Humphries Bay

Three weekends ago I went on my first backpacking trip in New Zealand. I am 10 minutes away from an amazing system of mountain bike trails, so I haven’t been hiking (or ‘tramping’ as it is known down here) much, but I had a free weekend and found a promising looking campsite on the map. Humphries Bay campsite, on the shores of Lake Tarawera, is not far as the crow flies from where I am, but can only be circuitously approached from my direction due to a matrix of smaller lakes and private pastures. I decided on a promising route, about 20km by road, about 10km by mountain bike on the dual-use Western Okataina Walkway, then about 10km hiking down the coast of Lake Ōkataina on the Eastern Okataina Walkway.

Biking with a full backpack can get awkward, but I managed to balance it so that it wasn’t much of a hassle. More of a hassle was the fact that the “dual-use path” was largely only so in words. It was an old logging road, which over time has gotten quite rutted. Recent rains made every depression into a mud pit that sucked your momentum at the bottom of hills, and overgrown gorse prevented any quick descents. It passed through many lovely sections of forest, but as a whole I was not impressed and definitely won’t be returning by bike. On the positive side, although delays “riding” the track set me back over an hour, it gave me an opportunity to try out my new 1000 lumen bike-light in the gathering dusk. At the halfway point, where it turned to an actual tramping track, I locked my bike in the woods.

The Eastern Okataina Walkway was as nice a tramping track as the Western was poor. It skirts the edge of the lake, sometimes running along the shore and sometimes taking a shortcut over ridges, but never getting really steep. Due to its gentle grade and quality construction it remains fairly smooth and dry without any added rockwork, although I did find one section with unsuccessful tree fern trunk causeways. It made for a peaceful night hike in, with the almost-full moon reflecting off the rippling surface of the lake through the trees and the gentle sound of waves lapping the shore carrying on the night breezes. I came around one corner to see what looked like thousands of small eyes dappling the underside of a bank; it was actually the New Zealand glowworm, the larvae of the Arachnocampa luminosa fungus gnat. Around another corner I startled a passel of possums (common brushtail possum). Most of them darted off into the woods or climbed a tree, but one particularly daft individual set off down the trail in front of me. Every time I would get closer it would run ahead again, but even when there were not steep slopes on either side it took it about a kilometer to figure out that it could go sideways and I wouldn’t ‘chase’ it. I hope I didn’t disrupt its possum social life too much by leading it so far away.

The campsite was a sight for sore eyes after the trip, and I quickly set up my hammock and rainfly. I woke up in the morning to raindrops splattering on the fly and the sun shining through. Clouds hung over Mount Tarawera on the far shore, but otherwise the lake was tranquil and clear and cold. I only saw two other people pass through the campsite that morning, I guess the chance of rain kept away all the other campers and trampers. The hike back was like a new trail, being able to see everything. The trail dipped down to the lakeshore a few times, and across a sandy beach once. With the semi-tropical foliage and the trail cut into cliffside (and the waterside campsite with composting privies) it reminded me a lot of the hike into Waimanu. I biked the sealed road back, and made it to the Rotorua airport before the skies opened up and dumped like they had been threatening to do all weekend, but not enough to dampen my spirits.

This past weekend I headed off on another tramping trip on the Whirinaki Track in the Whirinaki Te Pua-a-Tane Conservation Park with the Rotorua Tramping Club. I look forward to telling you all about it soon.

Mount Tarawera across the lake, wreathed in clouds.

Bikepacking

Masterton

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to see another part of the country, as I drove down with my colleagues to measure plots in Masterton, an hour North of Wellington and a five hour drive from Rotorua. New Zealand doesn’t believe in superhighways, the national speed limit is 100kmph (62mph) and the roads tend to rarely exceed four lanes, so I got a lot of great sightseeing as we meandered around. We stopped for a rest break at the entrance to Tongariro National Park, which includes Mount Ngauruhoe, the volcano that played Mount Doom in LotR, and its neighbor, the jagged Mount Ruapehu, the tallest point on the North Island. I could see those peaks looming in front of us for many kilometers as we approached, in dazzling blankets of snow. There is a trail, the Tongariro Northern Circuit, that loops around the flanks of both mountains, climbs the pass between them and summits Ngauruhoe (not in that order), and I hope I have the opportunity while I am here to go back down there and hike it. Our drive also took us past windswept, scrubby, misty pastures that were quite reminiscent of passing Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) on Saddle, especially with billboards advertising the approaching New Zealand National Army Museum. The road continued, clinging to the face of valley walls that dropped to sapphire streams scores of meters below and loomed in crags above, past rolling hills liberally speckled with fluffy sheep, and signs warning motorists to look out for kiwi birds during nighttime hours.

