This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
and The Trip That Was
riday the 23 of November. The rain is -bucketing down. It_has been raining nonstop for days. The weather, unusually, is coming in from the south-east. And I’m signed up on a Haurangis trip — Pararaki to Sutherlands, hopefully taking in Mt Ross, at 981 metres the highest point in the Haurangis. Just my luck! The weather in the Haurangis is usually fine, but in these south-east conditions the place will be copping the full brunt of it. As usual when I go into the hills, the weekend is clearly going to be awful. It’s enough to make a person retire from tramping...! I can think of much better things to be doing over the weekend than trudging around wet, miserable and dejected in the rain, picking my way up a swollen stream, grovelling in the damp undergrowth, seeing nothing. But I’m signed up, I’m committed, so I suppose I had better go. Reluctantly I trudge down to the railway station, sinking deeper and deeper into despair, prepared for a weekend of abject misery. Water is raging down the swollen gutters with the force and fury of a fireman’s hose. Passing cars send up sheets of spray from the surface flooding on the road. The rain is trickling down my parka neck and seeping in through holes in my sneakers. Why don’t they just build a huge geodesic dome over the whole bloody country, I think to myself. I reach the railway station to find, as usual, that I am the last one there. The other Fit trip members, Raymond, Eva, and Andrew, are huddled together in a group. About ten people on the Easy trip are also milling around. Well, let’s get on with it, I think to myself — let’s head off for another dismal, damp, and
Harry Smith
asks Raymond? It turns out that all of us are only here I because the others are here, because we’ve signed up, because we feel committed. So right there and then, at 6.00 o'clock on Friday night at Platform Nine at the railway station, we decide to call it off! Just to save Helen ten hours of unnecessary driving, we stress — but not too loudly, in case Helen hears and, kindhearted soul that she is, insists on taking us up after all. So this is what a Fit trip is like!, comments one of the Easies, whereupon I explain that “Fit” really means sensible and experienced. Andrew heads off home, while Raymond, Eva, and I head off to the Berhampore hoisprings for a pleasant few hours soak while imagining all those poor miserable bastards on the Easy trip grovelling around in the mud and puddles at the roadend, setting up : their flies in the bucketing rain. And that’s all there is to write about the trip that wasnt, so now I’ll write about the trip that was... It was December last year. The aim was to climb Mt Ross, the first time I can think of that the Club has ever scheduled a trip there, and I was the leader. Lyndsay dropped us off in the Orient Express at the camping area at the Pinnacles late on Friday night 1 and we set up the fly. There was no rain on that occasion, but unfortunately the wind got up in the night and at about 2 o'clock in the morning we had to spend a frantic half-hour finding boulders by torchlight to anchor the fly down and stop it being blown away. In the morning we were away at 8.00 o'clock. The ridge and track systems in the Haurangis make Mt Ross awkward to get to from the western side of the park where we were, but after studying the map fora denressina weekend i g But what’s this?! It seems there are too many people for the van, so Helen McDermott, who was originally going to lead the Easies but has had to pull out due to injury, is going to drive four people over to the roadend in her car, then return to Wellington the same night — a five-hour round trip! And on Sunday she is going to do exactly the same thing all over again to pick four people up! The four of us on the Fit trip look at each other. Do you really want to do this trip, while I had planned a reasonable-looking round trip involving tramping tracks, four-wheel-drive tracks, river travel, and bush-bashing — a bit of everything! We cruised up the track to the Pinnacles look-out and paused to look down on the spectacular eroded towers and gullies below before joining up with the main ridge track heading south towards the Washpool valley. Two hours later we reached the Mt Surf ridgeline. Here the track turns right and plunges down to Washpool Hut, but we turned left instead, along the untracked ridgeline towards Mt Surf and the fourwheel-drive track beyond. My fears of a thick, grovelly bush-bashing session soon eased as it became apparent that others had used this route before us and a rough track of sorts could be detected for much of the way. In fact the main difficulty turned out to be reining in an overenthusiastic Garry and stopping him plunging off down the hillside in his attempts to pioneer a new route: the De Rose Direct. At 12.30 we emerged out of the bush and onto the four-wheel-drive track of the Haurangi Crossing. I had been here once before, on a club Four-Wheel-Drive Safari trip many years before. (A great trip — why don’t we do it again? It would also make an excellent club mountain biking trip — it’s mentioned in the Kennett brothers’ books on classic New Zealand saddle with views down into the bush-filled valleys on either side. After lunch we continued on up the four-wheeldrive track. Mt Ross could be seen in the distance — the highest point on the flat-topped ridgeline of the main Aorangi Range. A steep uphill grind brought us to a bush-covered saddle, the highest point on the Haurangi Crossing. From here the four-wheel-drive track turned sharply left and dropped steeply down to
