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One of at least four Kereru that were
very noisily flapping around near the
road at the Kelson entrance.

I thought I might catch a train out to the Dry Creek entrance to Belmont Regional Park (most easily accessible from Manor Park Railway Station), and see where I ended up. It wasn’t until after I’d bought my day-rover ticket that I remembered many commuter trains in Wellington are being replaced by buses right now, at least on weekends, while they’re continuing various line upgrades. So I hopped on the Rail Replacement bus to find that due to various road layout issues, it wasn’t going to stop at Manor Park railway station. Instead it’d drop me at Silverstream (the next station along) and I’d then have to look for a “dinky little purple bus” to get back to Manor Park. It turns out the dinky little purple bus wasn’t very well synchronised with the other buses, and the person driving it had never been to Manor Park Railway Station before. Myself and the other poor guy on that bus eventually ended up in the right place, well over an hour after the train-bus had left Wellington.

Looking up towards Boulder Hill.

By now I was thinking there was no way I wanted to get back home the same way, so and made plans to get over to Paremata, on the far side of the park. This would mean walking up to Boulder Hill. Boulder Hill is a local high point from the Dry Creek entrance of Belmont Regional Park, and quite a nice walk. Having left the entrance some time after 12 (I’d had a late start even before the late train-bus), getting up at a reasonable pace, necessary if I was going to get all the way over the park before dark, took about an hour. Near the top I ran into some people coming the other way, who told me they couldn’t go any further because the park had been closed off. Sure enough, a couple of hundred metres further on and just below the top, there was a big sign on the fence saying the area was closed for lambing between 20th August and 22nd October. So I’d missed out on getting past that fence by a couple of days.

Closed for lambing.

Maybe I should have phoned the Wellington Regional Council before I left to check on track status, but I still felt a bit let down that there was no indication at the entrance (full of signposts and descriptions about the Boulder Hill walk) that it was not actually legally possible to get to Boulder Hill, and consequently not possible to get past it. I turns out, as I eventually figured out discovered, that when Boulder Hill is cut off for lambing season, that entire corner of Belmont Regional Park is cut off. The only ways down are either back to Dry Creek and that horribly inconvenient railway station, or down a side track to Kelson. That’s where I went since I didn’t want to go back to where I came, and I’d not been that way before. I made a point to tell everyone I met on the way down that they weren’t going to be able to get the whole way up, so more or less became a spreader of disappointment.

The “Kelson” entrance to Belmont Regional Park is near the end of a very long road which is full of the kinds of properties people have when land is more available. The main feature from a walking perspective is that it takes a long time to walk anywhere, but the road eventually dropped me on the busy State Highway 2. Fortuitously there was an okay footpath that let’s one skim the edge of the steep hillside without getting too close to the traffic, and I was eventually able to cross the main road at some traffic lights, finally making it to the Hutt River.

Much of the Hutt River Trail looks similar
to this. The entire area is inside the
flood-banks, just waiting for another
severe rain event.

Every so often, a gap in the trees
provides brief access to the actual river.

I don’t really enjoy walking around the Hutt Valley so much. It tends to be made up of very long north-south roads (just full of house after house if you’re walking along a road like that), and there are features such as the river that runs the length of the valley, and the railway line, that make it difficult to criss-cross between these long north-south roads. The Hutt River’s nice in places. A walk called the Hutt River Trail follows both sides of it. A year or so ago, Stacey and I walked part of this trail, mostly on the true left (eastern) side of the river. It was a bit of a let down, I think because we went in with expectations that a river trail might actually spend a lot of time following alongside a river. The trail on both sides tends to either be up near the roads, or down in the wide grassy flood-regions inside the stop-banks. In both cases, any views over the actual river are nearly always blocked by the bank of trees grown alongside.

This is by design, because every few years the Hutt River tends to flood with a massive rain event. The entire Hutt Valley has been carved out by this river that has its most significant origins out of the Tararua Range, but more widely out of the Akatarawas and the Rimutaka Range. Flooding is a natural event given enough time. As with any river, flooding is a standard way in which the water changes course and keeps chiselling into the valley floor, which over time has resulted in the wide valley we see today. The Hutt River hasn’t been a wild river since the area was settled, however. Now that so much infrastructure has been built and now that the valley’s floor has been carefully subdivided into people’s private property, the Hutt River will never be allowed to be a wild river again. For the foreseeable future, the riverhas to keep flowing in the same line as at that geologically instantaneous moment when people settled the area, most definitively in the 1930s when the government decided to build lots of state housing. The river’s most significant recent movement was during Wellington’s major earthquake in 1855.

