, planning to hope it didn’t rain, then figure out this problem tomorrow.

It was dark by the time we set up camp on the evening of day five. We spent minimal time before going to bed. With the prospect of us being stuck for another day, I didn’t personally want to spend too much food at this point, so left my main de-hydrated meal. Instead, I traded half a slice of my 3-day-expired pita bread and cheese for some of Robert’s salami. The two of us had a hastily assembled sandwich for dinner, and went to sleep.

Day six, 5th January 2010

It didn’t rain overnight. We awoke at about 6.30am, and with prospects of going somewhere, Robert and I enthusiastically prepared and consumed last night’s dinner (in my case half of my remaining de-hy meal) while everyone else feasted on their regular breakfast cereal, or whatever came to hand. We were now officially a day late, having been due out yesterday, but not much could have been done about it.

There was still the problem of getting through Limestone Creek, and it didn’t appear to be any lower this morning than it had been the previous night. It wasn’t long before Steve had concocted a plan, however, having gone for a short mission up the river and discovered a fallen tree. The only catch was that the tree didn’t span the entire creek. Rather, it dipped down into the creek from the southern side (true right) towards the north, meeting the water about half way across. Beyond this point the trunk continued to sink underneath. Falling off would mean a swim or a pack-float, but hopefully this wouldn’t be necessary. On closer inspection it was clear that the tree had been sawn by someone specifically to make a bridge, but it either didn’t work as well as that person had hoped, or it’s since collapsed into the creek. It worked, however.

Steve on a one-way trip.

Steve was first to inch his way down the trunk, and with some effort he found a way to clamber over the underwater branches on the far side of where it met the water, eventually reaching the far bank below a miniature bluff. Over the next 15 minutes we all followed, and we were over. Although it wasn’t certain if we’d be out tonight given some notes about the state of the track ahead, this crossing had been the last major expected hurdle of the trip. Given how long we’d been stuck and how frustrated some of us had become, it was a nice relief to finally have it behind us. There was finally some light ahead, and with some sunshine in the sky there might even be something to look forward to.

Robert in front of Mokihinui Forks Hut.

During another 90 minutes of sidling through thick tangled bush, we saw several more robins and fantails, and also three baby goats huddled together under a tree without a mummy or daddy goat in sight. Eventually, in the middle of the bush, we began to stumble on ancient human-made remnants of structures such as slabs of rusty corrugated iron. I suspect we were at an old site of Mokihinui Forks Hut, because the LINZ map shows the hut about 100 metres from where it actually is (according to my GPS). Soon after, at 9am, we pushed through the trees to finally reach a hut. It’s a standard 6 bunk hut located under a giant Rimu tree, with a wonderful wide view of the forks of the north and south branch of the Mokihinui River below. We stopped for a break, and applied insect repellent which very suddenly became necessary. Browsing the book, we found that a group from the Nelson Tramping Club had been stranded at this hut during the floods, having already been two days overdue before finally managing to leave about the previous day. Perhaps this had been the point of the helicopter earlier on.

The remainder of the walk out to the road from Mokihinui Forks Hut is shown as tracked on our map, and parts of it are well tracked with Department of Conservation orange triangles and all. Realistically it should only be classed as a route, though. Signs at both ends warn that it’s for experienced trampers only, and there’s good reason for this. The route, which follows the historic gold miners’ track cut into the cliffs high above the true left of the Mokihinui River, crosses numerous slips. Three or four of these slips are especially awkward, and while completely crossable and reasonably safe with care, you should expect to be traversing some narrow paths around bluffs, using fixed wires for security in a couple of places, and so on. The western end of the track also includes numerous creek crossings, and one waterfall under which we all had to get wet. Some had quite strong currents and needed thought before leaping in, though the recent rain could possibly have made a few more full than they would have otherwise been.

Mokihinui Forks, where the
south branch meets the north.

A notice in the hut claims the route takes 6 hours, the sign at the far end claims the route takes 8 hours. With seven of us including occasional breaks, it took about 7.5 hours. The route isn’t well marked to begin with, and even the Nelson Tramping Club (which had unsuccessfully tried to get out twice) had stated in their entry that they’d had to bush-bash north of the hut for the lack of any obvious track. We soon discovered that with the current conditions we could head down to the river level in the long grasses, and follow an approximate direction north-ish, during which we somehow spent lots of time walking within a rather deep ditch, to where the south branch of the river meets the north and it swings around to the west towards the coast. We reached this point at 9.30am, and stood on the beach for a few minutes admiring the scenic surroundings, before taking the lead of a bright orange triangle that led up the hillside above some bluffs over the main river, prior to coming back down again over a few more flats.

Views from above.

Crossing Specimen Creek.

At 11.15am, we reached Specimen Creek, coming into the Mokihinui from the true left. This creek is another waterway with a substantial catchment, and no doubt it could also have been problematic with significant rain, but at this time it was easily crossable. The marked route then heads up the hill-side, for the most part leaving the river well below, offering regular glimpses through the trees of an increasingly giant Mokihinui River below. It was compelling to consider just how much the river had changed from the tiny, barely significant tree-smothered creek we’d first stepped into four days earlier. The total catchment is massive and by comparison the river below was huge. For much of this time, we crossed slips — some old and overgrown, some appearing quite active. Several slips, as mentioned earlier, required careful thought and caution to negotiate safely, but all were eventually doable.

One of the more awkward slips.

At half past twelve we stopped for lunch, and I felt disappointed at how much food I had left on what was now almost certain to be our last meal of the walk, given how I’d spent so much effort carefully budgeting just in case. It pays to be safe though, I suppose. All that remained was to get out, and apart from the regular slip or creek crossing, this last section just goes on and on, roughly 20 kilometres of long, straight walking (except for the slips and creeks) from Mokihinui Forks Hut to the end of the road. In places where trees opened up, I looked over the edge and tried to imagine what this gorge would be like should it be dammed, with a 14 kilometre lake to smother the wild river below. At 3.45pm, we walked past the top end of Rough and Tumble Creek, aptly named for its rapids and the excessive noise it generates as it hits the Mokihinui. With an artificial lake, this spectacular entrance that’s been carved and moulded over the millennia would be gone.

Rough and Tumble Creek.

Much of the track along here is surrounded by a forest of young Rimu trees. One day — notwithstanding any decisions to fell them in the future — it will probably grow into something rather magnificent. As we left the main track and approached the road, we passed two crosses commemorating the deaths of David and James Russell, two gold prospectors (father and son) who died in a slip during the massive Murchison Earthquake in 1929.

After a substantial sit at the road in the vicinity of 5pm, we began our walk out to the small township of Seddonville, which isn’t a long way along the road. As we finally walked this stretch, Donna came driving up in a van to collect us, coincidentally having guessed that we might have arrived about now if we’d been walking all day. It was a nice relief.

Robert and Steve at the end.

Seddonville, the small township near the end of the Mokihinui River and whose population would probably all fit inside the Seddonville Pub, was on an evacuation alert during the early days of 2010, at about the same time we’d been penned behind Hennessy Creek. In the past few days, levels of the Mokihinui River that had been unprecedented for many years. Donna, also a day late out from her own trip further north in the Kahurangis, had already stayed a night in Seddonville and been assured by the locals that there was no way we could possibly be getting out that afternoon. I think they’d assumed we’d have aimed for Goat Creek Hut on the far side of the river, rather than camping 200 metres away in the rain for two nights.

The local hunters had ordered helicopters to bring out their mates, and on hearing about us, they’d even been trying to rig up a way of getting us out on the back of one of the other flights, wonderful people that they were. Ironically if we had stayed on the true right behind the large river to aim for Goat Creek Hut, we might have been spotted on the morning of day 5, perhaps even lifted out by the helicopter that buzzed over Robert and I to land in front of the hut and look in to see if anyone was home. This was not to be, however, but I think with so much uncertainty at the time we would have appreciated it a lot there and then, and happily divvied up any resulting expenses between us.

I’ve seen rivers in flood before, but this is the first time I’ve been stuck in such a way. Although no fun at the time, it was fulfilling and I think I’ll go into future experiences with more confidence about preparation and expectations around waiting for rivers to go down. It’s nice to reach the end of such experiences, though.

The beginning (day 2).

The end (day 6)

Edit 21-Jan-2009: I earlier mentioned allegations that Meridian paid the Department of Conservation to not make a submission, but have just noticed I had the wrong link, and can’t locate a reference. (That link refers to a different case that doesn’t involve the Mokihinui.) The Department of Conservation made a submission against the Mokihinui Dam proposal.

It’s a windy coastline.

It turns out I was the only person walking the walk to Honeycomb Rock last Sunday. A family group of about four began a few minutes before me, but turned around within the first ten minutes. I don’t blame them, but having driven for a couple of hours to get there, I wasn’t about to do the same. I’d heard that Honeycomb Rock would be an interesting place to visit, but didn’t really know what to expect. Information about the walk is fairly scarce, and this was combined with my general lack of research before I left. Being ill informed as I was, I ran into a few issues. The first was that aside form the starting point (Glenburn Station), I didn’t really know where to start. The second was that aside from somewhere around the coast, I didn’t really know where to go. The third was that aside from something about fancy rocks and a seal colony, I didn’t really know what to expect. I didn’t help that I’d for some reason been thinking it was “Honeycomb Rocks” instead of “Honeycomb Rock”, but I guess now I know better.

Date: 13th December, 2009
Location: Glenburn Station, Wairarapa Coast.
Route: Walk to Honeycomb Rock and back, wherever that is.
[Photos]
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The walk is administered by the New Zealand Department of Conservation in the Wairarapa region, but is entirely on the privately owned Glenburn Station (sheep and cattle farming). It’s officially closed when Glenburn Station is in baby-raising mode (ie. lambing season), but even the DOC signs only say that this is “usually” about September and October (despite the website info being specific about this), so if it’s near this time and you have any doubt you should probably contact an office in the Wairarapa to find out before going all the way out there. It’s not a major enough walk for much information to be available through DOC’s passive resources beyond a sparsely clad pamphlet downloadable from the website, and as a coastal walk it’s probably targeted mostly at people who live in relatively nearby places such as Carterton or Masterton. It’s not often that I go out for a daywalk and spend two thirds of the time driving, but I wanted to see what it was.

Driving over the hill and down to the coast, it was already clear just how windy it was simply by looking down on the fields and seeing the giant waves of wind racing over the grass-lands below. The unsealed road passes through a couple of farm gates, so if you’re going this way it may be necessary to open the odd gate — the standard New Zealand farm code applies of course, which is to leave the gate as you found it. (ie. Close it if it was closed, and leave it open if it was open.) Some time after 10am on Sunday morning, I parked the car in an intimidatingly strong wind beside the end of the road, and ducked outside finding some ad-hoc shelter under the car to sort out my gaiters. Gaiters probably aren’t needed here as a rule, but I’ve often found them to be very useful around farm-land even when it wasn’t clear they would be. Good footwear is a must, but that’s probably the case anywhere with a significant walk.

The DOC track leads over the ledge
directly above this beach for a short
distance, so I just hopped down.

I watched the family group (mum, dad and a couple of children) leave a couple of minutes ahead of me, clutching coats around their ears to keep the wind off, and followed the along the fence-line for a few minutes, which is marked over the farm by occasional DOC orange triangles. DOC goes to great pains to stress to people that the beach cannot be legally reached from the track, probably because people would otherwise wander over farm-land where they shouldn’t be. The marked track does actually follow directly alongside the beach in places, however, and one such place is within a few minutes of the start, where it heads direct to the beach and routes people outside the farm fences for a while, practically on the beach, before hopping back over the fence to be slightly further in-land. It was during this short stretch on the beach that I overtook the earlier-mentioned family group, and I don’t think they went much further than this because the wind in the air was just so frustratingly and consistently strong.

Wide and windy flats between
the coast and the hills.

Although the rule is to stick to the DOC-marked track and never leave it, I did find the entire thing fairly ambiguous. Having followed the markers over a fenced field from the coast and over a fence, I just lost the markers and didn’t pick them up for ages. At this time I decided to follow the coastal farm road on the assumption that it was probably where I was supposed to be, and my lack of research prior to arriving wasn’t helping. After 10 minutes of this, I started to wonder if I’d missed a critical marker completely, and if I’d been supposed to head up a small spur onto the top of the hills above the coast. During this time I met the only other person I’d see for the entire walk, driving a farm vehicle the other way back towards the public road. He grinned at me as he sped past and I took this as a sign that I wasn’t in a horribly illegal place, but it didn’t help on reaching a farm gate further up the road that was ambiguously un-marked by anything of a DOC nature.

I eventually discovered on the way back that there is a sort of a track, even with occasional markers, that sometimes seems to run parallel with the farm road on the coastal side, at least as best as I can tell. If you find yourself around here and can’t find the nice, legal DOC track, I’d suggest just sticking to the road unless you notice otherwise. Chances are you’re within a few metres of the legal track anyway, and the primary purpose of this restriction is to ensure that people don’t interfere with work or conditions on the farm in unexpected ways, antagonise animals accidentally, fall into holes and sue the Glenburn Station owners, or whatever else might occur as a consequence of people being in unexpected places. Being on the road, at least, is probably the next best way to minimise potential problems if the DOC-marked track isn’t visible. I did venture from the road at least once, which was necessary to find a rock behind which I could hide from the wind while I applied some sunblock. I also replaced my sun-hat with a beanie to protect my ears from the wind blasting, and this was one of the few times that I’ve felt I had to periodically check to see if my beanie hadn’t blown off my head. Several times it came close.

Looking back along the road. It think there’s a legal
DOC track buried somewhere to the right.

There were three gates in total, and it was only shortly before the third gate that I began to notice the occasional pole poking low out of the ground with small broken fragments of orange plastic nailed to them. The second gate, still not clearly marked by anything DOC related, holds a sign saying “Coast”, and it’s after this that the road moves quite close to the coast. As opposed to running about 50-60 metres inland, it’s now a hop, skip and jump of less than about 2-3 metres away. Although DOC states loudly that there’s no legal access to the beach from the DOC track, the road at least gets very close here. As it turns out, parts of the DOC track obviously do reach the coast regardless, because there’s a marker I’d missed in the vicinity of the major seal colony about half way towards Honeycomb Rock, and the seal colony is (of course) on the coast. Generally though, they don’t want people randomly wandering over the farm-land, with good intentions or not, for good reason.

