4-5 June 2014

We got down to Pureora in just over two hours, meeting up in Putaruru with Peter from the Rotorua Tramping Club. We pitched our tents at a DoC campsite, handily located in a frost hollow—it was a ‘moot point’ whether or not the grass was already frozen when we arrived. That was one chilly night, and some of us did not get a lot of sleep!  Next morning I learned something new—it’s best to get your tent down fast in a frost, before the condensation on the inside turns to ice! (there was plenty on the outside already).

As we planned to finish a long way from our starting point, Peter and trip leader Alan Wilson had to perform some juggling with the two vehicles. Peter was understandably nervous about leaving his car beside a burnt-out Subaru in the car park at the start of the track. A seven-hour tramp to the Waihaha Hut awaited us, heading into the range on the Waihora Track, before turning south onto the Hauhangaroa Track.

The track took us through the dazzling forest mosaic that Pureora is famous for, including some patches of toatoa —not a tree that you’ll see every day. It’s a great fruiting year for many tree and shrub species, and in places the forest floor was carpeted with the fruit of hinau, pokaka, native passionfruit, rimu and miro. There was some birdsong on Saturday, and in the afternoon we heard blue duck as we descended a steep spur to the Mangaru Stream.

One of the many great things about Pureora is its remoteness from the main centres of population, meaning you’ve a good chance of getting a bed in a hut, especially at this time of year. And indeed, at 3.45pm on Saturday we arrived to find Waihaha Hut empty, though we were later joined by a couple from Rotorua. When the ’drinks cabinet’ started to run low, the conversation turned to the controversial topic of powderized alcohol (‘Palcahol’): http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/04/21/305637545/powdered-liquor-now-legal-but-won-t-be-in-your-margarita-soon. Now wouldn’t that be handy for trampers!—though likely to cause some collateral damage and more than a few legal hangovers.

The walk out to the road next morning took us through more varied landscapes. The tall forest soon gave way to low, sparse vegetation of tanekaha, toru (Toronia toru), Dracophyllum, kamahi and manuka, growing on hard pavement rhyolite that clearly doesn’t provide much in the way of nutrition—quite similar to the forests you can see on the oldest, poorest soils of the Mamaku plateau. Descending to the floor of the Waihaha valley, we spent the last hour or so walking through frost flat vegetation dominated by Dacrophyllum, mountain toatoa and divaricate shrubs. The shrubs in fruit put on a lovely tricolour display: red (Corokia cotoneaster), white (Coprosma propinqua) and blue (C. Propinqua again). The bellbirds were in full song in a number of places.

We were: Alan Wilson (leader), John McArthur, Keith Robbins, John Grace, Chris Lusk, Peter McKellar (Rotorua).