45 almost epic adventures on the South Island & Rakiura
South Westland to Queenstown blog | January/February 2019
You come across new tracks in various ways.
The Haast Paringa Cattle Trail was mentioned in the film about the life of Sheila Natusch, “Some Kind of Sheila”. For her honeymoon she had biked down the West Coast with her new husband on single speed bikes long before the Haast Road was completed in 1965. Actually that trip had been featured in a Federated Mountain Club magazine article while the film was being made.
And on my trip down the West Coast on my way to the South Coast Track and Stewart Island/Rakiura I had zipped past the two entrances to the Haast-Paringa Cattle Track in my car on my way south to Stewart Island/Rakiura.
I contemplated the logistics.
Hint: get dropped off at the northern point because the southern exit is way better for hitching, being near a T intersection and a house, rather than in a random spot on a 100 km/h road.
And then moving immediately on to the South Westland coast, from Jackson Bay to the Hollyford Track, that had been on my mind ever since I scooted around the Hollyford/Pyke a few years ago. I heard an 86-year-old bloke had walked it, and a couple with a few horses, so maybe it wasn’t the horror show I’d been contemplating.
Well, this summer I was going to find out.
The main issue was that I’d been lulled into a very benign idea of the weather in the week or so I’d been back in Nelson, where it was about as fine a summer as I’d appreciate there.
Yeah, that may not continue, and I’ll be needing to be in my tent a bit.
So there is that.
Just as long as those tropical cyclones like the two that truncated my tramping and caused so much damage last summer stay away, well, until I can be in a position to head to the better weather to the east if required.
It turned out that despite a big 20 days coming down the coast that I only had a solitary night in civilisation in Te Anau. Long enough to scoff some fresh food and sort out another nine days worth.
Maybe I should have sat out some rain for another two nights, but I scurried on back to The Divide and tramped half the Greenstone and half the Caples Tracks before hitching over to the Rees-Dart Track for a quick circuit before making it to Queenstown.
By that stage, 29 days on the trot, 48 in all for the summer, it seemed sensible to head back to my own bed.
My body was telling my brain it was time for a break.
Here are the four maps from the trip. I hitchhiked/bused the short distances between the sections. Scroll on for each day’s blog.
Eventually rain set in and that helped to hasten movement, particularly as I became wetter, actually soaked. With the rain came a major temperature drop of about 8° C.
Chasm Creek stopped my flow of steps. From a distance it looks fairly perilous, with a 15 m vertical drop into stream that had to be negotiated on a wet, sloping, and potentially greasy rock face.
Unlike other coastal walks where I have jumped over bedrock, or large flat rocks, in this case, for the rest of the afternoon it was mostly head or cannonball-sized and shaped glacier wall moraine residue. On a slope.
Our jovial spirits were somewhat curtailed as this apparently was the most appropriate time to empty the septic tank. We were all severely gassed as I laced up my boots.
It was a major surprise to see the times from whence I come shown as 8 to 10 hours, although I figured out that I’d taken nine hours if you include all my stops.
Still making a Moderate Effort. (Yeah, I’m not likely to ever traipse around here again, so I’d better make the most of it. One of my basic travel philosophies.)
Huge house-sized chunks of gneiss in the rocky gorge, with the track 50 m above most of the way. It’s clear that shrubbery has a short half life due to spring avalanches.
I thought it prudent to up the pace mid-afternoon, but soon just upended myself, and had a serious face plant encounter with a rock. My glasses scraped down my nose, cheek and my forehead was lacerated.
It might have seemed a great idea that I slipped a mattress on the living room floor last night, but that really needed to be revised at 4 05 am when the four Korean trampers emerged from their bedroom with their head torches on to cook a breakfast.
