This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
from Wellington for us and once over the Rimutaka range the weather was looking glorious. The main aim of this weekend's tramping was to arrive at Donnelly Flat on Sunday afternoon for a barbecue as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations. Getting lost or delayed was definitely not an op-
fiom a Saturday morning start
tion. Although there was supposed to be an old route which this tramp was to follow, I had no idea how easy it was going to be to follow. Certainly if we didn’t turn up at Donnelly Flat it was going to be a very public way of getting lost. Still there might be plenty of people to come looking for us.
Nick Wood Putting such thoughts aside, I led my Medium group of Sue Higgins, John Collier and Shane Morgan — still a relative newcomer to the Club — back down the road a short distance from the Walls Whare roadend looking for a track marked on the map.
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Trip Reports
From Page 9 While the easy trip was to follow the Waiohine River up to Totara Flats, we were taking a slightly more geographically diverse (hilly) route over Mt Waiohine, which is on the ridge separating the Waiohine river valley from the Wairarapa. Finding nothing particularly obvious we found a likely place, bashed our way upwards 50 metres or so only to find the well marked track, which probably started down by the car park if we'd had a look around. Anyway the track led us to a point on a minor ridge leading us in the right direction.
Although there is no track marked on the map, an old route leads almost the entire way from this point, up over Mt Waiohine past the junctions of tracks down to Sayer’s Hut, Mangaterere roadend and the old Totara Flats Hut site and on up towards the track which leads up to the Mt Holdsworth track. There’s quite a bit of tree-fall and it’s overgrown in many places but with a bit of looking around, the route is generally reasonably easy to follow. There’s even the occasional old marker to be seen.
The four of us were making pretty good progress and the going was reasonably easy. From the map, my main-concern-had-been-a-point— where the minor ridge we were on forks. We wanted to take the westerly fork which headed up to the main ridge. It doesn’t look very well defined on the map butin the end the route we were following led us right to the spur leading up onto the main ridge, which was a pretty solid 150m climb. Having got on to the main ridge, we soon had a bit of a scramble through some shoulder-height scrubby trees, just the right height to tangle your pack. Luckily this didn’t last long and we were back into easier going. Lunch had us at the high point of the trip, Mt Waiohine. Although this ridge never actually gets properly above the bush line, most of the little peaks along the route have a clearing of some sort. So we were fortunate to have a fine view looking towards Holdsworth and the northern Tararuas as we ate our lunch and relaxed in the sun. It was a remarkably windless day making it even more pleasant.
Although we had considered options of dropping down one of those tracks to the left or right of the ridge, we decided we'd continue along and see how the going was. We would drop down towards Totara Creek further up and look for a camp for the night. We were soon well past the track junctions and our route continued on. Things were on the way down now so we continued to make pretty good progress. Finally we reached the point where the ridge becomes less well-defined. Strangely enough, the undergrowth-in-the. bush-also became— very sparse at about this point, so it was quite disorientating trying to pick out a route between the trees.
The compass came out and we took a couple of bearings to keep us in generally the right direction. We'd planned to start dropping down towards Totara Creek instead of continuing all the way to the track leading up to the Holdsworth track. Unfortunately we started down a bit too early and were soon scrambling around in a steepish creek. Re-orientating ourselves we sidled around to find an easier way down. Soon, around 5pm, we were at Totara Creek. John found us an excellent spot for the fly and dinner was soon under way. It was a calm and beautiful evening. Being so soon after daylight saving had started it was great to have a long evening to sit around, talk and enjoy the surroundings. There wasn’t much ground to cover the next day so it was a pretty leisurely start. A couple of packs zipping down the track on the far side of Totara Creek at about 7.30 proved later to be the party from the Club who were doing the Schormanns-Kaitoke trip, but at their steam train speed they were past before we could yell out.
It was about a kilometre to the point where the track crosses Totara Creek and starts to climb. At the top we decided to head up to Mountain House. It was quite windy so a short break sheltering in the hut was welcome. Then it was all downhill to the Atiwhakatu and-along-to-Donelly Flat;-where the first of the barbecue party were arriving at about midday.
The barbecue turned out to be a great way to finish an enjoyable tramp, with a good turn out of all ages and tramping generations.