New Zealand West Coast Compilation

While listening to the local college radio station, I used Shazzam on my iPhone to ferret out a 2-person band called "Phantogram" while waiting for a stoplight in midtown Anchorage.

All excited about that new Alpacka "Witchcraft" boat (Alpacka might send one up for us to test-out!), but it's snowing now and can't get out in my own boats even....so the best I could do was reminisce about the West Coast of NZ and put together this:

Upper Hokitika: Satisfaction

Kayaker scorn for packrafts crosses international borders and communication media. You pick it up on forums like “Mountain Buzz” where comments from posters hiding behind names like “super_narnar” or “badass*boofmaster” range from “What’s wrong with a kayak?” to “They look like a sh*tty IK to me.”

But in NZ, at Murchison and Hokitika, the scorn was shocking. I’d thought Kiwis to be open-minded and progressive. And many are. Curiously, it’s often the young kayakers and the original paddling explorers -- the latter who’d traveled the world and run rivers before it was cool, those who’d read John Mackay’s “Wild Rivers” classic about building rafts using packed-in inner-tubes and wood to make first descents of NZ’s biggest rivers 40 years ago – who get it, and respected it. They might not want to paddle a packraft, perhaps, but they find them full of potential in a country where tracks parallel every backcountry river and “burn” (Scottish for creek) and the huts lighten the load making room for boats.

The worst reactions came from the hard-core, gnar-gnar paddling, thirty-somethings and the middle-age kayakers who’d been at it awhile. From them: frowns and open scorn and maybe even a tinge of disgust. I’ve come to expect what many packrafters call “kayaker attitude”, a certain blend of arrogance and disrespect that turns many of us off to kayakers, something early, telemarking “pinheads” must have felt for alpine skiers back in the day. Which is too bad, as we packrafters can learn a lot from kayakers – and indeed have. I am thinking here of Paul Schauer, Thai Verzone, and Tim Johnson in particular, kayakers who get in packrafts and wear grins on Class IV, sharing with the rest of us their skills and knowledge of rivers and creeks. In contrast, there are the middle-aged kayakers who get in the butt-boats wearing an expression like the family dog wears during its annual bath, a sort of “what-am-I-doing-here” and “when-can-I-get-out” look.

Having paddled over a month in thigh straps I can attest that a lot of that sad-dog look is due to the sloppy-loafer feel of a packraft compared to the tight-glove fit of a hard-shell. But when it comes to the arrogant, self-righteous, fascist group, with their know-it-all theoretical insight based on zero experience in packrafts -- well, I find it particularly satisfying to prove their confident predictions dead wrong.

The Arahura River had been a creek run for me – my choice of style. It had a hike-in and a camp-out with both of us in butt-boats. The Upper Hokitika would be a steep creek (over 260 feet/mile for a mile and a half), kayak run for Tim. It would require helicopter access (about US $100 each) as its half-dozen sheer gorges interspersed by slip-fed (slips are active landslides) boulder drops preclude any trails or even routes through the steep-sided canyon. One could hike in over mountains upstream – and one day I hope to -- but the technicality of the run makes carrying even a small overnight load in a packraft by an intermediate Class IV boater like me just too challenging. And, I admit, the novelty of a helo run in a packraft did appeal.

Unfortunately I had to put up with four arrogant kayakers while waiting for the helicopter to show up and four more at two of the portages above must-run rapids in the Hoki’s bowels. And then there was the email comment from one of Tim’s friends who said basically that the Hoki "was no place for a packraft and if you were to take one in, be sure to pack some overnight gear." So I brought along a stick of pepperoni, a wool hoody, head net, and bug dope in case I got stuck and had to hike out. Tim brought his hard-shell since he didn’t fancy hitting his tail-bone again.

“What have you guys been doin?” asked Mr. Cool. It’s the standard way to gauge a boater here on the West Coast, where some of the hardest and most dangerous rivers in the world carve steeply off the Southern Alps through sheer-walled canyons and sieved-out slip drops.

Tim told him, the Arahura.

“Oh yea, mate, the Upper Hokitika’s nothing like the Arahura,” said blonde Mr. Cool in his shades and body armor wetsuit top. His tone wrapped “what the f*ck are you clowns doing here?” around the implicit warning.

As he bundled the paddles for the flight in, he couldn’t hold back his scorn any longer and blurted, “Who’s got the split paddle!”

I didn’t bother answering him. What did it matter: he already knew it all.