First signs of unusually-eroded rocks.

The third gate, just before Honeycomb Rock, actually does have a small orange triangle marker attached to confirm that it’s still a DOC-managed route. As soon as I opened this I could suddenly smell the stench of the New Zealand Fur Seal, but it I didn’t see the straight away. The rock itself stands out clearly on the coast, and I took a couple of photos. Not have a clue what to expect, or if I’d reached it, however, I thought that perhaps I was supposed to be reaching a much larger cluster of rocks rather than a single rock, so I kept walking for a while.

The third gate, which actually has a marker.

The wind had been blustery and strong all the way, but on turning the corner at the gate it suddenly became much extreme. Occasionally it would be carm, but the stirring of the trees in the distance would always turn into approaching waves of dancing grass, and spray from the waves being thrown in what was surely the wrong direction. There would be about enough time to quickly examine yet another creative variety of four letter words scrolling through my mind before having to rapidly duck to the ground thinking “oh krud, not again”, before it would hit.

The cows didn’t mind.

Moo.

These cows that I mention were the crowd of cattle cautiously eyeing me up, and being careful to stay together in the herd, as cows do, whilst I carefully negotiated my way around them. Soon after this was a shallow and un-bridged stream running into the sea, which I walked through, and a short distance later was another gate that looked even less as if it was designed for casual walkers to pass through. At this time, with the wind battering me, I decided that i really didn’t mind if I’d reached whatever it was I was supposed to be looking at, and I’d turn around now.

Honeycomb Rock, I think.

Having slowly come to the conclusion that perhaps I’d already passed all of the honeycomb, I stopped on the way back for a more proper look at what I later confirmed actually was Honeycomb Rock. A number of grumbling seals were basking near it so I didn’t manage to get too close to the sea (not wanting to disturb them or cause them to feel uneasy by getting between them and the sea), but it’s quite an interesting formation I guess. Not the kind of rock you see every day, unless you live in a place like Glenburn Station I suppose. What I should have done was to look on the southern end of the rock, where there’s supposed to be the wreck of the Tuvalu, “a Fijian trader which ran aground here on its maiden voyage on 11 January 1967″.

Seal guardians at the rock.

I’ve been trying to find out the geological details of Honeycomb Rock, about how it formed and why it’s like it is and such. A quick and lazy search on the web specifically about Honeycomb Rock doesn’t reveal much more than several plagiarised verbatim-lifted-and-uncredited copies of the DOC description that states it’s “a spectacular outcrop on the Wairarapa coast, so named because of the remarkable cell-like weathering pattern which gives the rock a honeycomb appearance.” So far the best reference I’ve found about the general concept is the Wikipedia article about Honeycomb Weathering, which essentially says it’s a reasonably common process on porous rock on horizontal planes in coastal areas. The salt-water settles within the pore spaces in the rock (rather than simply running off), and the salt from the water then crystalises as the water around it evaporates. Because it’s inside the pores, it the crystals eventually start to break seals open as they grow within the rock, and this opens up the rock to other kinds of erosion in a certain way that result in the honeycomb appearance. If I understand it correctly, anyway, but please correct me if you know otherwise. Pretty cool, actually.

More Honeycomb-eroded Rock next
to the beach on the way back.

Now on my way back, I thought I might try to walk on the DOC track that I could see poled one metre to the right of the road, although I stopped from time to time to sit on the beach and have staring contests with seals before the track and road left them behind. It was basically an animal track more than anything else, and when the DOC markers disappeared again (as far as I could tell), it just became several fairly non-distinguished animal tracks roughly between the road and the coast, occasionally converging back to where the road was at places such as gates.

More rock guards.

As I reached the mini-peninsula point that juts out about half way back, I spotted another DOC pole poking out of the ground with a marker on it, and took this as a happy sign that I could legally cross the farm-land, if for no other reason than to get back onto wherever the DOC track was supposed to be, since apparently it wasn’t where I was right at that time. The point of this marker was to provide access to the main fur seal colony, and at this time of year there were quite a few hanging out. I didn’t count, but certainly at least 50, and perhaps triple that if counting the others spread up and down the coast to Honeycomb Rock. I spent a few minutes having another staring contest with a big grunty seal sitting on a rock. Then I turned around and walked back to the road.

The spray tears back into the
sea as the waves come in.

Nearing where I’d parked the car, I finally managed to replace my sun-hat, and the cord that ties it down proved its practicality on several occasions when my hat blew away. The sea was still rolling in with as I approached outside the edge of the farm-land, the wind wisping away any spray well back into the sea, and I stopped for a few photos before reaching the car.

With a roughly 2.5 hour drive each way from Wellington and much of that on unsealed roads (and stopping for things like a very late lunch), I worked out that I was walking from 10.20am to 2.07pm, so a little less than 4 hours of walking — it may be wildly different for different people depending on how much of a hurry any given person or group is in, and the length of time of the staring contests with the local wildlife. It’s roughly similar to the DOC posted time to the “Track End” on the sign at the beginning, whatever that means. The same sign states it’s 3 hours return to Honeycomb Rock, and the online DOC information estimates a far more conservative time of 5 to 6 hours. So I’m still not really sure which rock is which, or how far I was supposed to go — perhaps the three hour “Honeycomb Rock” was the one I saw part way along that was practically on the beach, and the other big one that I thought was Honeycomb Rock was the 4 hour end of the track. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it was an interesting walk, but I find it frustrating not knowing these details lest I might have missed something interesting.

It’s a photogenic walk on a day like today, especially without too many people around and if you can prepare things to tolerate the wind if it’s present. I was relieved to be able to sit in the car and recover from the wind for a few minutes, but looking back on the photos I took along the way, I feel quite good about where I went.

The Orongorongo Valley.

I was actually supposed to be going with some others into the Tararuas, but that arrangement fell apart a day or two before, and I doubt I’d have been able to go along with it anyway since I’ve been having some knee problems since arriving back in the country. I really didn’t want to do nothing, though, and made a last minute plan to walk into the Orongorongas from Catchpool Valley, stopping to camp at whatever point my knee decided it could go no further. This plan eventually led me to an ad-hoc campsite next to a river underneath Papatahi where I stayed for a night, before walking out roughly the way I’d come on the following morning.

Dates: 5th – 6th December, 2009
Location: Rimutaka Forest Park, Catchpool Valley road-end.
People: Just me.
Huts visited: Baine Iti Hut (0 nights), Shamrock Hut (0 nights), Haurangi Hut (0 nights), and a heap of private lodges.
Route: Catchpool Valley to the Orongorongo River, up the river to North Boulder Creek, camp in the creek below Papatahi, then back the same way.
[Photos]
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The end of Turere Stream as it
reaches the Orongorongo River.

And thus it was that after a late start, I arrived at the Catchpool Valley car-park at about midday. I’ve been here before, but my first impression on the day of this entrance to the Rimutaka Range was that it might not have been a good idea with a dodgy knee. It’s probably by far the most popular entrance to the range, and the Orongorongo Track, which is the main route to the Orongorongo River, is hard enough on the legs that it might as well be cemented. A little over an hour later, though, I reached the main Orongorongo River, and walking on the sandy river rocks made things easier on my problem knee.

Many people were around during the sunny Saturday, especially near the junction of the main Orongorongo Track. This is probably a reflection of the accessibility and popularity of this area, and the numerous nearby places to stay, and so much the better to see everyone out and enjoying the place. The area is flooded with private batches, and most of them are concentrated in this part of the valley. They tend to be hidden in the trees and so besides the occasional hut poking out from the trees, their presence isn’t overbearing on a walk up the river bed.

The bed of the Orongorongo River is very wide and braided. Most of the time it’s low and easy to walk along, but it’s still necessary to get wet feet. There’s a track along the western side somewhere for part of the way which is where many of the batches are hiding, but when the river floods it’s very possible to be trapped on the wrong side. This certainly wasn’t happening on Saturday, though.

One of a pair of Paradise Ducks.

A New Zealand Pipit (I think).

I met a noisy pair of Paradise Ducks half an hour up the river, and an NZ Pipit not long after, which was nice as although fairly common, they’re the kind of birds I don’t notice much in many other places I visit. Around two hours after leaving the carpark, I arrived at the mouth of Matthew’s Stream, with Baines Hut on one bank (operated by the Hutt Valley Tramping Club) and Baine Iti Hut hidden deep in the trees on the other bank. The latter is the oldest remaining hut in the valley, having been built in 1930 to replace a previous hut. Unlike most of the locked huts in the valley, Baine Iti Hut has been donated for open use by the Baine Family, to all comers. It’s very cost but only a 4 bunk hut, so not the kind of place to visit without being prepared to camp outside if necessary. (It’s a good camping spot.)

Baine Iti Hut.

Matthew’s Stream is the turning point for most people wanting to climb Mt Matthews, which at 941 metres is the highest peak in the range, so I suppose this would be as far up the Orongorongo River as many people go. It’s also the point at which private lodges seem to thin out a lot, and from here on things finally began to feel more remote, in a sense. I wasn’t walking along the track in the trees (I couldn’t see the point on such a nice day), but I think it’s about this point where that track stops. LINZ still considers there to be a track heading up the river, but as far as I can tell it’s effectively the same as the 4WD route up the river, even so far as the Department of Conservation marking the road with very occasional orange triangles, such as the route up to Shamrock Hut — one of the locked DOC huts to which I went for a quick look. If you’re planning to follow the “official” track and happen to lose it, the easiest thing to do is probably to ask yourself where a herd of rampaging elephants might go (or have been), and that’s most likely where you’ll find the 4WD route. In most cases there’s little need, though, because it’s a whopping big river bed and very difficult to get lost unless you happen to be looking for a very specific place along the edge.

Approaching North Boulder Creek and
the entry to the water catchment.

I continued up the river, and at about 3.45pm (roughly 3.5 hours from the Catchpool Valley carpark, though I suspect this is a fairly quick time by some standards), I found the point where the 4WD route more or less stops and the main marked DOC track heads up to Papatahi, eventually over to the Wairarapa in the route known as the Papatahi Crossing. Actually the road possibly continues further up the main river, but it’s not legal to continue without permission because it’s from here that the Orongorongo River emerges from one of Wellington’s main water catchment regions. Prior to leaving I’d had a plan in the back of my mind to look somewhere up there somewhere for a nice camp-side, based solely on the terrain shown on the map. I suppose now I know better. With lots of daylight, though, I kept walking further up North Boulder Creek, where the Papatahi Crossing route goes, and although the potential good campsites up that way seemed hard to come by, I managed to find a small patch of sandy rock that was reasonably flat and just large enough to pitch my fly. It’s probably been used for camping in the past. I made a note of it but with so much daylight left, I was thinking about heading up to Papatahi for a look.

The final stage up to Papatahi.

At 902 metres, Papatahi is the second highest peak in the range after Mt Matthews, and it seemed a shame to be so close and not visit. I made it as far as filling up my water bottle and preparing virtually everything, but I turned around within the first 10 metres of climbing from the river. Unfortunately it’s one of those tracks that climbs very steeply to first get up onto a spur, and while that in itself seemed normal, it didn’t feel quite right to be going up something like that when on my own, particularly when I was already feeling my sore knee again, and without knowing exactly how long it’d be like this before the gradient shallowed out and became easier. Actually given the state of my knee and only 3 more hours of daylight, thought of getting down again if I had an accident concerned me too. So I turned around, returned to my nominated camping platform, and pitched my fly. I’ll visit Papatahi some other time, perhaps during a proper attempt at a Papatahi Crossing.

An ad-hoc campsite.

It wasn’t a terribly well pitched fly in the end given the difficulty in getting pegs into rocks. One day I’ll probably learn and attach some ties to my fly to make it easier to use in this situation (ie. tying it to rocks), but on this occasion I just found some heavy river rocks (sometimes with large and interesting looking spiders underneath) to weigh down the edges. It looked ugly and was probably bad for the canvas, but without much wind it did the job well enough and I wandered out to soak up the last of the sunshine, boil some water and rehydrate my dinner (Yum), and read this book I found by Jane Austen and some other guy. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been tramping solo and had a night completely alone (without running into other groups). Despite being camped alongside one of the main tramping routes over the Rimutakas, I saw nobody between about 2pm Saturday and 11am Sunday.

Saturday night.

I’d had an idea in the back of my mind that if I got away early enough on Sunday morning, and felt well enough, I might be able to dash up Mt Matthews on the way home, which I’ve also never done. Things didn’t work out so well though, and despite best intentions and opening my eyes at 6am, I didn’t bother to drag myself properly from my sleeping bag until 2 hours later, and then not getting away until after 9. I’m sure I needed my sleep, though.

If there is a track near the river in this region, I think it goes somewhere along the true left (south-eastern side) of the North Boulder Creek and Orongorongo River. In fact, I saw clear evidence of people (or possibly animals) having stumbled and shimmied down the sandy banks in the past. As I was leaving I thought I might investigate to try and find any track, but all I found immediately at the top of the bank was lots of barely penetrable and tangly supplejack, and a solid knee-full of Onga Onga (also known as Stinging Nettle), which regrettably stayed with me for the rest of the day. Maybe a good point is that on the occasions that I thought it stopped stinging, it seemed to be numbing the pain that was around my knee before it… it was probably my imagination, though. So I went back down the creek, more or less the way I came up. There must be reasons to go up the bank, but I’m not completely sure what they are. Perhaps there’s a really good track that I just didn’t look hard enough for. It might sometimes make sense when the river and creeks are flooded, but it seems necessary to cross them so frequently in this area regardless anyway.

A less ad-hoc campsite.

Back along the Orongorongo River, I checked a couple of other places where there were obvious short tracks down the high sand banks, and on one occasion found what was a very nice campsite on the true left. (I tagged it on my GPS so it’s marked it on the map attached to this post.) It’s probably one of many nice campsites in the area, although few would be clearly visible from the riverbed, and if I’d found it the night before I expect I would have come back to here rather than camp on the edge of the river where I’d found myself.

Mt Matthews is well signposted
from Matthews Stream.

