Whirinaki

Welcome back to my blog, noble readers! I have fallen quite behind in my journaling, but now that I am back in Hawai’i I will endeavor to catch you all up on my assorted adventures in tramping and woodchopping! This entry brings us all the way back to November, when I made contact with the Rotorua Tramping Club and went for the first non-solo backpacking trip of my time in New Zealand…

Whirinaki Te Pua-a-Tane Conservation Park is southwest of Rotorua, almost to the sea, home to one of the world’s last remaining prehistoric rainforests. After the decline of the native timber industry after extensive efforts by the Maori and conservationists to save what remained, many towns in the area likewise declined, although the infrastructure for tourism is increasing and breathing new life into communities. The Whirinaki Forest Park’s 136,000 acres is home to many miles of hiking trails, 32 miles of mountain bike track in two long loops, and 9 Department of Conservation (DOC) huts. The forest contains many remaining giant native podocarps that escaped the logging of days past. The native bush is also home to many native animals, such as the whio, or blue duck, and like many places in New Zealand there is an aggressive trapping campaign to lower the numbers of voracious alien pests like rats and stoats.

The Rotorua Tramping Club is one of the oldest of such on the North Island (I think trailing Auckland and Taranaki). They meet once monthly, and I caught their last meeting of the year. It started off with a Christmas trivia game; I started off strong with my knowledge of magi gifts and reindeer names, then quickly faded as the questions turned to Kiwi geography (that I now know a lot more about), finishing with about 16 out of a possible 69 points. I was runner up for the booby prize, won by an Italian exchange student I would get to know on the upcoming hike. The RTC seemed a lot like the AMC groups I have met, largely middle-aged and retired folk who had a propensity for scheduling hikes and activities during working days. However, their penultimate tramping of the year (their ultimate tramp in the Kaimanawa Ranges conflicted with attending the Tokoroa Axemens Carnival) fit nicely into a weekend I had free.

I was picked up Saturday morning by the club president, a snowy-bearded gentleman originally from Scotland. As we drove out toward Whirinaki, along the same road I took to work in Kaingaroa, we talked about tramping around the world and how Kiwi tramping compares to that in the States. He said that he is in competition with his son as to who can visit the most DOC huts. He has a head start with his years, and has bagged a few that his son will never see, as the DOC loses a few of their over 950 huts every year to fire and new ones are constantly being built elsewhere to replace them. The rest of the group arrived at Whirinaki a few minutes after we did, and the five of us piled into the 4WD van of the local shuttle service to the trailhead.

Our objective for the trip was Central Whirinaki Hut, a relaxed XXX miles up the trail. The trail started with an informational board explaining the significance of the native podocarp forest we were entering, some of the largest species of native trees, whose populations have been decimated by logging in most places. We passed many such podocarps, the first few with small identification signs. Three members of our group were retirees and set the leisurely pace. The fourth group member was an exchange student from Italy named Sergio. Sergio was from a small city in the North, and quite conversational about his home region, hiking in the Alps, land access, bits of Italian vocabulary, and how confusing English names were when he first got here.

We pushed on, and shortly after came out into a clearing of tall grass and wildflowers, with a shelter and picnic table to stop at for lunch. The shelter was far beyond my expectations. I had an image in my mind of the classic 3-sided shelter from Dartmouth’s AT stretch, but an open front was about where the similarities between the two stopped. This shelter had a counter in the center of a 200 square foot floor plan, complete with sinks with running water from a rooftop catchment water system. A woodstove sat in the offset corrugated iron chimney box, along with an axe by a pile of firewood and a set of pots. Four bunks, complete with mattresses, lined the walls to complete thus quasi-cabin.

For most of the remainder of the hike the trail followed the river, albeit carved into the bank 20 feet above the water. In a few locations the steep bank had given away in a slip, and the temporary reroutes involved short, steep climbs up to go over the tops of the slide footprints. Otherwise the trail was wide, flat and smooth enough that I could have happily biked along it; at one point shortly before the hut a tunnel cut straight through a ridge rather than climbing an extra 15 feet. As well as all the markers for stoat traps, and the orange triangles nailed to trees that serve the same purpose as white blazes, I noticed other periodic markers, with sequentially rising numbers. One of my guesses was that these were marking the percent of the way we were to the hut, which seemed to be supported when we hit 100 right before rounding the corner to see the hut, but I lost track of them on the return hike and couldn’t verify their beginning number and location.

As for the hut! This was the first DOC hut I had been to, and I had high hopes based on the quality of their mere shelters. The hut had what I would later find to be a standard layout, two bunkrooms to sleep 25, and a large common area with a woodstove and food preparation areas. Cut off by an internal wall was the locked warden’s quarters, where he or she would stay when making a periodic visit for monitoring or maintenance. All this for only NZ$10/person (US$6)! Our party was the only one there that night, but I decided to stick with my original plan (and save NZ$5) and camp out, given I had packed my hammock set-up. There were ample trees nearby, halfway to the familiar stream, which now burbled merrily in riffles and was home to a remaining population of the whio (blue duck).

On Sunday we bid goodbye to my original ride, who was taking an additional two days to complete the full circuit (if only I had the time), and packed up to retrace our steps. About two miles from the end three of us elected to walk the other side of a loop track that covered some new terrain and small waterfalls. Our shuttle had not yet arrived, so we set down our packs to wait at the trailhead benches. Up until this time Sergio had done a better job than I had in sticking to the group pace rather than distractedly hiking faster, demonstrating youthful spryness mostly only in clambering over the landslides. I was happy with the hiking we had done so far, but Sergio apparently had a bunch of bottled up energy and pointed out that there was a short trail to a notable waterfall that left from the same trailhead we were at. Ever game for a challenge and extra scenic points, I agreed with him that the prescribed 45-minute round trip could be done in the 20 we had until the shuttle’s scheduled arrival, if we ran. Sergio had been hiking in trail running shoes, I in full hiking boots, and I was out of breath after we went up and down several small valleys on the mile to the waterfall. The falls made it worth it though, as they were pleasingly tumultuous and voluminous. There was a pool at the base, much like the one I would visit later on the Kepler Track at Iris Burns, and we took a short, frigid swim before jogging back to meet the shuttle on time. 

A very fancy shelter!