There’s an ongoing programme with the Hutt City Council to manage the flow of the river. Aside from regular removal of old refrigerators, shopping trolleys and who-knows what else that people dump from time to time, the council ensures that any discretions the river might have from its acceptable course are quickly shut down, and it’s put back in its place. There’s really very little choice now, given how things have developed. Its course has to be controlled. Every so often these kinds of rivers still burst their banks, however, and everyone wonders whose fault it is that properties that were subdivided just a few metres above its regular high points are suddenly flooded, and who’s going to pay for it. Recently we went and looked through an open home whose back door looks straight through to the river just 200 metres away, and it’s a flat and unobscured line. It shouldn’t be surprising that such kinds of problems occur.

The river level becomes
more tidal near Petone,
as it flows into
Wellington Harbour.

I followed the Hutt River trail for a while, which is a nice walk albeit long and parallel, eventually bailing out at Ava Railway Station. It was some time before 4pm by now, and soon after I walked under a railway bridge, a train clattered past behind me towards Upper Hutt — a sign that the day’s maintenance was finished and the trains were finally running again. This prompted me to run back to Ava, at which point the Rail Replacement bus pulled into the parking area, saw me standing on the platform, and promptly drove away. No matter. There was still a little time before I needed to head home, and I really wanted to get a train and make some decent use of my Day Rover ticket. I hopped on the first train that came along, which turned out to be heading the opposite direction towards Upper Hutt, and sat on it all the way to Taita before jumping off and switching to the other side of the platform, finally finding a train home. Fun.

Today I went for a walk with Shaun around Belmont Regional Park, starting at Korokoro and up to Belmont Trig, then over to Cannons’ Head and back through the valley. I’d taken annual leave from work, and it was a really nice day for it. More photos are over here.

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Shaun’s temporarily here from New York, to where he migrated (from Wellington) about 7 years ago, but it’s really cool that he’s come over. He did most of the work for organising a bachelor party last weekend, and I was able to drag some people along part of the Skyline Walkway. Everyone kept up.

All this walking around, of course, was an ulterior motive to make it on topic for me to write that I’ll have a few other things on my mind over the next few weeks, and probably won’t get out walking or tramping much during that time unless things are hideously wrong. Not that this is a problem as far as I’m concerned.

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.

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.

Date: 19th April, 2008
Location: Belmont Regional Park, Cornish Street to Dry Creek (Haywards Turnoff).
People: Sarah, Mari, Edwin, Nicole and me.
Intended route: Start at Cornish Street, walk up to Belmont Trig via Baked Beans Bend, continue around Cannons Head and Boulder Hill via the Puke Ariki Track, then exit via Dry Creek at the Haywards turnoff from State Highway 2.
[Photos]

I’d originally had 9 people interested in doing this walk, but as the weekend approached we eventually filtered down to 5, through a combination of flu, weekend work issues, and one person simply not showing up. It was a good trip, albeit a little windy.

We left Wellington on the 8.05am train, wanting to get an early start since nobody had done this particular walk before, the days are getting shorter in the winter, and the Wellington Regional Council flags this trip as about 7 to 8 hours of walking. The weather also didn’t look too hot (literally), with a Southerly coming in and intermittent bursts of rain.

After a short walk from Petone Railway Station, we entered Belmont Regional Park via Cornish Street at roughly 8.45am. It wasn’t freezing at this point, but the walk is also sheltered. It was also during this time that we saw the only three people we’d see for the entire day. All of them were joggers, and they were all in this sheltered zone, probably just jogging from one street in the Hutt Valley to another.

We found the main turnoff to the Trig (via Baked Beans Bend) at around 9.25am, and were at the trig itself a little over an hour later at 10.35am. We were a little exposed to the southerly on the way up, but it was bearable, especially with the tree cover.

Not wanting to spent very long on the exposed peak around Belmont Trig, we quickly went down the north side. One option if the weather had been really horrible had been to simply go back down from here in a short loop walk via the Korokoro Dam, but we decided to press on. After about 10 minutes of walking, however, when we reached the first main gate, Nicole decided she was finding things a bit cold, so she and Edwin resolved to return to the turnoff and get out while there was still a good opportunity.

Sarah, Mari and I continued, however. We quickly discovered that the peaks around Belmont Regional Park were getting absolutely clobbered in the southerly, and the wind was freezing. It was bearable with reasonable gear to stay covered, however,and I was only once nearly blown off my feet (and that was partly because my foot slipped). Nevertheless, we pretty much ended up hoofing it for the rest of the trip and just racing through, rather than spend too much time on the exposed hilltops.

The three of us were at Cannons Head at 11.35am, and we continued around to the shelter of one of the ammunition bunkers, during which time we were hailed on, just after midday to have a quick lunch and rest. We arrived at Boulder Hill by about 1.30pm, and at 2.20pm we caught our first nearby glimpse of State Highway 2 about 5 minutes walk away. At almost exactly the time that we walked out, I received a call from Edwin confirming that he and Nicole had also exited, so all was good.

