Ruahine Adventure

25Jan07

Ruahine’s 20th January 2007

We left Wairarapa at 8am Saturday morning, having enjoyed the views of McNaughts comet Friday night over the Wairarapa coastline. It was great to be off on an adventure at last as I hadn’t done anything fun for what seemed like years as having bought a house recently seems to take a lot of your time up doing bits n pieces here n there while it’s summer.

The plan was to head to the roadend, walk over the ridge track and down to Barlows hut, then out via the riverbed Sunday. As we approached the roadend the first problem evolved…it was literally the roadend…6km before the map said it was. The road literally ended at a farm gate into a paddock. So…not to be stopped we went through the gate and drove over the paddock, through a second gate and over a second paddock…and come to a crusty, ancient old DOC noticeboard announcing the Ruahine’s. A rough slightly rutted entrance was evident to the river…I had a 4wd…of course we locked the hubs and went into the river! But no road (if we could call it one by this time) was evident anywhere over the river so we decided to change our trip and walk up the river and back down, and of course I made that plan even better by deciding we should drive as far up the river as we could before we start walking! About half an hours driving saw us at a creek mouth where 2 other tracks disappeared into the bush so we parked up and prepared to walk.

It was stinking hot and it took us 3 hours to get to Barlows hut stopping and taking a good dip in a nice pool on the way and lying in the sun for a while. Barlows hut is flash and very comfortable…odd for such a “non-roadend”. It had no clouded over significantly at the hut and as we made hot drinks and had a snack it began to rain. This was a dilemma as we didn’t know the behaviours of Ruahine rivers and the trip relied on riverbed travel so we decided to play it safe and retreat to the car at 8pm. We arrived at the car at 9:30pm, just on dusk andpacked our stuff into the boot, and proceeded to drive back down the riverbed as it may get tricky doing it without a snorkel on the car if the river came up, and we could camp at the paddock where the road ended. Well it was non eventful driving and as we arrived at the paddock we decided we didn’t feel like that any more, so why not just go home? So off home we went…so all in all a nice afternoon walk out, leaving at 8am and getting back 1am the next morning!

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