By the time we arrived in Masterton it was too late to drive out to the forest to check out our plots, so we had the late afternoon free. When I decided to come to New Zealand, I made vague plans to check out the factory of Tuatahi Racing Axes & Saws, the origin of most of the Dartmouth Woodsmens Team axes. As it happens, the Tuatahi factory was not just in Masterton, but only a 12 minute walk from the motel where we were staying. I actually missed the building the first time we passed, as “factory” may have been a bit of a grandiose term for the location, exaggerated by the company’s international prominence in Timbersports. Tuatahi is based out of a modest workshop the size of an auto-repair shop, which is more than enough to produce small numbers of very high quality tools, and they are just the right size for their business model. There isn’t a showroom, just a front office with assorted articles about its history and trinkets, such as a painted axe-head and an antique peg-and-raker (perforated lance-tooth pattern). The receptionist was more than happy to chat with us about the company and sport (and assure us that his missing leg and arm had nothing to do with a Timbersports accident). He says that it great to be able to connect with people around the world, but taking orders online lacks the personal feel of talking to people face to face to get their product exactly right. So many big online retailers make the purchasing process nothing more than a simple click-and-ship, with the product arriving on your doorstep in a few days, and some customers don’t understand that small custom shops just don’t work like that. Tuatahi makes all of their tools to order, whether they are work axes or top of the line racing axes. An axe takes about 6 months from waitlist to finish, and saws are about two years. All customers get the same respect; whether they are Jason Wynyard (Kiwi and 8x STIHL World Champion!) or Joan Smith they progress through the queue the same. Big names in the Timbersports community are usually better about knowing how these workshops operate and expecting the delay. Due to safety regulations we couldn’t tour the actual workshop, but I could see through the windows a saw being tuned and tested, as well as half a dozen axes waiting to be hand finished and inspected before being shipped out across the world. Out in the yard I also saw assorted sheets of metal that the saws had been cut out of. This time around I only got a T-shirt, but perhaps someday in the future I will still enjoy Timbersports and be back in New Zealand and I can return to get an ax.

For the official reason we were down there, we went out into the forest (‘into the bush’) and measured plots. Our first location was, like many, in a commercial timber production forest. Driving around felt similar to PTA again, as for safety reasons we were constantly checking in on the radio. On our way to our sites (after taking a bit of an erroneous loop on the ever-changing network of logging roads) we passed an active logging site. Working with logs this Summer on Trail Crew gave me a new appreciation for how the logs were being moved around, most impressively by a machine with a tower with many cables like a Griphoist® pulling logs up slopes that were too steep for trucks. When we finally approached our site, we had a bit of a worried moment when out Toyota Hilux (it’s a truck down here) started sliding a bit on the steep muddy road, so we hiked the last 2km in. This site was a plot of eucalyptus, mostly about 60cm in diameter (fun fact: the exact length of one of my dbh tapes). We were measuring it again after many years, and half the fun was finding the painted

numbers on tree trunks (#treesearch (btw the actual October guest wifi password for this very professional national forest research institute I work at)). This was made more difficult by the frequent steep, muddy slopes, the dense undergrowth (‘scrub’), and the fact that some of the marked trees had fallen facedown on their numbers. The trees were also numbered in order as you went clockwise from North (easy), and then in random directions if a 360⁰ rotation didn’t come up to the needed 24 samples (not so easy). Our next set of plots was significantly more devoid of scrub, but on even more of a slope. We were establishing new plots, so each tree had to be assessed for eligibility as to whether it was within the plot radius. The hypsometer we used for measuring height could give us distance, but a few trees were close enough that we had to run out the transect tape to split centimeters. Our third set of plots was at the top of a 38% grade (21⁰ slope), which due to a GPS error we climbed twice. Instead of a circle it had been laid out in a square, and about half of the trees had been felled, making it quite a game to piece back together for the datasheets. To make it even more fun, they were members of the stringybark group of Eucalyptus, so the painted numbers were puzzles themselves even when you found them. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun. The weather was gorgeous for three of the days, and the open understories and steep slopes gave views out across the rolling green hills spotted with sheep. We ran out of time to measure the plots of Coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), with their awesome gigantic DBHs, but that will just come another day.