On reaching the mouth of Matthews Stream (between Baine Iti Hut and Baines Hut), and still only being mid-morning, I thought I might at least wander up the stream-bed a little to check out what was there, and how easy it is to find the track as it leaves to climb up to South Saddle and Mt Matthews. The LINZ map data actually shows a track that doesn’t go directly along this stream at all, but which enters the trees on the southern side of Baines Hut before criss-crossing Matthews’ Stream further on. Looking for this route seemed obsolete, if it even exists, and there was also a big obvious orange track marking stake in the middle of the wide stream mouth, which I took as a likely sign that walking up the stream-bed was a preferable option. Following it around the corner to be parallel with the Orongorongo for a short stretch, it was barely 10 minutes before I found the well marked and verbally sign-posted beginning of a track up to South Saddle, Mt Matthews or alternatively the coast. It would have been very tempting to try and dash up to see what was there, except for the whole knee issue combined with knowledge of a family function I wanted to attend later on Sunday evening. So I took some photos, enjoyed the silence, and returned to the Orongorongo where I met the first people I’d see all day — a group of about five who were preparing to walk up. I’ll come back and take a look up some other time.

Haurangi Hut.

I made a token effort to find the walking track inside the trees on the true right of the Orongorongo River, which supposedly begins about here. I wasn’t successful, though, so continued to follow the river bed until I saw a dark green shipping container balanced in the trees on the hill-side. It turned out I’d reached Haurangi Hut, another of the locked DOC huts in the valley and similar in status to Shamrock Hut where I’d visited yesterday. I wandered up for a look, and for future reference, before leaving at about 11.20am.

From this point on, what remained was a nice, casual river walk, albeit careful given I didn’t want to do myself any more damage. I stopped for a brief lunch as I reached the end of the Orongorongo Track after another hour, before finally leaving the river. The track wasn’t quite so hard on the way back for the final hour, and I’m unsure if it was to do with walking the opposite direction, or perhaps my various leg muscles had this time been warmed up in advance. Or perhaps my knee’s just getting better as time goes on. I was just happy that I managed to get out and do something for the weekend, and also that I finally was able to see another side of this mountain range which, until now, my impressions have been biased with ideas of built-up private batches everywhere, and vehicle access. I think returning some time to explore more of it will be an easy decision.

The Orongorongo Valley.

I found a new way into Belmont Regional Park that I’d previously not known about, heading up through Granada North where there’s a new sub-division going in, then just following the roads until they fade away. In hindsight I think I might have accidentally crossed about 50 metres of private land (hopefully no more), which I realised upon emerging at the end of someone’s driveway, so I’m not 100% sure if there’s a complete public access corridor going through there.

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I decided about half way through the day that I’d like to get to Whitby, which is the suburb in which I grew up. It would have been nice to have been able to follow Duck Creek from Belmont Regional Park all the way, but unfortunately it’s blocked off as more private land and so I had to divert back into suburbia and walk around the streets.

It was strange walking around Whitby. I haven’t lived there for 17 years, but there are memories everywhere, and much of it doesn’t seem to have changed so much. Other things have, though. Everything seems so much more condensed. Great hills that I remember as taking much effort to climb feel unusually shallow. Walking through my old school in which I spent my entire primary and intermediate career, all of the buildings feel smaller. It’s hard to imagine how we spent so much time running around here without constantly hitting the walls. I guess people grow up.

The property developers have taken over some of the great areas of recreation. I have wonderful memories of flying kites through the area that’s now a fenced off retirement village. It was always going to happen, and despite having been very sad to leave in 1992, I’m not sure I could go back to live there again, at least with the same expectations.

It was late in the day, in any case, and I resumed my plan of aiming for the 6.34pm train from Paremata back home again… more of a challenge than I expected given how my feet were starting to give up. There was still enough summer daylight left to make the walk around Pauatahanui Inlet worthwhile, and when I arrived at the train station at exactly 6.34pm, it was only a shame the train was running 20 minutes late.

I guess what had turned into a 43 km walk was quite a shock to the system when it’d been a while, and my right knee now seems to be playing up. Hopefully things will improve in the next week or two, though.

Dundas Hut at sunset.

By now, we’re narrowing down some ideas. Over Holdsworth to Neill Forks might be worth doing in dodgy weather, and it’s near the top of the list. Looking more closely at the forecast though, it seems as if things may become more bearable late on Saturday. From somewhere an idea dawns that we could do what we originally planned in reverse, and it seems better and better the more we think about it. Getting over Cattle Ridge on Saturday with its reputation of exposure to wind could be a problem, but maybe it’s worth a try all the same. There are really only a few hundred metres to cross over the top before heading down the other side. Mmmm, sleep would be nice.

Dates: 18th – 20th September, 2009
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Putara road-end.
People: Illona, Amanda, Richard and me.
Huts visited: Herepai Hut (1 night), Roaring Stag Lodge (0 nights), Cattle Ridge Hut (0 nights), Dundas Hut (1 night).
Route: From the Putara Road End to Herepai Hut for Friday night. Then past Roaring Stag, up and over Cattle Ridge, down to cross the Ruamahanga River, then up to Dundas Hut for Saturday night. Over Pukemoremore to West Peak, East Peak, Ruapae and Herepai, then down past Herepai Hut back to the Putara Road End.
[Photos]
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Sometimes I wonder what I’m getting myself in for, but it usually pays off. One way or another, I’ll enjoy it or enjoy the end of it. Besides, as long as good decisions are made between points of safety, bad weather tramping lets you see places in a way that’s often missed.

It really is raining by the time we roll up to the end of Putara Road at 8.30pm, gateway to such fascinating places as Roaring Stag Lodge and Herepai Hut. Thankfully nobody wants to camp in this, so we’ll be walking for a while to avoid it. Two large vehicles are parked at the road, which look distinctly like the types that would belong to people who’d more likely be at Roaring Stag, fitting nicely with our plan to instead walk to Herepai Hut in the other direction. It’ll mean doubling back tomorrow, but Herepai’s also closer, and we want sleep, or I do. After some time we cross the long swing bridge over the Mangatainoka River, and after that there’s about 400 metres of walking mostly up-hill. Trudging up the muddy track by torchlight isn’t the most riveting experience, but at least there’s some drying out to look forward to, and it usually pays off. Right now it’s just raining and cold. 2 hours after leaving, when we do reach Herepai, it’s a happy relief to find it empty, so we’re not be disturbing anyone.

Unpacking and hanging things up doesn’t take long, not to imply that many things ever actually do dry out but sometimes it’s good to feel as if you’re doing something useful. With a quick assessment, we resolve we’d like to be away by 7am, meaning a wake-up call at 6. Seven hours of sleep will really help, and I slink into my nice comfy sleeping bag as the sole occupant of the top platform. Rain pounds on the roof for most of the night. Every so often a strong gust of wind rustles surrounding trees, but that’s all outside. With luck it’ll stop some time tomorrow morning, and in anticipation of the wind also dying down, we’re looking forward to a good weekend.

For some reason Illona’s alarm goes off at ten to six. This is ten minutes earlier than advertised and she probably planned it. I can hear everyone rummaging around below, but really can’t pull myself out of bed. The deal I’d made with my brain was for 6am, and until then it isn’t going to help me at all. Eventually the clock ticks over, though, and I slide down, slip on some crocs and look outside. Part of the main range is visible within the dingy lurking cloud, a thinnish layer of icy snow settled on the area between East Peak and Ruapae. It’s still raining, still windy at the top, and I’m very glad we decided not to head straight up this morning.

Illona and Richard preparing to leave.

Thankfully due to people more organised than myself, the billy’s boiled, and a quickly mixed hot brekkie helps. Before 7am, we’re fully packed, have latched the door, and commence wading through the track that’s become much more boggy overnight. It’s getting warmer with the walking and, even better, the barometer readings imply the weather has improved from the previous night. Shame about the rain.

I suppose one of the things easiest to notice about the route we’ve chosen is the excessive up and down. It starts with a climb of about 500 metres up to Herepai Hut (which we’d done on Friday night), followed by a drop of about the same amount down to Roaring Stag Lodge on the banks of the Ruamahanga River, which we’re now doing. A little demoralising in some respects given what’s to come.

The Ruamahanga River outside
Roaring Stag Lodge.

Roaring Stag Lodge is in a nice place on the banks of the Ruamahanga River, and it’s a good site for a hut. As we arrive at about 8.30am, we’re greeted by two lively and enthusiastic hunting dogs, supervised by three guys preparing to leave for the day. As they head off back up in the direction we’d come from, we take off a layer because it was getting hot. It’s still raining, though.

From Roaring Stag Lodge, we cross the long swing bridge over the Ruamahanga River to the base of Cattle Ridge, and begin climbing. Despite having climbed about 500 metres on Friday night (and dropped the same amount earlier this morning), getting up to Cattle Ridge Hut is the first big climb, straight up from around 450 metres to about 1150 metres where the hut is placed. We lose the track momentarily within the trees on the way up and have to sidle around some slippery soil, but otherwise it’s a fairly standard up-hill Tararua track. The rain is less noticeable under trees, and by the time we reach the bush-line it’s finally stopped, thankfully consistent with our most recent weather forecast. In fact, there are even traces of blue sky phasing in and out. Now we only need to contend with a freezing breeze whenever we’re exposed. There’s a wide landscape below, straight down to Roaring Stag Lodge which is directly visible for most of the climb, and right until the track curves over the top of the ridge to where Cattle Ridge Hut sits, just above a murky tarn. The two huts are only separated by 2km on a flat map, but there’s around 700 vertical metres of climbing in that 2 km, which makes it feel further.

Richard outside Cattle Ridge Hut.

We reach Cattle Ridge Hut at 10.30am, having coasted into the base of some of the lower clouds, and stop for a very early lunch. Flipping through the hut book, we also discover we aren’t the first people to pass through for the day. In fact, a group of three apparently crazy guys have been through at 8.30am, roughly the same time we’d been at Roaring Stag, with the intent of walking our entire weekend circuit back out past Herepai before the end of today. This seems very ambitious, not solely because they’re doing it in a single day (which seems feasible for a very fit person), but because they’re doing it on this specific day with gale-force southerlies forecast for much of the time, which seems potentially very miserable compared with what they might get a day later. Perhaps their schedule is restricted. Anyway, as long as the make good decisions they’ll be fine, and perhaps we’ll see them at Dundas Hut if they decide not to go beyond. Looking at how freezing, windy and clagged in it still is on the main range and with the knowledge it’s likely to stay that way, it isn’t exactly something that would appeal to me right now.

Cattle Ridge Hut is more run down than what I remember from 18 months before, but still perfectly adequate. The hut is (I think) being considered for removal thanks to its close proximity to the much more modern Roaring Stag Lodge below, despite the vertical distance between the two. The stove was removed a while back (since there isn’t much dead firewood above the bush-line). For better or worse, a 44 gallon drum which a tramping entrepreneur had last-time left at the hut with instructions about how to use it as a replacement stove has now also been removed. Furthermore on a similar theme, Cattle Ridge Hut is one of the huts that had a bunk removed as a victim of the unfortunate fire exit technicality that affected DOC 18 months ago. Even though the bureaucracy is sorted thanks to some emergency negotiations with New Zealand’s Department of Building and Housing (which administers building regulations), Cattle Ridge Hut is still down to five bunks as a reminder of the confusing ways that governments can work. If anything, the missing top bunk does mean there’s more space to sit down for lunch without having to bend forwards.

Crossing over Cattle Ridge.

After our 45 minute early lunch stop, we finally leave Cattle Ridge Hut at around 11.15am, venturing back out into the frozen and murky tops. Cattle Ridge is notorious for wind, being very exposed to the freezing southerly and sou-easterly that’s occurring right now. We follow the network of cairns and, eventually, marker poles, which lead to the route down the western side — fortunately despite the wind, it’s not clagged in so we don’t need to be as concerned about navigation. I’m really glad we have full storm gear for this part, even though it’s only a few hundred metres over the top before we shimmy over the ridge. There’s a very icy wind chill, despite the wind not being uncomfortably strong to stand in.

Rounding an inconspicuous corner, however, the wind is suddenly gone, and we’re at the top of the small scree gut (perhaps 50 metres down) that marks the beginning of the descent. It’s not a tricky scree gut and has a lot growing on it, so with the usual care it’s quite easy to get down as these things go. Alpine plants are fantastically trustworthy for how solidly rooted they are. As we glance over to the main range from near the top of Cattle Ridge, we can see Dundas Hut murmuring in the distance, perched near the top of a baby spur that’s set back between the two more mammoth ridge/spurs that come off Logan and Pukemoremore to either side. Dundas Hut itself is coming and going at about the level of the clouds, and it’s nice to finally be able to see our destination for the night. It’s only a shame there’s a 600 hundred metre vertical drop between here and there.

Amanda nears the Ruamahanga River
on the western side of Cattle Ridge.

The track down the south-western side of Cattle Ridge is fairly steep, but (again) typical and easy enough to get alllll the way down. After walking 2 horizontal kilometres and a 600 vertical metres, at 12.30pm we’re deposited, once again, at the Ruamahanga River — apparently a river we can’t leave behind. This is a higher section of the same thing, which flows all the way around the end of Cattle Ridge before turning back on the far side past Roaring Stag Lodge where we’ve just been. I’m assured that for some reason it makes more sense to climb over the top of Cattle Ridge and go all the way down the other side, however, rather than follow the river. By now it’s actually quite sunny, and Illona’s decided to try and climb the social ladder by offering around some biscuits she brought. They’re quite yummy. Amanda points out that we’re now within the inner reaches of the range.

With the rain overnight and earlier in the day, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the river’s flowing higher than usual. It’s not flooded, but certainly thigh-deep, flowing quite fast, tricky to stand in with any stability, and without many options up or down-stream for finding optimal places to cross. In its current state, it’s a good candidate for a technical river crossing, and carrying this out is actually quite a fulfilling exercise. Unlike some other occasions in which I’ve been involved, we actually talk to each other and reach a consensus about all the details of which method we’re going to use before we begin. This is a very positive thing, since so many people have so many different ideas about the “correct” way to cross a river, that multiple times in the past I’ve found we’ve made it part-way through a river only to find people trying to do different things.

