Day 48: Hiking in Abel Tasman, Takaka to Castle Rocks

After the intense hiking that we managed to do on the Heaphy Track, we decided for something a bit more low key.  Only 2 nights, and we would stay in huts both night.   Also, we would start and finish from our yurt, which means no need to arrange a ride or take our chances with hitching.

   

We hiked up the Rameka, where we went running the previous week.  It's actually a pretty vertical hike:  We started below 30m above sea level, and within 12 km we had reached around 800m above sea level. The half finished hiking trail is called The Odyssey, and while it makes for great hiking, it would be a brutal down hill, although we did see a few tire tracks on it in the fresh mud.

 Someone has built a very fortress like house right at the top of that hill, at around 2400ft above sea level, looking over the valley.  I'll have to ask about it sometime.

But you can see how good their view would be.

Once there, the Rameka Track was a great level pathway into the Canaan Downs.  The Track was original made to bring animals from the valley up to the Downs for grazing, and is now maintained as a mountain bike and hiking trail.  The views of the mountains and valley are pretty impressive.

The downs are a limestone valley in the middle of granite hills, and have an interesting geological feature:  They are a true basin, with no valley leading out of them.  Rather than collect water, however, they have a series of crevices, tunnels and shafts that burrow out of the limestone basin and out the side of the mountains, eventually leading to a stream that flows almost to the Takaka River before it also flows underground.  This stream, the Gorge Creek, eventually flows into the water table that feeds the Pupu Springs, meaning that rain that falls into the Downs goes underground and resurfaces twice before reaching the ocean.

 

That stream bed you can see in the center of the picture flows right into the hillside, and then underground.

 If you squint hard enough, you can see the Farewell spit.

 A little more visible using my binoculars.

  

 A closer up view of the stream and where it goes underground.

There's a little homestead in the middle of the downs that still raises sheep.
After hiking the outskirts of the downs, we climbed the Evans Ridge (Mt. Evans is the highest point bordering the Downs) and then along the Inland Track to Castle Rocks Hut.  The Inland Track is a backcountry hiking track in Abel Tasman, and it shows.

Remember how I said that the DOC (Department of Conservation) builds really nice trails when it wants to?  It's still true, but the Inland Track is sort of the red-headed stepchild of the Abel Tasman.  It hasn't been maintained, it seems, in a long while, so after all the rain we had gotten for the last few days, and the fact that nothing has been done to improve the trail for a while, we spent most of the time on the Inland delicately stepping from root ball to root ball avoiding the often 8 inch deep mud pits.

But we made it to Castle Rock Hut in once piece, even though our feet were muddy and sore (at least it wasn't raining!).  There we found 8 bunks, which by the end of the evening were filled with a cross section of hikers in New Zealand:  An older Kiwi couple (who were unneccessarily grumpy and bossy...not too pleasant, oddly), a German father and daughter, an energetic Frenchman named Kevin, a Canadian obsessed with fishing, and us.

The Castle Rocks above the hut formed little turret-like towers, and gave an amazing view of the Nelson Bay.

   

That's Kevin in the last photo, although I think the panoramic shot squished his head a bit.

It was nice being in a hut, rather than camping.  It got quite cold at 3000ft above sea level, and windy, too.  The woodburning stove and real mattress helped, as did just having four walls around you.

A good day of hiking, and we slept like rocks.