In hindsight it does seem to make some logical sense that we didn’t see anyone else in the park on a day like today, but I’m really glad we went. As we were discussing for part of the trip, it really helps one to appreciate good weather.

I’ve walked from Petone to Porirua a couple of times now, and both times I’ve gotten lost on a farm on the Porirua side and ended up walking down some random farmer’s driveway. This time I thought I might do it in the other direction, so that maybe I could finally figure out where I should have been going.

Date: 1st January, 2008
Location: Belmont Regional Park, Cannons Creek Lake Reserve to Cornish Street.
People: Just me.
Intended route: Start at Cannons Creek, walk up past Cannons Head and Belmont Trig, then down one of the routes near the Korokoro Stream, and out at the Cornish Street exit in Petone.
[Photos]

Belmont Regional Park is one of my favourite places to go walking near Wellington. It’s very accessible for public transport, and it has a nice mixture of native bush, as well as open areas, albeit mostly farmland, from where there are some nice views. The park is owned by the Wellington Regional Council, which recently completed purchasing all of the remaining farmland, but still leases it out to be used as farms at the moment (as I understand it, at least). Most of the farmed area is on the western and nothern side of the park, whereas the native bush tends to be on the Hutt side, particularly around the Korokoro stream. The high point of the park is Belmont Trig (at 457 metres), which has an excellent vantage point for a 360 degree panorama around the entire Wellington region through the Hutt, central Wellington, and out towards Porirua and Plimmerton.

I’ve been there quite a few times, and one of my favourite things to do is to catch a train to somewhere (usually Petone), walk over the hills and come out the other side to catch a train home from somewhere else (usually Porirua or Paremata). This can be done quite comfortably in a day with some good planning, although coming back from Paremata usually means getting out of the park somewhere along State Highway 58, and it can be quite a boring road walk from there around through Pauatahanui and back to the railway station. It can also be quite dangerous getting around the Pauatahanui Inlet if it gets dark, since the traffic races around the road at high speeds and there’s not much space for walking near the side. (One alternative is to go through Whitby, which is probably 3 or 4 times the distance, but a lot safer and probably not much slower than trying to edge around the open road.)

This time, I thought I might start at Porirua, and make my way back to Petone. Until now I’d always done this in the other direction, and ended up getting lost when trying to get out on the Porirua side, and finding my way out over farmland that I probably shouldn’t have been on ideally. Especially since I think I’m supposed to be coordinating a tramping club trip in the area a bit later this year, it seemed like a good idea to remind myself a bit about how long it’d take to get around the place.

I got to Porirua Railway Station at about 9.20am, and from there it was about a 30 minute walk to the Cannons Creek Lake Reserve entrance, which is really well signposted, just past the Cannons Creek shops on Mungavin Avenue. This is the first time I’d been to the lake reserve, and I wasn’t 100% sure there would actually be a track of any sort out the back of it into the rest of the park. The lakes in the reserve are long and thin, and it’s possible to walk along either side of them. It turns out that both tracks converge at the end, and then it does carry on into a definite track into the rest of the park.

The track entrance at the back
of the Cannons Creek Lake
Reserve.

The first park-related sign from here points up the track to both Hill Road and Takapu Road, but it’s possible to get pretty much everywhere by following it. I left the end of the lakes at about 10.15am, but within a couple of minutes, the track split, with a sign pointing in one direction to Hill Road (which comes up from the Hutt side, but further north than I wanted to be), or Takapu Road (which comes into the park from the southern end of Tawa). I didn’t really want to go to either of these places, and as far as I could tell at the time, Belmont Trig was probably about half way between. In the end I pulled out my Wellington topo map and set a compass bearing, and decided that for the first 50 metres at least, the track that was signposted as leading to Takapu Road was going in a much more favourable direction. It turned out that this was the better way, but in hindsight I think I probably could have gone in either direction, although the Hill Road route would have meant a longer day.

Where the track splits, straight
after the sub-station.

One of the track markers for the
Puke Ariki track, over Belmont
Trig.

After 15 minutes I did actually get to Takapu Road, which I hadn’t realised (until now) was actually a road-end entrance into the park. At this point there was a sign clearly pointing to Cannons Head, which I recognised was a peak not far along the ridge from Belmont Trig, so that was very reassuring. The road from here basically went past the power sub-station, but it split immediately afterwards in a three-way intersection. There wasn’t any clear signage about where each road was going, and it looked as if all three directions had track marker poles. This was a bit confusing at first, so I just went with my gut feeling and followed the more straight-ahead route (to the left) which also looked as if it was heading more towards the centre of the regional park. This ended up being a good choice in the end, and 15 minutes further along the road, there was a sign pointing along a track up the hill to Round Knob (another one of the peaks along the same line as Belmont Peak and Cannons Head).