All lined up perfectly, gripping hip-belts behind each other’s backs, we carefully nudge our way into the Ruamahanga River, staying lined up well to minimise the surface area visible to the current, and it’s working really well. Half way through, I’m starting to think that this is probably the most successful technical river crossing I’ve ever been involved in (not much of a challenge, I’m afraid). I’m busy boasting to everyone about this, and perhaps it’s my emotively flailing arms that push Richard into a big rock on the river floor, causing him to stumble slightly up to his waist. I feel some mild responsibility which I mostly keep quiet about, but no matter. It’s still the most successful technical crossing I’ve ever been involved in.

We pause for another snack on the far side, then at 1pm we climb up into the sidling track (about 100 metres above where we’ve left the river) that follows around the edge of the spur off Pukemoremore, then to the base of the baby Dundas Hut spur we could see earlier. This track seems fairly damaged in a few places. It never feels unsafe, but it’s narrow in places and on at least a couple of occasions, large trees have fallen and require awkward and creative circumventions. It’s uncharacteristic of the sorts of tracks we’ve seen so far during the weekend. At the base of the spur is the confluence where the two side-creeks meet having come down the gulleys on either side, we pause for yet another snack, and it’s up-hill to Dundas Hut on the main range.

Amanda crossing the confluence
at the base of the Dundas Hut spur.

Looking up towards the
Tararua Main Range.

This will be the final climb of the day, and it’s another 600 metres more or less straight up. At least it’s a completely honest spur, with no messing around and undulating. Within 30 minutes we’re back above the bush-line, and the surrounding environment is impressive to take in. We’re well sheltered from the sou-easterly by the two massive spurs on either side, which means it’s a quiet and calm atmosphere for most of the way up. The creeks on either side of the spur are loud and easily audible, but it’s funny to only be able to hear one at a time, alternating as the track up the spur alternates from side to side, as little as a couple of metres either way.

At 3pm, the spur flattens out slightly, for a short while, just before the final climb up to the perch above Dundas Hut, and 15 minutes later we finally reach the sign which diverts traffic bound for Dundas Hut down to the right, off the spur. Sure enough, Dundas Hut is lurking in the hazy depths below, and within 10 minutes we’re sitting inside. It’s surprisingly warm, given the air temperature outside and the lack of insulation. Perhaps there’s been an unlikely coincidence of sunshine coming through the skylight and warming the inside of the hut at about this time of day, or perhaps we’re imaging it. Amanda pegs her socks outside on one of the metal cables that anchors Dundas Hut to the ground, perhaps in the hope they’ll dry in the remaining sunshine and wind. Nobody else is quite so enthusiastic. Looking up to the main range, no longer far above us, the clouds are shifting quickly in the air, but we’re well sheltered down here. We were curious if those three guys might have stopped here for the night rather than continue their circuit, but they haven’t, and in fact they’ve written in the book that they passed through for lunch. They must have been having an “interesting” day, and they’re most likely still going.

Amanda looks up towards
Pukemoremore near sunset.

Tonight, however, we’re focused on preparing to stay the night. Illona’s planned a very nice Soba Satay noodle meal with a ginger cake dessert. Tramping dinners can be fantastic when they’re well planned and with the food divided, and this is no exception.

The late afternoon dwindles as I’m scrubbing the plates outside the front door. We have a colourfully muted sunset with lazy clouds dangling around Pukemoremore and its spur off the main range behind the hut. As time goes on, the cloud movement above the range slows down, thankfully as was forecast, and hopefully to stay that way for tomorrow. It’s getting cold, though, and as the sun drops to the west we’re spending more time in sleeping bags for warmth. Dundas Hut survived the 6th-bunk-purge that had affected Cattle Ridge, but the redundant wood-stove that was once here is long gone, evidenced only by the nailed covers on the floor and ceiling, and therefore there’s no extra heating. I am, once again, on a top bunk, and Dundas Hut as with some other smaller huts, has special rules which state that those in top bunks aren’t allowed to sit upright. To ensure of this, the designers instituted a cunning system of ceiling support beams that lie in strategic places relative to the bunks. At first it makes climbing into the top bunk a challenge, but one is rewarded with a satisfying feeling once it’s completed, and therefore it’s well worthwhile. Obviously more huts and bunks should be designed like this, not because I want to use them all the time, but because I think it adds to the tramping experience.

Having settled into my sleeping bag and only hit my head once, I pull out my book to read, only to realise that after 2 pages it’s finished. (Damn these books with 10 blank pages at the end.) Amanda shuffles outside having remembered the socks hanging on the anchor cable, and brings them inside in a fairly crusty state, half way to being frozen. This prompts an idea of bringing in all the boots and socks, some of which are still in the old wood-shed part of the porch just outside the door, to prevent them from freezing. So far I’ve managed to avoid getting up, but at that point Amanda rather annoyingly points out that the tap might be frozen in the morning, so perhaps we should fill up on water now. (Nothing annoying about Amanda, of course, only what she stated.)

Grrrr, this means I’ll have to get up, even though “I bet it’s not frozen in the morning.” All the same I unzip my sleeping bag, pull myself out of my liner, roll over and fall to the floor in a semi-controlled fashion, then rummage around to find my water bottles. Richard’s doing something similar, and Illona’s pretending to be asleep, perhaps having already been through all of this while I wasn’t paying attention. I hop outside onto the freezing deck in bare feet to fill them up, shake icy water from my fingers (brrrrr), haul myself back up onto the bunk, hit my head on the beam as I’m trying to slide back into the delicate configuration of sleeping bag and liner, roll over and re-arrange my things, then lie quietly. Amanda briefly ventures outside again, comes in and comments how clear the sky has now become, with a brilliant Milky Way outside. I choose to believe her, but despite my efforts I can’t make much out through the corrugated plastic skylight directly above me that’s rapidly attracting condensation. It’s a quiet night, bearable but not exactly warm. I find myself stirring at 4am for a sip of water. Groping around in the dark, I discover a thin seal of ice around the top. Hmmmm.

Roughly Sunrise, 6.35am.

And it’s welcome to Sunday morning. With our adjusted plan that spends Sunday on the tops instead of Saturday, we’ll have a longer than expected day today, and therefore intend to be away by 7.30am. This translates to a 6.30am wake-up, although in the emerging pattern I notice everyone except for me rustling ten minutes earlier.

Well, it turns out the idea to bring the boots and socks inside was a very good idea. Unfortunately it just wasn’t quite good enough, because it turns out they’re all well frozen despite our precaution. The socks that hang on the wall are frozen. Everyone’s boots that were under the bench are frozen. The tea-bag in my cup is frozen. By this point, I’m willing to agree that there might have been something worthwhile in Amanda’s idea the previous night. We haven’t tested the tap so far this morning, however, and with all the water we saved there’s no reason to test it, so perhaps we’ll never know for certain.

Illona sips a cup of tea over frozen
socks, boots and gaiters.

Stepping outside, it looks as if it’ll actually be quite sunny today. We lay out our frozen boots and socks in an attempt to thaw them in the morning sun, but it may take some time. If I’d actually believed this was going to happen, I might have made an effort to shape my boot-laces into a more artistic and symmetrical pattern. Well, breakfast perhaps.

They’re not thawing out very well, and nobody really wants to try and pull frozen socks and boots onto their feet. It’ll have to happen soon, however. Application of sunblock could be a good diversion, even though for some reason I seem to be having trouble getting it out of the tube. Strange — usually this stuff flows so easily. Finally though, we do make the effort to freeze our feet, which should hopefully warm up and quickly thaw out as we begin to walk. It’s even less fun than pulling on soggy socks and boots in the morning, however. I think I have a clump of ice somewhere under my heel, and might need to do something about that later.

Leaving Dundas Hut on Saturday morning.

As it is, though, we close the door at Dundas Hut and leave at 7.30am, happily at the exact time we’d hoped for. It’s actually quite a climb out of Dundas Hut, especially noticeable early in the morning when getting into it so immediately. Last time I was here, I made a silly mistake of drinking far too much water which contributed to severe problems later in the day, and this time I was being much more careful. In fact, this time I’d filled up with a complete 3 litres of water which was at least twice as much as what I expected I’d probably need. Still, better to have too much than not enough if in doubt.

Nearing the top of the Dundas Hut spur, I’m already feeling quite hot and sweaty in the morning sun, though this is quickly thwarted on reaching spot-height 1415 at the top of the spur after 20 minutes, where we’re suddenly hit by what remains of the light but still-freezing sou-easterly. It gets stronger as we briefly drop into a saddle below Pukemoremore, but is never threatening. Evidence of the overnight cold is all around, though, including small remaining slabs of snow, and one small tarn which is very solidly frozen on top when I test it. We stand on top of Pukemoremore at around 8.15am, the highest point we’ll reach during the entire weekend at 1474 metres.

Early clouds on the Main Range.

We carry on over Walker (or rather sidling around to the left of it), all part of a very pleasurable ridge to follow, although with the freezing breeze it makes sense to stop a few times and all of us end up wearing over-trousers, gloves and hats to keep off the threat of the wind chill. Every so often, we spot the footprints of the three people the previous day, deeply embedded in the alpine mud, and more often than not they’ve become the moulds for icy casts of their boots that are now in-set into the ground.

Coasting along the ridge as wispy clouds waft over the range with the light suffix of a sou-easterly, turbulent patterns form over and under each other in seemingly chaotic patterns before disintegrating in a vapourous wash of transparency. To the west, the town of Levin is bathed in an opaque sunshine, shielded from the ravages of an overcast sky by the profile of the Tararuas, the silhouette of which right now includes our kitted out storm gear. If there’s any doubt about the point of going tramping on the Tararua main range, this should seal away any concerns because studies show that the weather affects people’s happiness and by adding to the profile of the Tararua main range, it occurs to me that we are helping to shield Levin from the dasterdly and treacherous light wind that would otherwise carry demoralising cloud over the district to the west. Somewhere out there, people are producing higher and more efficient economic outputs by working harder because they’re happier (as various studies imply), improving the economy of Levin and by extension the world. And it’s all thanks to trampers in the Tararuas. We’re happy, too.

Illona double-checks the map.

Amanda, Richard and Illona wait
for me to hurry up and take a photo.

As we pause at times, we can see as far as Mount Eggie/Taranaki, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe in the distance. Looking out over the plains, we contemplate how they might have been as forest wet-lands, prior to European settlers arriving with their newly-invented techniques of turning the vast majority of New Zealand’s original wetlands into land that could be used for farming, but completely transforming the eco-system as a consequence. Eventually as the sun rises in the sky, the cloud that blows over the range from the east disintegrates entirely, leaving us with a completely sunny, though slightly breezy day on the tops. On reaching West Peak, we have the last climb of any significance ahead of us, since it’s here that the main range drops into a saddle about 200 metres deep between two ridges, re-commencing at East Peak on the far side — exactly 20 metres higher than the West Peak on which we stand. I bet this is treacherous in the wrong kind of weather, and perhaps it wasn’t much fun for those guys the previous day, but for us it works out okay. Overall it takes about 40 minutes to drop into the saddle from West Peak, then climb to East Peak, and we pass it by at roughly 10.45.

Amanda and Richard climb
up to West Peak.

And suddenly our time on the Main Range is almost over. Already. Because at Ruapae, we’ll be turning off and working our way back down to Herepai Hut, where we began so long ago on Saturday morning. The only concern I have from this point is a short section of ridge I remember from last time, which has slipped on both sides and which is largely held together by Leatherwood. To an extent, the thought of it has been haunting the back of my mind for much of the weekend, especially since the Department of Conservation decided to start warning people some time ago that the ridge has fallen away and it’s necessary to be very careful. Once we arrive shortly before Ruapae, however, it’s barely noticeable such that until it’s gone, I’m not even sure if we’ve passed it by. The ridge is held together by Leatherwood and it’s reasonably steep on either side, but nothing like as bad as I remembered it. So that’s good. I’ll remember for next time that I shouldn’t trust my memory, and this experience wouldn’t be the first time.

And we leave the Tararua Main Range, turning off at Ruapae towards the East, over to Herepai. Half way there, we stop in a flattish place sheltered from the wind, bathed in sunshine, and have an early and lazy lunch. From here we can see the leatherwood-laden ridges to the northern end of the Main Range, not a good place to be stuck without sufficient planning. We take our time, knowing that from here it’s mostly down-hill. Through some bad coincidences of timing, this is actually the first time I’ve been able to get to the Tararua tops all year, and the first time on any tops since April. It’s been awesome.

Illona in front of East Peak (left) and
Ruapae (right) on the Tararua Main
Range, seen from Herepai.

Anyway, it’s time to leave after a while, and we walk past the Stan Evans Memorial Cross on Herepai at about 12.20pm. The track along this spur is tussock-laden, and it’s necessary to take care about stepping in hidden holes and such, but it’s generally easy. Within 20 minutes, we’re looking straight down to the roof of Herepai Hut, not far below, with the long upper reaches of the Ruamahanga River in the background as it flows south-ish towards Roaring Stag Lodge. Roaring Stag is hidden behind a dent in the riverbed, but from this perspective we can see roughly where it should be. It takes 15 minutes to jaunt down the steep track into the trees and reach Herepai Hut, and then we once again stretch our legs in the sunshine. Checking the hut book, it seems to three crazy guys did pass through here last night, although they didn’t leave much more information about their trip except to imply they were heading back out to the Putara Road. And this is where we were going, too, maybe in a more relaxed state.

Final views of the Main Range.

We sit in the sun at Herepai Hut for about 15 minutes, before leaving on the final leg of the weekend. From here it’s just down. It’s the third time we’ve walked along this section, and the first in the sunshine. It seems somewhat less muddy than it was yesterday morning. After an hour of walking we cross a long bridge over the Mangatainoka River, which the track follows for the remainder of the distance to the road, and from here on it’s flat. There’s a nice camp-site below the bridge, reachable from a short track that begins a minute or two from the end closest to Putara Road, and we head down for a look before finally returning to the van, a further 40 minutes away.

There’s an annoying amount of mud just before the road, which nobody manages to avoid — only irritating because it complicates the act of putting boots away later, but I suppose this is part of the whole thing. Overall it’s be a very rewarding and relaxing weekend, a good thing given the ugly weather in the beginning, but now it’s all paid off.