Harry Smith
Sutherlands Hut in the Turanganui valley, but our route lay along the untracked ridgeline leading across to the main Aorangi Range. David decided to leave us at this point and head directly down the track to the hut, while the rest of us set off for another bush-bash. Garry now came to the fore, leading the route through the bush which was thick and scrubby in places. A steep, grovelly climb brought us to the top of the range, and flat going led northwards to Mt Ross. This proved to be a completely featureless spot on the nearly completely flat and level ridgeline, discernible only by the presence of a marker pipe in the ground. A slight gap in the beech trees allowed a glimpse southwards towards the peaks of the southern Haurangis in the distance. It was six oclock — we had taken 3 hours since leaving the four-wheel-drive track. -———From Mt Ross we were back-on a track. This led along the flat ridge-top for a while, then plunged off steeply down the hillside, first through mature bush, and then scrub. Eventually we reached the valley floor, with some beautiful open grassy clearings and a stream, our first water all day. Some fierce onga-onga slowed us down until we emerged out onto the Haurangi Crossing four-wheel-drive track in the floor of the main Turanganui valley. Fifteen minutes back down the track brought us at last to Sutherland Hut.
Trip Reports
It was 8.00 o'clock and it had been a 12-hour day. Sutherland Hut is an old shearers’ hut dating back from around 50 years ago when the Turanganui valley was farmed. It is set on a bank above the river, in an area of extensive grassy clearings sprinkled with buttercups and surrounded by regenerating bush — a beautiful setting, spoilt only by the fact that it soon began to rain. David had the fire going and we soon had the primus cranked up for a brew — a very pleasant way to end a long day. Next morning we had a comparatively leisurely start, getting away about 9 o'clock. The planned route was to head down the Turanganui valley for a few kilometres before climbing out and picking up the western half of the Haurangi Crossing track back to the Pinnacles. There used to be a four-wheel-drive track down the Turanganui but this has now mostly vanished. In places we could follow it for short distances, but for most of the way it had become completely overgrown or slumped away and we ending up wading in the river itself. The Turanganui proved to be one of my favourite types of country: rugged former farmland, no longer farmed, and with the bush regenerating, but still with grassy clearings and an open, airy feeling, not the damp gloom of thick mature bush. We passed several open grassy flats where I could happily come in and pitch my tent for a week, doing nothing but relaxing, lying in the sun and reading books. Two hours of river travel brought us to the boundary of the forest park. A short distance beyond we could see the old vehicle track leading steeply up the hillside to the south. This is no longer used by vehicles and the lower sections were knee-deep in long grass. After a long uphill grind we emerged onto the crest of the ridgeline and back onto the Haurangi Crossing track once again — the third section of it we had been on this weekend! This led down the ridgeline to the west, gradually losing height before plunging steeply off into Hurupi Stream, where we stopped for a late lunch. After lunch we had a choice of two routes back to the Pinnacles carpark. One was to follow the fourwheel-drive track up to the ridgeline on the other side of the valley and then back down the track past the I Pinnacles. The other was straight down Hurupi Stream, followed by a short road-walk around the coast. This avoided the climb, but we didn’t know what Hurupi Stream would be like. At the spot where we had lunch it didn’t look at all promising, disappearing under a thick barrage of over-hanging gorse bushes. After some umming and ahhing, David, Hugh, and Eddie chose the track, while Garry, Jonathan, and I went for the stream. The stream tumed out to be easy-going after all. There were some sections where you had to crouch down under the over-hanging vegetation for quite long stretches, like going through a tunnel, but we still managed to beat the others by a good twenty minutes or more! Then Steve Patience turned up in the bus and it was back to Wellington, to end another great trip in the hills.
Punters on last year’s trip that was: Dave Garrett, Garry de Rose, Hugh Fyson, Jonathan Kaye, Eddie Shaw, Harry Smith. Punters on this year’s trip that wasn’t: Raymond Morgan, Eva Lottermoser, Andrew Chisholm, Harry Smith.
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Trip Reports