First views of Wellington Harbour.

The track up the hill continues squiggling around the high tension power cables, which is a common theme around this side of the park. By 11.15am, I’d reached the intersection with the main Puke Ariki track, which runs along the top of the park, and turned south towards Cannons Head. Cannons Head was about 10 to 15 minutes away, and it’s the bit of track leading up to it which was the first decent view I had of Wellington Harbour on the far side of the park. The track then continues with some ups and downs and by 11.50am I was crossing the fence which (I think) divides the farm-land from everything else. From here, the track becomes slightly more overgrown with various grasses and more native plants, since I guess there aren’t as many sheep around to munch on it.

Belmont Trig.

After another 10 minutes of walking, I’d reached the intersection of several tracks just below Belmont Trig. There are at least three obvious ways down to Korokoro from the Trig and I hadn’t quite decided which route I wanted to take, but it’s only a 2 minute jaunt up to the top from there in any case, so I wandered up to the trig for a few minutes of looking at the surround scenery of the entire region.

The most direct way down from the trig (I think) is to continue past it and hop over a gate on the southern side along the Ridge Track, which leads down the southern-side ridge past a place called Baked Beans Bend, before it joins the Korokoro stream. I’ve come up that way several times, so wasn’t too keen to go that way. Another track, which I’ve never followed, is called the Bridleway track (or something similar), and goes around the western side of the ridge. I think there’s another road-end or two down that way, but otherwise it follows a stream back towards the Korokoro Stream, before meeting up with the ridge track somewhere just after Baked Beans Bend. The third way is to turn east at Belmont Trig, and head straight to the Korokoro stream, then follow it (along a track) until it exits around Petone. This track isn’t actually signposted as such — instead, the sign points to Stratton Street, which is one of the roads on the Hutt side of the park. There are places to turn off before actually reaching the road, however.

So I followed the sign pointing to Stratton Street, on the assumption that sooner or later I’d find some way to avoid actually reaching Stratton Street. The weather was fantastic, and it was from about here on that I started to meet quite a few family groups wandering up towards the trig from the Hutt side of the park. At about 12.30pm, I reached the first obvious turn-off, which was signposted as pointing to Oakleigh Street. I didn’t exactly want to go there, either, but it looked as if it was heading in a better direction than the main track, so I followed it.

The track I missed, seen
on the way back down.

There was an old possum-bait warning sign very shortly after that junction, and almost immediately the track veered up the hill. This didn’t seem quite right, and although the track was still obvious, it was now more of a trampled-grass track than anything else. I followed it up the hill for about 5 minutes before I decided I must be going the wrong way, and turned around, since it felt like it was almost heading back towards Belmont Ridge. Sure enough, as soon as I descended back down to the possum-bait sign, there was another track obviously visible that curved around the hillside lower down. It even had a track marker pole. By 12.55pm, I’d left the farm land and was now walking through native bush near the beginning of the Korokoro stream.

Korokoro Dam.

According to the signpost I’d seen earlier, this track was still heading towards a place called Oakleigh Street, but at least it was in the area where actually I wanted to be. At 1.10pm, I passed the Oakleigh Street track junction, which was very reassuring, since it meant that the track I was on would probably continue for the length of the stream. From here, the Korokoro Dam was about 10 minutes away, and on reaching it I sat down for another quick snack. It was pretty obvious by now that there wasn’t any hurry, so I stopped in a few places to listen to birds.

This is quite a nice sign.

The Korokoro Track is a very well maintained track (even though it’s thin in places), and there were lots of people out for an afternoon wander by now. By 1.35pm I reached the junction where the Ridge Track (and the Bridleway Track) converge onto the Korokoro Track, after coming down from Belmont Trig. Someone’s very helpfully carved out the word “TRIG” in very large letters in a fallen tree, indicating a direction up that track, so it’s very easy to pick out.

The Korokoro Track, near
the Petone end.

For the rest of the walk out to Korokoro, the track hovers above Korokoro stream as it winds its way through the valley out towards Cornish Street. I stopped in one place about half way along where I found a small side track that led up the hill, but apart from that I pretty much wandered straight out to Petone, since the trains were only running every hour on New Years Day. I reached the Cornish Street road-end at 2.10pm.

As it turned out, it was a neat day with some really nice weather and almost no wind. 4 hours from one side of the park to the other was a little faster than I was expecting, but I did walk reasonably quickly in places and I’m sure that it can be stretched out much longer by walking further north towards the Pauatahanui direction. I’ve done this in the past, but not during a time when I was writing things up.