Alistair and Patricia navigating
down Te Mara.

Dates: 11th – 13th September, 2009
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Ruamahanga and Kiriwhakapapa road-ends.
People: Marie, Alistair, Patrisha, Richard, Tim and me.
Huts visited: Blue Range Hut (1 night).
Route: From Ruamahanga Road End up a south-east spur to Blue Range, heading south-west along the ridge to Blue Range Hut for Saturday night. Then up to Te Mara, and down to the South East. Out at Kiriwhakapapa.
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We spent Friday night in Kiriwhakapapa Shelter, sharing it with another club group, even though we weren’t intending to start from there. It’s not quite as exposed as the Ruamahanga road-end further north, though. The rain was coming down persistently by the time we drove up, and one way or another anyone on the edges migrated further inwards overnight. Eventually the bellbirds began to wake, and some kind of bird that I couldn’t identify began making a lot of noise as it started fluttering around with its nest in the ceiling.

Our plan for the morning, after driving slightly further north, was to head a short distance up the track on the true right of the Ruamahanga River before turning straight up a spur, and navigating our way onto Blue Range. Alistair looked up a grid reference for the point at the bottom of the spur we planned to climb up from the Ruamahanga River, and we keyed it into a GPS so we could confirm the approximate point we’d want to head up-hill, just in case there was any doubt. Ideally we wouldn’t need it, though.

Ray, from the other club trampey group, was very kind to drive us around from the Kiriwhakapapa Shelter and drop us at the Ruamahanga Road End on Saturday morning, which we finally left shortly after 8am. Perhaps it wasn’t quite raining, but it wasn’t far off. We began by climbing a fence, and this was undoubtedly the climax of the trip until that point. Shortly after this we made our first navigation error, embarrassingly enough as we tried to navigate along the track markers over the farm-land. It did take us to the highest altitude we’d been during the morning to that point, although some mild depression followed once we realised and had to turn back the way we’d come.

The flooded Ruamahanga River.

The Ruamahanga Road entrance to the Tararuas actually has quite a long walk before the park entrance, to the extent that we actually walked for a good hour and 45 minutes before reaching the park boundary. (This, of course, included our unintended detour up a windy farm track, which probably added half an hour.) Still, much of the walk seems to be in a buffer zone between the forest park and the farm-land, which isn’t really farm land. During this walk we could look down to the Ruamahanga River from the sidling track high above, well endowed with muddy flood water, and it was nice to know we’d not need to go anywhere near it in the next couple of days. Eventually we passed a sign indicating the official border of the Tararua Forest Park, and the surrounding trees very quickly changed to provide a more consistent canopy over the track.

Alistair working his way
around the creek.

Soon after entering the park, we had our first minor creek crossing, followed by a much more gnarly creek in a small gorge of its own, though there were plenty of hand-holds to get up and around the edges without any real concern. At this point, we were more or less at the bottom of a very nice, direct spur (east of spot-height 635), heading upwards towards the south-south-east, making it fairly straight-forward to plough upwards and be confident of getting onto the main Blue Range Ridge.

The route up this particular spur is overgrown in places, especially for the first 10-20 minutes. As usually happens, though, it became clearer higher up, and animal tracks along the obvious and a handy deer track developed to make the going somewhat easier. Alistair reckoned he noticed one or two markers, but apart from this we didn’t really see much sign of people at all, although it’d be a reasonable assumption that it’s quite a well walked route.

Our lunch stop occurred on the high point of our initial spur, north of spot-height 875, and we stayed until 12.45, then headed along the main part of Blue Range towards the south-west. By now the rain was coming down steadily, but the tree canopy was holding most of it off, apart from all the water settled on the vegetation we had to push through.

Patricia on the ridge
towards Blue Range Hut.

It’s an okay ridge and certainly not difficult to traverse, but I wouldn’t personally rate it as one of my favourite to walk along. It was interesting though, because it was one of the few ridges I’ve visited so far which felt as if there was much more of an animal track than a human track. I guess people must follow it from time to time, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence of this — Marie found a single ribbon marker tied to a branch on the ground, but that was about all. There was a very nice little track to follow, however, which made good diversions around many obstacles that weren’t always immediately obvious. Animal tracks tend to have good ideas, though, so it was generally a good idea to follow them. I guess my only regret is that deer aren’t about a metre taller. For however much the route was relatively easy-going, everything that hit tended to be about chest and head high, and there was a lot of it. Furthermore, the track would every so often divert into a small space under a big fallen tree, or something similar, which would either require a little pack dragging or some awkward circumvention of various obstacles. Maybe things wouldn’t be so difficult if the New Zealand back-country hosted introduced herds of wild elephants rather than introduced herds of wild deer, but that also wouldn’t be quite the same.

We continued to follow the ridge until about 4pm, at which point the bearing carried us into a thick patch of something where it wasn’t quite clear whether it was best to push through it, or sidle around. Marie did some investigations pushing through, and after some fighting with a variety of dracophyllum, suddenly emerged onto the short side-track that leads down to Blue Range Hut. And this was the end of the day’s walking.

The other group of club people, who’d walked up to Blue Range Hut from Kiriwhakapapa that morning, were happily relaxing and reading in the hut, not very bothered to get out of their sleeping bags as we walked soppily through the door. The first order of business was to get a brew going, which was well worth it.

The next order of business was to get a couple of tent flies set up outside, since there wasn’t going to be enough space in the hut to comfortably shelter everyone. Trish, Richard and Tim elected to spend a night on the floor, but Marie and Alistair preferred a Huntech fly outside, and soon after I decided I’d rather have my own space. There are two or three possible tent sites outside Blue Range Hut, but all are fairly thin and not well suited to the tent fly’s we had, and so we put them up on the flat area out the back, partly anchored to the hut’s picnic table. Alistair gave me a hand with my own, and as we were threading the pole through the fly, it snapped, which is never a good sound to hear — especially when it’s raining. It turned out to be not too bad-a-break, though, and very fortunate that the fly would still go up. Still a bit of a pain, but more of a relief that it wasn’t the end of the world. Overall it worked quite nicely, with the only problem being that I wasn’t able to angle my own fly very easily with the wind, and ultimately I nearly lost a peg overnight. No matter, though.

Back inside it was nearly dinner time, and Alistair took some glee in smoking out the hut with prime steak for everyone in our group except the two vegetarians (who’d brought some kind of pasta thing). Everyone who’d been hanging out their clothes to dry probably had a meaty scent left on them by morning. Dinner was fantastic, as it usually the case when Alistair’s involved.

Cattle Ridge in the distance
on sunny Sunday morning.

The rain kept falling, and hadn’t relented at whatever time it was that I wandered back out to the fly to get some sleep. I think it’d stopped by about 2am, although recurring gusts of wind would whip themselves up in the surrounding trees as a threat before descending to the fly. I woke on Sunday to the machine gunning sound of a Whitehead in the upper branches, and noticed that my badly-angled tent fly had nearly lost a peg in one of the front corners. I lay there for a while having discovered it was 6.20am as the occasional light gust caused the corner to flap rather wildly, then decided it might be in my better interests to reach out and try to plug it back into the ground. Optimistically warm morning sunshine glinted through the lower branches, but not direct enough to dry anything out. In the distance through the gap in the trees, Cattle Ridge Hut reflected the Sun’s rays as a bright dot in the distance.

RIchard stands in front of the
sign pointing to Te Mara.

We left at about 8.15am, intent to get back to some more off-track navigation. This would begin by heading up to Te Mara — the high point of Blue Range at 1104 metres. Alistair knew of a side-track directly up the spur from the direction of the hut, which I happily managed to walk straight past — doubly amusing because there’s a sign nailed about 2 metres up a tree which I didn’t notice at all. Noticing track markers really isn’t my strong point, I guess.

Sidling around below Te Mara
after we made a minor nav error.

Te Mara’s marked by a drainpipe in the ground, and it was here that we calibrated some altimetres before navigating down the spur to the south-east, probably about 8.30am or so. It’s a very nice route to follow down, where the bush isn’t too dense, there’s plenty of space to walk, and the ground is comfortably soft. It took a while, though, and there was at least one place where we nearly fell off the spur. There’s a ribbon-marked track all the way up, though, and if we had any doubt we were able to look around for a marker. The route ends on the old bush tram line between the Kiriwhakapapa and Mickey Mickey road ends, right at the point of quite a nice picnic seat. We stopped here for quite some time, had some early lunch at 11.30am, and tried to dry out a few things in the sunshine that was by now beginning to creep through the branches.

Sunning on the tram-line route down below.

From here there’s just a cruisy walk out along the old bush tram-line route, which gradually descends down to the Kiriwhakapapa Road End. Those in the other group were sitting around in the sunshine waiting for us when we arrived, having been there for about an hour or so. All good.

Usually when I go out with the trampey club, it’s on overnight and weekend trips. The club runs many daywalks around the Wellington region too, however, and I thought I might join in for a particular walk that Darren was organising up Mt McKerrow in the Rimutaka Range. I did exactly the same thing back in 2007, with a different group of people.

Date: 29th August, 2009
Location: Rimutaka Forest Park, Catchpool Valley entrance.
Route: Along the Orongorongo Track, up to Mt McKerrow, then down Clay Ridge.
[Photos]
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We left about 10am, following the Orongorongo Track for about an hour to the base of the McKerrow Track. The Orongorongo Track climbs by about 70 vertical metres over this time, but it’s not very noticeable and it’s an easy walk. There are several side-tracks off both sides, one of which is Browns’ Track, and is not officially maintained although it’s still used — it’s a handy (though potentially steep and slippery) way up to Cattle Ridge, and then down to the Orongorongo River on the other side. I made a note to look for this because I’ve tried to find it several times in the past without luck, and happily on this occasion it stood out really well. I marked it in my GPS and on the attached map so maybe I’ll find it more easily next time, but it’s also marked with a broad piece of ribbon.

It took a couple of hours to climb to the summit of Mt McKerrow. The summit itself is a five minute walk past the top of the Clay Ridge track, which we intended to walk down. At roughly 700 metres it’s still under trees and ceremoniously marked by a drainpipe poking out of the ground. It here that we sat down for lunch at about the same time that a chap came wandering up from the Wainuiomata direction to the north. He commented on another track that was supposed to be near here, which he’d not seen, leading down to a scout camp on the Wainui Coast Road to the east. I checked my 2006-published LINZ map which implied that such a track should be leading down a spur to the west, almost straight off the Mt McKerrow summit, but there was no sign of anything apart from a short 2 metre track to a possum track. A quick look around and bashing through the nearby scrub still didn’t find anything that looked to be a likely track, and we abandoned the idea in favour of heading further north along the obvious track, hoping to find some nicer views. And there were a few places where the track emerged from the trees, making it possible to see a long way over East Harbour Regional Park to Wellington Harbour, and also north to Wainuiomata.

The Forestry Service Marker 60 metres
west of the Mt McKerrow summit.

Some people continued to wander further down, but I didn’t feel like coming all the way up again, so I abandoned that idea and returned to the McKerrow summit to wait, at which point I resumed looking for this elusive track entrance. And eventually, I found it. Contrary to first visual impressions, the track does head west almost directly from the McKerrow drainpipe. It appears to fade out after just a few metres, but there’s still a faint hint of a track that winds around a little, and 60 metres away (at least according to my GPS), I found an old Forestry Service white rectangle nailed to a tree. Someone’s tied a ribbon to another tree a few metres behind it, so it seems this track is probably still used enough that it’d be reasonably walkable. (Certainly nothing like the standard of the other tracks in the area, and it was already quite boggy, but sometimes that’s a good thing.) From what I could see it appeared to be curving around to be on top of the spur it supposedly went down, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I marked the location of the marker as another waypoint, and that’s the waypoint showing near the top of McKerrow in the attached map. Perhaps I’ll return here at some point to see if I can follow it properly, but it wasn’t part of the plan today. We left around a quarter to two.

Darren out in the open.

From McKerrow, we headed back to the track junction 5 minutes below, at the top of the Clay Ridge Track. Shortly after we began to head down, the trees opened up and we were suddenly walking right along the ridge, far more exposed and able to see a long way once again, at least for about a minute. These were probably the best viewing points of the day. Clay Ridge is comparatively steep in places, though nothing frightening and it’s completely doable. It’s actually a really nice walk.

A nice river walk.

Near the bottom (90 minutes later), Clay Ridge track splits into three. It’s possible to either keep going straight ahead over the last part of the ridge, go south-east and connect back to the Orongorongo Track, or go west down the side of the ridge, and walk along the river at the bottom. All three options can end at the same place (the carpark), and for whatever reason we chose to turn right, and follow the western path down the ridge. From here it was a 20 minute coast sidling above a nice river valley, on a good track, back to the Catchpool Valley carpark.

Morning at Mangahao Flats.

Dates: 21st – 23rd August, 2009
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Ohau and Mangahao region.
People: Amanda, Dirk, Illona, Richard, Duncan and me.
Huts visited: Mangahao Flats Hut (1 night).
Route: From Poads Road to the Ohau River (camping a couple of minutes before it), up the Ohau River to Deception Spur (where the North and South Ohau split), up Deception Spur, down into the Mangahao River on the other side, and to Mangahao Flats Hut for Saturday night. Out at the Mangahao Dams on Sunday.
[Photos and Movie]

We began having made some vehicle relocation arrangements that dropped us at the end of Poads Road, east of Levin, at around 9pm, and from there we walked about an hour in the darkness to what’s a very nice camp-site about 2 minutes before the track meets the actual Ohau river, almost exactly at the point that a dry weather track heads up the Gable End Ridge. There’s a walk through some often muddy farm-land at first, past the moo-cows and electric fences, but after that it’s all under trees. The campsite has an open clearing with a fire pit, but the best camping spots are under the nearby trees, and there are lots of them.

Last time I visited this camp-site was with Craig, John and Paul, and at that time we had plans to do something very similar to this weekend. For various reasons, we changed our plans and I missed out on seeing the Mangahao River at the time, but on this occasion it all worked out.

Entering the Ohau.

