Humm. They are predicting heavy rain tomorrow morning at some time and there isn’t enough space for whacking the tent up. I’m going to have to sleep using it as a bivvy bag.

Overall a big day, but I’m about halfway and with more than half the climbing done.

I didn’t manage to get away until 8 30 and other than the first hour when I retraced my route through the grass and up the sand dune it was mostly hard work.

I had been seriously thinking of postponing things for another day, to enjoy the amenity of the hut for a while but then I remembered the rain, somehow thinking I might make it to the Ministry of Works Historic Hut in one day. I guess it might be possible but many coming down had spent a night in a tent so that should have been an indicator. Maybe I should have left at first light.

It was a very warm, mostly cloudless day but by the early afternoon I realised I was going to spend the night in the tent so I ended up bashing my way down to be next to a stream for water with my evening cook up. There sure wasn’t water anywhere else.

I don’t mind having a look at some different spots, check out the vegetation in a close, if at times physical way.

Yeah, it was hot and humid, a lot of sweat to the brow from the energy expended but there was a vague trail, used by the great spotted kiwi protection team with their rat tunnel tests to see if rats were still present before or after 1080 poisoning. The tunnels were clearly visible but it looked as if it had been a while since they had been used.

There were a few windfall to obscure the already vague track, not so easy to pick up again on the other side.

Once the pink ribbon finished it was just straight bashing, crashing, smashing along, creating my own path through the shrubbery.

But this isn’t the open beech forest around Nelson Lakes, it’s the wild West Coast, very much higher rainfall in a significant variety of different mixed podocarp forest, except with the usual wind the trees are stunted.

Anyway I clocked off early, there’s little water around and I’ve made it to a flowing stream, a tributary of the Kahurangi River.

Water, but due to the steepness, the shrubbery, and ferns there is actually no place to put up a tent.

I hope any rain is delayed.

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