This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
arrived at the Railway Station on Friday evening looking © forward to a good weekend tramping along Cattle Ridge. There were five of us: me, John, Jez, Anne, and Mark. pulled up in a Rent-a-Dent (we were the only trip going away that weekend) and we were off to Putara - a nice long way to go - north of Eketahuna.
We arrived at the roadend at around half past nine. It was pitch black, the wind was blowing a gale, it was just
dogs outside the nearby farmhouse were barking themselves into a frenzy, as if the whole of the Wairarapa deserved to know of our (welcome) arrival. The wind presented a problem: we needed to find a place to pitch our fly where it wouldn’t get blown away. We spent half an hour stomping around scrutinising various sites and weighing up their respective merits. Eventually we found a
{ ' John I
By James Roberts to rain hard. The result of this was that a small stream soon began to run under one half of the fly. Jez and I were at this “end and so (as we discovered i i in the morning) most of our gear was soaked, including our pits. Fortunately Jez and I have quallofil bags, so this was no big I problem. The others somehow / managed to keep semi-dry. Five minutes up the track in the -morning, we found proof of - Murphy’s Law: a wonderful, flat beginning to drizzle, and the ' i been flooded.
campsite which would not have
We continued up the track beside the river, enjoying the scenery and thoughts of a warm hut at Roaring Stag, and in about thirty minutes reached the . bridge at Mangatainoka Forks.
sheltered spot between the © cowpats on the other side of the pitched the fly.
Sometime during the very early hours of the morning, it began
There was a sign up on a tree telling us, in no uncertain terms, that the bridge was unsafe to cross. At this point we recalled ' a sign at the roadend telling us something about a bridge being closed. We had assumed it I meant the first bridge. We were Mangatainoka Bridge, and I wrong. This one had been hit by a tree on the other side and, though still in place, the bridge was quite obviously out of commission.
. We looked at crossing the stream which was a brown, raging torrent, and decided since crossing it would be both unpleasant and unsafe, to go back to the van. Once there we drove. down to the Kiriwhakapapa shelter and had _lunch with a member of the Masterton Tramping Club, who talked a lot and assured us that Blue Range Hut was clean and well-stocked with firewood as he had just been there cleaning up. The Hutt Valley’s truck was also there but we decided that they had probably gone to Cow Creek, and set off for Blue Range Hut, thinking correctly that dessert would be worth getting wet for.
It was. After dinner John whipped up a sponge cake with mandarin segments and _chocolate sauce, which we devoured quickly before continuing with our tasks of squeezing the water out of our pits. The next morning we went back down to the van, spent ' forty minutes wandering around a “loop walk” in the sun (which chose this time to come out) looking at native birds, and after lunch, headed home to hot showers. A true Tararua tramp ; anytime.
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