Having woken at 6.45, we packed up and were away so that we walked into the Ohau River — the water supply of Levin — shortly before 8am. River levels were conveniently low, albeit with very cold morning water, and it was a straight-forward walk up the Ohau to the base of Deception Spur, 40 minutes later, which is where the South Ohau and the North Ohau rivers join. Each of these branches has its own hut further up, with each hut being named after the branch on which it resides. On this occasion we didn’t want to follow either, but instead head up the spur between the two.

The lower end of Deception Spur.

Deception Spur is actually really steep in places for the first 15 or 20 minutes, more-so than I remembered it from a couple of years before. There are several places where it’s necessary to clamber up walls several metres in height that at least feel near vertical, and which are steep enough to allow for quite a slide if you slipped. It still seems very safe, however, simply because there’s so much dense kruft growing on the spur that it’s difficult enough to move, let alone fall off. Although it can make things awkward to bash through, it also means there isn’t really a shortage of hand-holds and foot-holds. The biggest danger is probably getting a pack caught on something and having it spring you backwards with an unexpected great force, so there’s still some need for care in that respect.

A brief window through the trees.

Things thin out a little after about 20 minutes, and although there are patches of thick scrub to awkwardly push through, it’s easier, and becomes more typical for the 600 metre climb towards spot-height 865. There was a small window in the trees after a couple of hours, from which we could see some of the higher ridges towards the north. I took a photo for the record, but all of Deception Spur remains under the bush-line to the top, so this particular view is unusual. Perhaps half an hour after that, we reached the ridge-line at the top of the spur, and found a place just over the top, where warm sun was creeping through the tree branches to have some lunch. From here we’d be navigating down the far side on compass bearings, and when it became apparent that we used different methods for compass reading and therefore ended up with different bearings, we spent much of the time arguing about which is the more True North — grid north or magnetic north. I guess the irony is that neither of them is parallel with the Earth’s rotational axis.

Our plan, from spot-height 865, was to head south-south-west to the top of a slip (marked on LINZ’s topo map), then head roughly east down a vague spur to the Mangahao River, which we began at around 12pm. It appears very steep at first, but there’s not much alternative so it’s really just a matter of being cautious to hold onto things as appropriate and not to slide too far. The first thing to take note of when doing this is to avoid wandering west along another spur towards spot-height 660, and eventually down towards South Ohau Hut. That’s the wrong way (unless you’re trying to do it for some reason). The second thing to be cautious of is walking off the top of the slip. It’s a wide open view through a small gap in the trees above the slip. The ridge in that direction trends towards it, and it’s probably not a bad idea to stop before falling off. It was also the point at which we’d turn to the east. The route east from here wasn’t clearly marked with any obvious trail, but it wasn’t so thick and overgrown to make it difficult to push through the trees.

There was some debate about whether we should try to stay on the ridge, or sidle it in the gully to its north. Things became clearer when half way down, we started seeing blue triangle markers on the trees which were consistent with what Illona identified for us as stoat tunnels, which are used recurringly to monitor the densities of stoats that enjoy peanut butter so that DOC knows how much to budget for when it feeds them, or something like that. At regular intervals, someone will walk up the route and bait the tunnels, then come back the next evening to count the tracks of stoats left in the tunnels and get a better idea of how many there are. We followed the marker trail all the way to the Mangahao River, which ultimately took us down the small side creek to the north of the spur, and the numbering on the markers gave us a handy count-down to indicate our distance from the river at the bottom. We reached it at around 1.10pm, just over an hour after leaving point 865.

Duncan, Richard, Amanda, Dirk and Illona
on the edge of the Mangahao River.

With a hop through the river and after a short sit-down, we were now able to walk along 2 km of the track beside it towards Mangahao Hut, our destination for the evening. Although it’s generally quite a nice track as Tararua tramping tracks go, there are one or two places where the track alongside the Mangahao River gets a little hairy. Storm damage from a couple of years ago still hasn’t been completely worked around, and at least one of the side creeks had us placing rather a lot of trust in some loose-feeling branches in order to climb up to where the track continued. Overall this is just part of it, however, and we reached the sunny Mangahao Flats Hut at about 2.30pm. We expected to meet another group here this evening but they hadn’t arrived yet, so we stretched out, rinsed off, and went on a firewood collecting mission.

Mangahao Flats Hut.

Mangahao Flats Hut is a really nice hut. It’s a similar design as Waitewaewae, with 16 platform bunks and a heap of room on the floor or outside if it’s needed. When our other group showed up and we could exchange van keys, we still weren’t crowded. There’s a nice vista out over the river, which has wide banks, and it’s possible to go for a nice walk over the rocks. Still being near the end of winter months, the sun was setting by 6pm and with Dirk having built a fire, we settled into Amanda’s nicely organised dinner of smoked salmon pasta.

Mangahao River during early morning.

After 12 hours of sleep, people slowly began to rise in sequence some time before 7am, albeit with no major rush to leave. I wandered down towards the river as I muched my brekkie to take in some of the quiet morning atmosphere as the sun slowly emerged. The Mangahao River must be one of the nicest rivers in the Tararuas. It’s wide and scenic, and it’s also gorgey in places which must mean lots of good swimming holes. I’d like to walk along it in the future, keeping in mind that there would probably need to be at least some pack-floating to do it properly.

It was about 8am when we finally left, heading along the main track towards the Mangahao Dams, where our vehicle was parked. About the third major side-creek on the true right, about 25 minutes north-east of the hut, is probably the most awkward along the entire walk. Storm damage still remains from a couple of years before. To stay on the track it’s necessary to clamber up a rather steep wall, although we had an option of walking along the river if we’d wanted to.

The track sidles high above a slip from where there’s a scenic view of the Mangahao negotiating a hair-pin bend, before it descends back to the level of the river. At this point an informal sign nailed to a tree notifies those coming from the direction of the dams of the option between the wet feet and dry feet routes. The track itself continues along the river bank above some areas which appear quite gorgey, and we stopped quite often so Illona (the resident ecologist) could point out all the Bellbirds, Squeaky Tricycles (aka Tomtits) and Machine Guns (aka Whiteheads). An hour from the hut (our time), a bridge crosses Barra Stream. 30 minutes later, just before another bridge crosses Harris Creek, there’s a very nice camp-site at the flats on the river-side of the track. It comes complete with a picnic table, and we also noticed a couple of folded tarps pushed under nearby branches which probably means the site is well used.

The bridge over the
Mangahao River.

We ambled our way to the major bridge over the Mangahao River, reaching it at 11am. The bridge is currently one of the classic 40 year old swing bridge designs, but it appears DOC is gearing up to replace it with one of their more modern designs, given that both ends show preparations. 45 minutes from the bridge, we walked off the marked track and into the wide and mostly dry bed of the Mangahao River, just before it reaches the No 1 Reservoir behind the top dam. With the weather that we had, there was no need for the marked track any longer, and we left it inside the trees to follow the main route of the river out in the wide open.

The Mangahao tree cemetary.

Probably the reason the river bed is so wide is because it borders the reservoir, and at times this entire area would be artificially filled behind the dam. The region itself is a cemetary of dead trees, remnants before the time of building the dams in the 1920s, and drowned nearly a century ago during times when reservoir was filled to a higher level. Today they’re simply skeletons, surrounded by a sea of river rocks. It’s strange to think of the Tararuas as a place that would be dammed like this, yet in the middle of the 20th century there were plans for even more massive damming which would have changed the landscape of the range to an even more massive and noticeable extent. We stopped for lunch in this curious landscape, before resuming the 15 minute walk to the dam, to the parked van, and to an exit from the Tararuas early on Sunday afternoon.

I’ve already written about the Skyline Walkway at least a couple of times [1, 2], so I’ll focus more on the parts around Makara Peak.

Date: 15th August, 2009
Location: Makara Peak and Skyline Walkway, Wellington.
Route: Walk up to Makara Peak from South Karori Road, down via Zac’s Track, then along the Skyline Walkway to Mt Kaukau, and Johnsonville via Old Coach Road. (Also see the map at the end of this post.)
[Photos]
[Download GPX] [Show map] [Display in new window]

Makara Peak is a dedicated Mountain Bike park, choca-full of mountain bike tracks that are maintained by the community. This is the second time I’ve been there. The first time (before I was really writing things down), I wandered into a few areas that caused me to be really worried that a speedy bicycle pilot would come careening around a blind corner and run me over. It didn’t feel quite the same this time, though, possibly because I had a better idea of wanting to stay to the wider tracks, and perhaps because there seemed to be less people around.

I live in Northland (the Wellington suburb), and started late (about midday) by walking through the Karori Shops (collecting lunch along the way) to the end of the Karori Park bus route, then up South Karori Road to the main car-park area after about an hour or so. There’s an information board under a small shelter which I went up to take a look at, but it didn’t have much in the way of maps so I turned to leave, and promptly walked straight into a post holding up the shelter’s roof. Ouch. All good, though.

The number of cars had me concerned that there might be lots of people riding around on bikes, but it didn’t eventuate into a problem. I nearly always find people on bikes to be careful, cheerful and considerate in off-road areas both to other bikies and to poor impoverished pedestrians alike, even when they’re in their own playground. Sometimes accidents can still happen though, so the possibility of lots of bikes around had me concerned for a little while. I didn’t meet many people though. I followed my nose upwards until I reached Makara Peak, where a couple of guys with bikes were sitting down staring at the view.

Dormant turbines.

Once again the Makara Wind Farm (aka Project West Wind) dominates the skyline from the top of Makara Peak, which shouldn’t be surprising. The building of the wind farm should be nearly finished now, but what’s there is already operating. Even though it was overcast with some recurring very light rain, the air was still and most of the turbines were barely moving, if at all. Maybe this is why there weren’t as many people obviously riding around, or perhaps I’d only been frequenting the boring places since I’d made sure about half my route up was on the fairly wide servicing road to the top.

The transmitter at the
top of Makara Peak.

There’s another servicing road leading down to the Skyline Carpark, which is my made-up name for the carpark opposite the start of the Skyline Walkway on Makara Road, because I don’t know what bikies call it. As there as almost nobody at the top, though, I thought it would probably also be reasonably okay to walk along Zac’s Track, also noting a big sign that warned bikies that people might be walking on Zac’s Track. It goes to roughly the same place as the road, and the only two people I saw along here were a couple of guys with a bike, a dog, and a bucket of dirt, who were doing some track maintenance. That track ends half way down the road, at which point it’s possible to cross the road and head down another track (with lots of switches) called Varley’s Track… or alternatively down one called Vertigo, which had a big warning sign announcing it should only ever be attempted by expert bikies in good weather. Despite walking, I didn’t think I should check that one out just yet.

Cattle stops for walkers are everywhere.

Some time after 2pm, I was back down at Makara Road, and commenced walking the Skyline Walkway, which was noticeably vacant of the flocks of people who might often have been walking along it. Perhaps this was because the day wasn’t one of brilliant sunshine. The Skyline Walkway’s undergone some maintenance since I last walked it. Every farm-gate along the track has been improved to have pedestrian cattle stops alongside them. With so many people walking the route, the council probably got sick of people leaving gates open, or perhaps just having them wear out with so much opening and closing, and the consequence is a much smoother walk around all the gates without having to walk through them.

I went on a detour up Johnston Hill, which I usually do when walking the Skyline Walkway, and for some reason I became very confused. I’m unsure if the ongoing maintenance has caused the routes up Johnston Hill to be altered, but I was just walking up happily when I suddenly noticed all of Wellington City was on the opposite side from what I expected, and I was walking the wrong way. It was really weird to have an orientation flip like that, and despite completely recognising the top, being able to see Mt Kaukau in the distance, it took some careful thinking to convince myself to walk towards it because my brain really wanted to do something different.

It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago (Inner Navigation by Erik Jonsson), which is full of anecdotes about this kind of thing. Eventually I had to back-track the way I’d come to a point I properly recognised as being the right way around. That probably added about 500 metres to my route, but it was all in good fun. Weird.

It took about 2 hours to reach Mt Kaukau this time. Having left the Skyline Walkway Carpark at Makara Road at around 2.15pm or so, I walked up to the giant television transmitter, without which Wellingtonians wouldn’t be able to enjoy quality free-to-air television like Survivor and the “We’re not going to tell you what shocking thing happened until you watch our commercials” prime time television news. On arriving at this point, which is where all the dog-walking tracks converge and where the lookout platform is, I did something I believe I’ve never done before. I walked to the actual peak of Mt Kaukau.

Mt Kaukau Trig.

The actual peak is about 300 metres to the north of the television transmitter. There’s even a giant trig sitting on it which is visible from many places, but it’s not easily visible from the lookout platform area since it’s behind a big clump of trees. There’s a servicing road up to the transmitter from this side that passes to one side of the trees I mentioned earlier. I can only presume there’s not been much problem with people walking the final 300 metres to the actual top of Kaukau. The most obvious visible way back is to first go down to this road, and it seemed a little strange when I found myself separated by a barbed wire fence from the trees I’d recently freely walked through. Why have a barbed wire fence when anyone can just walk around the end? The road led into a maintenance parking area around the transmitter which felt more and more as if I wasn’t supposed to be there, and in the end (because I couldn’t bothered back-tracking), I had to climb a small fence to get to where I wanted to be.

Looking west at sunset.

By now it was around 4.40pm, and the sun would be setting in less than an hour. From here, as I was still going in quite good time, I thought I might walk around the Old Coach Road way to get to Johnsonville before hopping onto a train to get home. The track down this way is well signposted, but it splits off to several other streets that have entrances to Mt Kaukau, and I did the same thing that I’ve done three times now, which was to walk straight past a major track junction and find myself approaching a street called Woodmancote Road. Of course, by the time this becomes obvious I’ve walked into a deep hole, and so have to turn around and walk all the way up again, around 600 metres back to the junction which is well sign-posted and very obvious for people coming from this direction. The good news is that this time I was tracking my entire day’s walk with a GPS receiver, and I’ll keep the GPX file so that I’ll be able to follow the same track and make the same mistake every single time I do this from now on.

The Old Coach Road route is a nice way to finish this walk. It’s over farmland, and despite being very accessible, it sidles along hills on the inside of the valleys, which gives the impression that the track is more isolated than it really is. I finally exited at McLintock Street, and from here it’s very easy to simply follow the down-hill roads which lead back to Johnsonville, almost straight to the railway station. All good.

