Leader: Dion Pont
I once read that Karamea has more sunshine hours than Auckland, and I can believe that. The local storekeeper attested to drought conditions when we passed through. At the road-end carpark, we noticed the time on the DOC sign had been lengthened to ‘6 hours’ – it wasn’t too far wrong.
In a litany of errors, our first boo-boo was missing the start of the track. We were resigned to following the farm road up the hill to a gate. Here, a sign warned that ‘You Have Arrived At The End Of The World.’ I thought to myself, ‘Armageddon outta here!’
A side-road mis-lead us down to the Karamea River, below a dis-used cableway. We began scrambling over house-sized boulders – energy-sapping stuff in the humidity of early Autumn. Passing Old Man Rock, after an hour, I suggested we clamber up the riverbank. Sure enough, the old miner’s track was easily found, and our progress was about four times faster.
At times the track spat us out onto the river stones. We searched for elusive orange triangles that invited us back into the cool shade of the bush. The old trail began to falter, requiring tricky legwork to negotiate rock steps and chains. Then a long stretch of boulder-hopping ensued.
It was rather late in the afternoon when I made my blunder. Surely, I thought, we should bash back onto the track. After 100m of very steep bush-bashing, and fighting supple-jack, there was zero success in locating even a smidgen of track. Defeated, we battled our way back riverside, only to stumble onto a track only 200 metres further upstream.
Some four hours of tough travel brought us past Cuckoo Stream, which tumbled from nowhere into the gorge; beyond here, the Karamea disappeared around a sharp corner. Since ‘The Bend’ had already been used, I named this corner ‘The Karamea Kink’.
Around the kink, our sidle track spat us onto a jumble of giant rocks. We were tentatively tip-toeing along the tops, trying not to slip. I looked up. Some 500m upriver, there was the hut.
Yeah, right. Without my glasses, I was short-sighted. According to my younger companions, my mirage was not the hut I hoped for, merely a huge stone prism on the riverbank, which sported a very geometric profile. We dubbed this ‘Rocks Hut.’
Further up, father on, the real deal was waiting on the grassy flats; a typical NZFS six-bunker set back in a clearing. A ridiculously high concrete staircase led up to the door, where we escaped the dreaded namu. After a tea-drinking frenzy, I hit the pit, exhausted.
I remembered that, back in the late 1800s, my gt-gt-grandfather had left his sheep on the Tableland, and with his 12-year-old son, had made a remarkable journey down this same river to the coast. However, before the devastation of the 1929 earthquake, travel would have been better.
On Sunday morning, we enjoyed a well-deserved sleep-in. The return journey was uneventful, and we made faster progress into a cooling seabreeze. The fleshpots of Westport beckoned – the Denniston Dog café to be precise. Flat Whites in hand, we toasted to another hut bagged. (Eat yer heart out, Ian, Mike and Wade.)
Rock-hoppers were: Dion Pont, Grant Standing and Ray Salisbury (scribe).