From Cannons’ Head down to Stratton Street.

I had some free time during rather nice weather on Sunday, and decided to drive out to Petone and spend it doing exactly this. With the opportunity, I also decided to do some red lining and take a look around a few areas of Belmont Regional Park where I haven’t yet been.

Date: 19th July, 2009
Location: Belmont Regional Park, from Cornish Street.
Route: A clockwise loop up to Belmont Trig via Bridleway, over to Cannons’ Head, down to Stratton Street and back to Cornish Street via Korokoro Dam.
[Photos]

I began in a place where I’ve entered the park many times before, at the end of Cornish Street in Petone. Cornish Street is an industrial street and although there’s a modest amount of public parking at the end, near the entrance to the park, it doesn’t have much other space where public parking is legal. This is, at least, what I discovered for the first time yesterday having turned up shortly after what I think were people from a tramping club milling around their cars, though I didn’t ask which one. The street is incredibly wide and quiet, but it wasn’t until I had to find somewhere else to park that I discovered virtually the entire length of the street is made up of industrial driveways and access points to private parking spaces. I did manage to find a legal area about 100 metres away, though, and left at about 9.30am or thereabouts.

My usual way in from here is to walk up to Belmont Trig via the main ridge track up from Baked Beans Bend, but this time I thought I might try to red line some of the parts I hadn’t been to before. For this reason, I decided to head up to Belmont Trig via the Bridleway track, which (from the Korokoro side) coasts around the back of Belmont Peak before climbing up the far side.

The main track from Korokoro continues along under the trees past the Korokoro Dam and it’s a really good track shared with runners and mountain bikers. Before that point though, about half an hour after leaving, a major track junction leads off to the left and up towards Belmont Trig. Only a short distance towards the trig, the track begins to criss-cross a stream which, especially if it’s raining, would make it difficult to get through without getting wet feet. (Anyone really determined might find rocks to hop over if they look hard enough, though.)

Where the track first splits up
towards the Bridleway spur.

Baked Beans Bend is about 15 minutes further up the track. There’s an ad-hoc camp-site here (though I’m not sure the regional council would appreciate someone having a campfire as has obviously happened), and it’s here where the route begins to climb. It’s also very soon after this bend that the main Belmont Trig track splits from the Bridleway Track. The Trig track climbs more or less evenly up its spur, but the Bridleway track hovers in the depths of the valley for a while, undulating up and down a few times. The R27 Wellington LINZ map from the 260 Map Series (published 2006) then indicates that the Bridleway track climbs sharply up a spur further further around, shortly after it splits again with the other option heading out to Horokiwi. This is what I initially thought I was going up when the track very obviously split, and it definitely climbs steeply. It turns out there’s another spur between the Trig Track spur and the Bridleway Spur, though. Half way up, I saw a pole further around to the hill-side, and after some checking of my map I figured out I was on a track the map hadn’t marked. The two spurs joined each other, though, so I ended up in the same place where the Bridleway Track emerges not far below Belmont Trig.

The main ridge leading up to Belmont
Trig from Baked Beans Bend.

On a nice day in Belmont, it’s unusual to go without seeing many people, and I expected to encounter others by the time I reached the trig. There was nobody. The morning was sunny, virtually no wind, and there was nobody.

At 457 metres above sea-level, Belmont Trig is the highest point in the centre of the Wellington Region. It’s not above any natural bush-line, but the park is a farm park and there comes a point where one emerges from the native bush into council-operated publicly accessible farm-land, and there’s a similar sentiment to reaching the tops in New Zealand’s more mountainous back-country.

Looking towards Porirua Harbour.

I sat under the trig, spent a couple of minutes strapping my feet, hoping to ward off blisters from only the second outing of my new Scarpas, then I found a grassy patch slightly down the side of the hill and stared towards the Tararuas which were basking inside some grey cloud. Colonial Knob behind Porirua, and on the edge, is slightly higher than this, but to be well above Belmont Trig without flying, it’d be necessary to be in the Rimutaka Range to the east on the far side of the harbour (the Mt Matthews high point in the distance is a little over twice the height), or in the Tararua Range to the north where Mitre Peak is more than three times the height of Belmont Trig. From here, though, the Tararuas were still a cloud-covered smudge in the far distance.

Say what you might about high tension power cables being strung over regional parks, they make it much easier to identify locations on topo maps. As I sat on the northern slope of Belmont Peak with the map unfolded in front of me, it was easy to pick out the upcoming route around Cannons’ Head, down a spur to the Stratton Street park entrance that I’d visit before continuing back to the Korokoro Dam.

After 15 minutes of sitting on the grass-covered slope, I eventually heard the chatter of a group of people approaching up the main ridge from Baked Beans Bend, and with the peak about to be overrun by the next group of day-walkers it was time to carry on.

The Tararuas from Cannons’ Head.

It took about 40 minutes to reach Cannons’ Head, during which time I passed one enthusiastic mountain runner and nobody else — surprising given the weather so far. Cannons’ Head shares a name with Cannons’ Creek, visible below, which is one of the fore-mentioned locations in which lots of state housing was built during the mid-20th century. In the past the area has had a reputation of one of the highest crime rates in the country and admittedly it was an area I tended to avoid when I was growing up nearby, but I’ve walked through it several times in the last few years when approaching Belmont Regional Park from the other side, and I’m actually really impressed with how it doesn’t feel anything like as run-down as it used to. It’s possible to walk down the street as a stranger and smile at someone, and get a smile back. Perhaps there’s more pride in living there than there used to be, or maybe I’m just imagining a difference where the only difference has been inside my head. Either way it’s really neat.

Not being in any kind of rush, I once again managed to find a nice place in the grass near Cannons’ Head where I could sit for another 10 minutes and gaze towards the Tararuas. By now they had emerged from the grey clouds and were showing some snow-covered peaks. Perhaps another day.

Leaving Stratton Street towards Belmont Trig.

The walk from Cannons’ Head down to the Stratton Street entrance took about 25 minutes down a spur, and there’s a picnic area that seems quite nice in the sunshine. Not having left a vehicle here, though, I followed the signposted track back up towards Belmont Peak. After only 10 minutes, the track splits off with one branch heading further up open farmland towards Belmont Trig, and the other directed into the bush in the direction of the Korokoro Dam.

Even though it’s a direct route between nearby entrances, this track is actually really steep by regional park recreational walking standards, and I expect it could be quite slippery when wet. Before reaching the Oakleigh Street entrance, the track around here also criss-crosses a stream in a way that was fine with tramping boots, but it’d be a challenge to keep dry feet if attempting to walk the track with regular shoes (and a dry-feet attitude). This section of track along here is very accessible, and from this point on there were many more people out for casual walks in t-shirts and with handbags and such.

Korokoro Dam.

Nobody was at the Korokoro Dam when I reached it 40 minutes after leaving Stratton Street, and I sat for five minutes to study a couple of ducks that very slowly made their way over the artificial lake behind the dam. From the dam, it was a 45 minute casual walk back to Cornish Street. All good.

The Makara turbines of Project West Wind.

It’s hard to talk about the Makara Beach Loop these days without talking about Project West Wind — the initiative of Meridian Energy to build a giant wind farm on Wellington’s south coast. It took years to get through the consent process, and my most vivid memory of this was one of the few meetings I attended of the Tararua Tramping Club back in 2007. The meeting involved a representative of Meridian who described the wind farm proposal with a slide-show decorated by a large photo of a cute and happy dog basking in the wind, many noisy people whom I was later informed were not regular attendees of TTC meetings, and a lot of angry heckling.

Date: 14th June, 2009
Location: Makara Loop Walk, from Makara Beach.
Route: Just doing the loop clockwise starting from the beach.
[Photos and Videos]

The wind farm has been controversial to say the least, especially for some residents of the small settlement of Makara separated from Wellington by the hills, who have been very concerned about the visual and audial impact the wind turbines would have on their community. When the Environment Court approved the project in 2007, Meridian wasted no time in starting construction, and the hills in that area are now dotted with turbines. I hadn’t thought they’d be quite so obvious so close to Wellington, and so I was surprised just how obvious it was even a few minutes drive up the hill from Karori. The things are huge. The wind farm isn’t fully completed until the end of 2009, but it’s been operating in part since April.

Makara Beach.

I started at Makara Beach at about 11.20, walked the loop in a clock-wise direction (over the hill to Opau Bay, then back along the beach), took lots of photos, stopped to look at lots of views, and arrived back at the car at around 1.30pm.

Hovering all on its own.

The loop doesn’t split until after a few minutes of walking, at which point the track leads straight up over farmland, and up and up. It’s not long before there’s some nice scenery out to sea. The South Island was only murkily visible today, but both Mana Island and Kapiti Island behind it stood out very impressively. From the beginning of the track, the only clear evidence that there’s a wind farm nearby is the single closest turbine, which the route spends much of its time weaving around. At the point that the higher track diverts up the hill, the full blades of this shiny white turbine are visible between the shoulders of the hills on either side. The walkway climbs up to the height of the base of this turbine, but for now it’s just a giant in the distance and with the perspective it’s difficult to gauge the height. I’d be very interested to see this massive thing operating simply to see how noisy it is, as noise has been one of the posted concerns of the lobby groups.

Mana Island (closer) and Kapiti Island (behind).

It’s a nice coastal hill to walk along and with the direct exposure to the north, south and the west along the top, I bet it’s devastatingly impressive to wander around when it’s windy, but the air today was calm and still. The track goes up and up as it hugs the top of the shallow cliff-face above the sea, more or less until it starts going down. I already had blisters in my new boots by now, but that was okay because I wasn’t really in any rush.

At about midday I reached the two WW2 gun emplacements. It’s about this time, walking around to the far side of the bunkers, that the scale of Project West Wind becomes clear. Suddenly the farm-land over the hills is covered in turbines. With my imperfect eyesight I counted at least 39 although they continue back into the distance towards the south coast and the total size of the farm is slated to be 62, which is a compromised down-scaling from the original plan before the lobby groups expressed their concerns. They’re all massive, each with a total 82 metre blade radius sidding on top of 67 metre towers!

A very populated skyline.

It’s a novelty for me to walk around near a wind farm, and I stood for a while just gaping at the scale of it, waiting for a couple of noisy people whose voices were carrying to approach and overtake me. Then in the relative silence with the noises of birds and the coastal sounds of the sea below, I watched several turbines in the distance as they lazily expressed their angular momentum obtained from what must have been a barely detectable breeze in terms of what would be the norm.

Even at this lack-luster pace as one of those blades took 12 seconds for a full revolution of 258 metres (see the short movie), the tip was by my calculations moving at roughly 21 metres per second. That’s around twice the average speed of 10.36 metres per second of Usain Bolt, the current world record holder in the 200 metre dash (averaged faster than the 100m dash). There’s a lot of force in those blades, even when they appear to be drifting slowly.

Despite concerns I have about the environmental effects that such wind farms can have in some places, my current personal opinion is that in the big scheme of things the Makara farm is a good design if wind turbines have to go somewhere. I guess putting them here in an area that’s already being used for farming and industry, high tension power lines and productivity certainly beats the prospect of changing the character of wilderness areas, forest parks and national parks.

It’s shortly after the WW2 bunkers that the track curves around to the base of one of the nearest turbines. The road is gated off preventing access, but I snuck off the track by about 100 metres to a small point higher up where it looked as if many people had already been, and took a few photos of the turbine with Mana and Kapiti Islands in the background. It’s a nice spot, and soon after the track becomes a deteriorating asphalt road that leads down to Opau Bay on the coast. I reached the coast at about 12.30pm, and from here it’s a nice coastal walk back to Makara Beach.

Arriving at Opua Bay.

Looking back towards Opua Bay.

And yeah, my boots went okay but I definitely have a couple of blisters on the back of my heels that I’ll need to deal with now. I probably should have taken some band-aids with me, but I wasn’t thinking so intelligently when I left home this morning. Hopefully with two or three more short walks like this, my new boots will be good for something more demanding.

Dave getting snowed on.

Dates: 29th – 31st May, 2009
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Holdsworth Road-end.
People: Dave, Marie S, Marie H and me.
Huts visited: Holdsworth Lodge (0 nights), Atiwhakatu Hut (0 nights), Mitre Flats Hut (1 night).
Route: From Holdsworth road-end to somewhere past Atiwhakatu to camp on Friday night, Mitre Flats and up then down Mitre on Saturday, back to Holdsworth road-end on Sunday.
[Photos and movies]

After starting out at Holdsworth Lodge, plan A would be to climb up Baldy, then get over Three Kings and Girdlestone to spend a night at Tarn Ridge Hut, drop down over Mitre to Mitre Flats on the following day (possibly with a very early start if we had to fit into a weather window), and walk back to Holdsworth on the Monday.

All four of us began walking at about 7pm. Some time around 8.30pm, we reached the site of Atiwhakatu Hut, now appearing nearly complete from the outside but still with lots going. A guitar from inside the old hut strummed something from Metallica as we approached, quickly identified by Marie S, and one of the builders came to the door to greet us and chat for a bit. He suggested we could camp on the helipad area next to the river not far away, but at the time we were set on carrying on to a river-side campsite below the second track up to Jumbo so we’d have less to walk before a potentially long day tomorrow. We never reached it that night, because sleepiness and undulating awkward tracks won out. About 15 minutes after Atiwhakatu, we set up tents on the track.

Despite having been walking with torches in the early winter darkness since we began, it still wasn’t terribly late. We sat in Dave’s tent for a while considering maps and likely scenarios. Recent weather had left snow on the tops, and although Dave had brought in an ice axe, we weren’t well equipped if the snow proved to be too much. Furthermore, a cold snap and heavy snow warning for Sunday morning meant we might potentially get to Tarn Ridge for Saturday night, and not be able to get out. Without knowing what it was like in advance, and after some lengthy consideration, we decided our best option was probably to avoid committing ourselves to the tops. Plan B was to aim straight for Mitre Flats, walk up Mitre from there, and find something else to do on Sunday, possibly head up to Jumbo and walk over the tops to East Holdsworth to get out on Monday.

Dave crossing the Atiwhakatu River.

Nearly ready to leave at 7am, I pulled on my right boot and was dismayed to see my boot-lace fray into some kind of thin elastic as I pulled it tightly. I was even more dismayed as I pulled on my left boot, only to have on of the lace eye-lets pop off and hit me in the face before burying itself somewhere in the nearby track. Fortunately my boots were still usable and my gaiters to a lot to help them remain tied up, but I think these boots might be on their last legs.

Marie H and Dave climbing up to Mitre.

We reached Mitre Flats at 10.45, dropped lots of gear at the hut, had a quick lunch, and within an hour we were on our way up Mitre. The track up Mitre starts with a small amount of clambering followed by a few short and sudden switches, but quickly morphs into a reasonably consistent and fairly direct track upwards through the trees, varying in gradient every so often. It’s not the most interesting track and the truth is that it is consistently up. With the weather not being too fantastic anyway, Marie S decided to head back to the hut while Dave, Marie H and I kept pressing up to the bush line where we promptly decided that Marie S’s idea wasn’t so bad after all. There wasn’t a lot to look at. Any possible visions of wondrous flats of the Wairarapa were being covered by thick cloud, and we decided at that point to turn around and return to the hut rather than press on up to the fog-smothered Mitre.

Dave highlights a rare view from
the bush-line below Mitre.

Marie H returns from an excursion.

Three of us arrived back at Mitre Flats at about 3.15 to find Marie S happily settled in. With evening approaching, we spent an hour finding and chopping firewood, and Marie H went off for an excursion with her pack. Sadly it was all too damp, and we never managed to get a proper fire going despite the helpful firelighters that’d been left behind.

As evening approached another 7 people showed up in a couple of groups, all having walked in from The Pines with the alleged intent of walking up Mitre on Sunday. Somehow this seemed unlikely, though, because the forecast from Sunday included a severe snow warning as part of one of the more extreme weather events seen by the region in recent times.

We were all on de-hy BackCountry meals that night, partly as a consequence of late organisation, but also because we’d expected the trip to be somewhat more exerting than it turned out to be with the change of plans. This was the first time I’d tried one, and I have to say I was impressed with my Classic Beef Curry meal, which was quick and easy to prepare (add boiling water and wait), and tasted good enough. Then we just trimmed the top off the bags, ate out of the bag, and so had minimal dish-washing afterwards. The only note was that a 2 person Backcountry Cuisine meal couldn’t possibly feed more than 1 person with the amount of food you get, certainly not in a tramping context when you tend to spend the day burning energy. All four of us had bought a 2-person meal for each night.

Dave, Marie S and I found bunks, Marie H set up a tent outside, and we went asleep with the noble intent of rising at 7pm to be away and off to Jumbo at 8. And thus I woke at 7.20 when Marie S poked up her head and asked if we were supposed to be awake by now. The only answer I had for this was “probably”, but it was easier to ignore any motivation for effort and wait for someone else to do something first. With Dave on the far end also unwilling to be the first to get up, it wasn’t until Marie H came in from outside that anyone really bothered to do anything.

Marie S, just after a washed out side-creek
crossing north of the Baldy saddle.

We left over a staggered time between about 8.40 and 9am on Sunday morning. The weather decayed, but it was cold enough to never actually rain, and the forecasts of snow down to 200 metres were happily accurate. Instead of rain we had a combination of snow and hail, but the shelter alongside the ridge there was very little wind, snow and hail both tended to bounce off raincoats (as it does), and this made it a rather pleasant walk if cold at times.

At about 11.15am we crossed the saddle below Baldy, covered in frost, and by now the snow was coming down very persistently, especially in the areas without much tree shelter. There was about a 20 minute slip-slide down the Atiwhakatu side of the saddle, and not long after we met another party of 6 or 7 people who’d come down from Jumbo and were heading for Mitre Flats. We exchanged information, and they told us there was a lot of snow up there. It was an enticing idea, but after a short conference at the track junction a few minutes afterwards, we decided we might just go straight out and find a cafe rather than walk up to Jumbo and spend an extra night in the range when it was seeming increasingly likely that we’d simply need to come straight back down again the next morning due to the conditions.

Balefire of the old Atiwhakatu Hut.

Now with a cafe in mind, all four of us duly abandoned the idea of lunch. Before 1pm we reached Atiwhakatu Hut during a land-mark moment. The new hut was still getting some final touches, but the builders had nearly finished dismantling the old hut which they’d been living in for several weeks, and happened to have a large bonfire going. It was hot, too. I suppose if we’d been able to burn the hut at Mitre Flats last night, we may have stood a better chance of getting a fire going, too. Oh well.

The final section of this route, between Atiwhakatu Hut and the Holdsworth road-end, is a very well-maintained track, being part of the Holdsworth/Jumbo circuit which is by far one of the most walked tracks in the Tararuas. If there’s something noteworthy about it, which both Dave and I found amusing, it’s the great range of types of bridges that have been used to make up this section. There’s nothing difficult (like 3 wire or 2 wire), but there’s a combination of 1970s swing bridges, more recent suspended plank bridges boardwalks with handrails (and typical 1 Person Maximum signs), strange metallic arch bridges that look as if they’re being re-cycled from some other location, and the list goes on. You can be reasonably sure that if there’s a muddy patch along here, DOC has built a bridge over it. The fun comes in guessing what kind of bridge it’ll be.

This more or less concludes the trip, because we walked out past Holdsworth Lodge at 2.45pm, around 6 hours after we left Mitre Flats. This is the first time I’ve really walked through New Zealand forest during snow, and it was wonderful. I hope I have more opportunities in the future.

Crossing the Waingawa under Cow Creek.

It seems weird going back to somewhere where I’ve been as recently as a week earlier, but that’s what I did last weekend. This time it was with the trampey club, and it wasn’t quite the same place. Instead of just walking from Holdsworth to Mitre Flats and back, we began further north at Kiriwhakapapa, then walked back to Mitre Flats before coming out at Holdsworth.

Dates: 8th – 10th May, 2009
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Kiriwhakapapa to Holdsworth Road-ends.
People: Steve, Daniel, Andrew, Justin and me.
Huts visited: Blue Range Hut (1 night), Cow Creek Hut (0 nights), Mitre Flats Hut (1 night), Atiwhakatu Hut (0 nights), Holdsworth Lodge (0 nights).
Route: Kiriwhakapapa to Blue Range Hut (Friday night), down to Cow Creek Hut via an old track to Cow Saddle, then to Mitre Flats Hut for Saturday night. Out to Holdsworth road-end on Sunday.
[Photos]

We’d planned to camp at Kiriwhakapapa on Friday night (though it turns out there’s a shelter), but with the rain we decided instead to walk straight up to Blue Range Hut, which took between about 90 and 120 minutes (I forget), and being under trees meant the rain wasn’t too much of a problem. Usefully enough, that Friday night walk got most of what would have been Saturday’s climbing out of the way. Blue Range Hut is one of those fun huts with interesting signs and lots of character, thanks to the humour of people in the Masterton Tramping Club, but you really have to be there to appreciate it.

Cattle Ridge in the morning,
from Blue Range Hut.

Steve crawled out of his sleeping bag at 7.30am on the dot, and as I stared at the multitude of maps on the ceiling I could hear him stuffing things into stuff-sacks and assembling his cooker. He had a billy boiling before long, and it was time for brekkie. It took me about 20 minutes to finally roll off the top bunk, stepping outside to a chilly and crisp morning. The trees part next to the clearing outside Blue Range Hut behind a picnic table which seems to have been placed there since I last visited, offering a direct view to snow on the nearby range. It would have been cold up there overnight!

Blue Range to Cow Creek.

We were packed and leaving between about 8.20 and 8.30am, set to meet back at the track junction 10 metres above the hut. A brief gap in the trees allowed a glance towards Mitre Peak, hiding behind a clump of light gray clouds. Then we were under trees again, heading towards Cow Creek Hut. A friend (Craig) had told me earlier that there’s a very nice route directly from Mitre Flats, down from Te Mara (1104) leading west, then south-west above Donald Stream. I kept an eye out for this but I started looking too late, and missed it, but next time I’m in the area it could be an interesting route to find. Rather than walk directly to Cow Creek Hut on the marked track, we thought we might follow an old track which leads down to Cow Saddle, and then turn back towards the hut from there. This old track is shown on some older maps, and begins behind the sign at grid reference S25 213437. It then follows the ridge over spot heights 970, 890 and 810 before dropping down a spur to Cow Saddle.

The on Cow Saddle that marks
one end of the old track.

We thought we may potentially need to do some navigation along this route. It’s actually a very clear track, though, and according to a couple of people I spoke to, in better condition than the official track to Cow Creek Hut. We didn’t actually walk along the official track, however, so I can’t say so from experience. There are no official markers along the old track (DOC, Forestry Service or otherwise), but a helpful person has marked it occasionally with fluorescent pink ribbons. Even so, they weren’t necessary at the time we visited because the track itself was so obvious. At 10.50am we emerged from behind a tree on Cow Saddle with a sign nailed to the trunk that incorporated a symbol of a cow. I’ve arrived at Cow Saddle previously having come down from Cattle Ridge on the opposite side, but on that occasion I think we must have entered it slightly further along, because at our current location there was no sign-post pointing to Cow Creek Hut. We turned left to follow the track down Cow Creek, however, and within 20 minutes and one Bus Stop Sign (nailed to another tree) later, we were on the shores of the Waingawa River — not at all flooded, which was consistent with the complete lack of rain and increasing amount of sunshine so far.

There used to be a cable-way with a winch next to Cow Creek Hut until very recently, so I hear. This is now gone, and replaced by one of those mammoth new suspension bridges with wooden planks that the Department of Conservation now seems to favour. There’s a sidling track from Cow Creek around to the end of the bridge, which we duly ignored, and instead we walked around the edge of the Waingawa River and ultimately waded through the river almost directly underneath the bridge. And thus we arrived at Cow Creek Hut, too early for lunch at 11.30am.

Cow Creek Hut.

Cow Creek Hut is an old Forestry Service 6-bunker, and looks well placed in the trees. I’d like to visit it overnight some time in the future, but its location in the shade meant it wasn’t an optimal place for lunch on a day such as this. Steve wrote something in the book, which to this day I don’t know what it was, I bounded over the bridge and back — just so I could say I’d done it — we all messed around and did nothing in particular for about 20 or 30 minutes, and then we wandered south along the bank of the Waingawa River in the direction of Mitre Flats, looking for a sunny patch.

The exit pool.

We found it at about 12.30pm, a nice peninsula of rocks on the edge of the river. If we’d had wet tent flies from the previous night, this would have been a wonderful place to dry them out. For half an hour we sat around and ate lunch in the sunshine, and with a weekend forecast of continuous heavy rain, the five of us elected for a time to wade down the Waingawa River. We left our lunch spot at about 12.30pm, and potentially could have followed the river for the rest of the day, all the way to Mitre Flats. Due to some cold feet it was not to be, and 30 minutes later we decided to exit the river and instead follow the track which runs alongside. The first exit point was on the far side of a small pool in which Steve quickly found himself up to his waist before being able to climb out, and then spent a minute or two figuring out how to lever his pack and himself above an over-hanging tree root. The sight of it encouraged Andrew, Daniel and Justin to find an alternative route to the track through the trees, but it looked quite fun and I felt left out seeing Steve do something like that. As soon as it was clear there was a way up the other side, I jumped in. It was fun.

Walking alongside the Waingawa.

It’s quite a good track between Cow Creek and Mitre Flats, which sidles along the true right of the Waingawa River for the entire distance, albeit climbing up the hillside from time to time. For a couple of stretches we ventured back into the river, and at one point a deer and (apparently earlier than I arrived) a stag came down to the river’s edge on the far side.

A couple of side-creeks could flood for a while in heavy rain. One is North Mitre Stream where we arrived at about 2pm, and the other is Peggy Stream, about 15 to 20 metres south of it. After this we continued along the track which sidles up and down and through old board-walks buried 30 cm under mud, until we reached Mitre Flats at about 3.30pm.

Nearly at Mitre Flats.

Mitre Flats was similar to how I’d left it a week before, which wasn’t too surprising. We arrived shortly after a couple of other chaps who’d walked in from The Pines, one of whom was a volunteer DOC warden, also from the Tararua Tramping Club and a great source of information about nearby routes. I asked him about the second track up to Jumbo that I’d had trouble finding a week before, and he confirmed that it certainly did still exist. I’d probably missed it because it’s easy to coast along next to the river (where there’s a nice campsite) and completely miss the main track’s excursion slightly uphill. I guess I did this in both directions, and it’s something to keep in mind for the future.

He also confirmed that the morning’s forecast for the weekend had involved the words “rain”, “hail” and “severe”, each several times and in a variety of orders. What wasn’t completely clear was exactly how the rain, hail and impending severity would manifest itself on the south-eastern end of the Tararuas, given that it was coming from the other side. Hopefully it’d be clearer by tomorrow morning, when he was scheduled to make a 7am radio call for rugby results and an updated forecast. We manufactured our Moroccan Couscous and had a nice dinner. A fly wouldn’t stop buzzing near the window, even after the candles were out, but I eventually got to sleep on the top bunk at the late hour of about 8pm. It didn’t rain much overnight.

We woke to the overnight rugby results booming through Mitre Flats Hut at 7am on the dot thanks to the radio call that the helpful warden guy was making for a forecast, followed by further repetition of the words “rain”, “hail” and “severe”. The weather was quite unusual. Looking outside there was actually some blue sky, although I somehow managed to get hailed on under the blue sky. The rain and occasional hail was coming in waves, every so often being blown horizontally over the range from the west and ceremoniously landing on us. In time it began to rain more properly, and by 8am we’d all left Mitre Flats on our way out to Holdsworth Lodge. Just chugging along.

For me at least, I now walked along this section exactly a week after I’d walked along it previously. This time, however, I was trying to keep an eye out for more of the side routes. The first couple were in the vicinity of the Barton Track, which leads up an east-west spur in the direction of Baldy. My LINZ map shows a loopy bit here where one option heads about half way up the spur before going down and sidling around, and this is where the marked track leads. The second option (also shown as a track on the map) simply sidles around the lower section. A week before I’d never actually seen the division, but the warden guy had told me that the lower track split off in an obvious place. Sure enough, we did sp