Poor, sweet, modest, Class V paddling Tim. He had his hardshell. And he had the experience and skills to run this test-piece. But here he was, suffering contact scorn for being around the likes of me. Maybe it’s my sort of frowny face, big nose, nasal voice, unkempt hair. Maybe it’s wearing long pants over my 1996-vintage dry-suit and adventure racing shoes, my plastic rafter’s helmet -- in addition to my paddle and boat.

The helo arrived and the bad-boys sprinted to it.

“Wow, what’s wrong with those guys? They act like their going to a funeral.”

Quite likely they expected me to die and wanted to get as far away as fast as possible from the epic they knew was sure to happen. They wanted no part of my swims, my junk show, my carnage, my unplanned bivouac in the button-down brush above sheer, polished gorges.

By the time we landed in the little two-passenger 'copter, all six other kayaks, making up three pair-wise groups, were far downstream. Looking below at the first drop I could see them scouting, portaging, racing to keep ahead of us.

We paddled off, admiring a Blue Duck, a long thin waterfall, a shady glen.

“Let ‘em go. We’re better off doing our own thing,” said Tim.

He was right. First off we didn’t need them. Our skills and our judgment were sufficient. Second, it seemed that they were in a hurry, trying to get down as fast as possible. And from my adventure racing days I knew that the best races are your own, where nobody else’s pace matters. Besides, Tim and I weren’t racing: we were just trying to make it down with safe satisfaction.

The first drop was really a double drop. The top one tall, the lower one on a corner.

“You should pull into the eddy below the first drop and then drive sideways over the second so you don’t get caught in the pocket hole.”

I disregarded Tim’s instructions. It looked doable and fun to link them both. It looked like there was room to make the 'snicker-snack', paddle-jab-pivot, and I nearly did, but misjudging the power of the current sent me off-line by a foot and shoved me into the pocket hole, upside down.

Holding onto boat and paddle I waited to surface, but instead found myself inside blue gloom and doom, shoved beneath a boulder. Realizing my predicament I pushed backwards out of the cave and clawed for the surface, dropping my paddle in the process, but managing to clamber on top of the rock that moments before had trapped me.

Above Tim was hidden and unable to help because of a huge overhanging boulder.

“I’m OK! My paddle! Get my paddle!”

The paddle floated away, slid off the next drop, cruised toward shore, then somehow hung up at the brink of another drop.

Tim ran and retrieved it while I caught up on some recently missed oxygen.

Tim wrapped the rope around a log and tossed me down an end with a carabiner that I clipped to myself for back-up. Then he belayed while I scrambled, using the rope as a hand-line to get over the bulge.

“You were right about that corner. I got shoved under a rock. Pretty f*in scary. I’m going to walk a while.”

I boulder-hopped down to where the Funeral Party had recently scouted. I put back in, running a number of fun mid-boat to boat-length drops for an hour or so, walking past the collapsed 'Viagra Falls', a massive mess of sievy boulders.

About an hour and a half after our put-in we caught the Funeral Party portaging the entrance falls to the First Gorge, a mini one and a taste of what was to come.

Seeing my boat, two kayakers from the early group of four, whom we hadn’t yet met, smiled and laughed, perhaps appreciating how easy it was to portage the steep boulders beside crashing falls with a packraft. Taking Tim's boat across a channel, I realized that kayakers are really burly people. They paddle their boats in places they simply mustn’t swim and carry them in places where they mustn’t fall. They are true bad-asses.

But the bad-asses hurriedly seal launched into the gorge pool below and paddled away, leaving without so much as a wave hello or good-bye. Again I was reminded of teams in an adventure race, wanting to drop the clowns in back who so obviously didn’t belong.

“I’ve never really met kayakers like that before,” said Tim.

Twenty minutes later, we caught them again, portaging into the Second Gorge with its series of must-do and partially blind rapids. This section of the Upper Hokitika had recently changed making the guidebooks suggestion of a ferry to river right and portage past an enormous boulder obsolete. Now it was drop into an 'L-Bow' turn and watch for the hole at the end, paddling between overhung boulders and a sheer gorge wall.

The Funeral Crew fully ignored us here, especially Mr. Cool who was worked his still-cam for the keenest photo possible while the others studied the line from every possible angle, which summed to exactly two: very high and directly above.

The Funeral Six studied the rapid with such seriousness, ignoring me as if I was certain to die, that their mood was contagious and I was soon sick with dread. I looked up and wondered how long it would take for me to bushwack along the rim and back to the river. I wondered, too, if I threw up if I’d feel any better.

No words of encouragement, none of warning. Nothing. Like I was a ghost. Five of them treated us as if we were nothing more than soft boulders in their way.

There was one guy, a Kiwi in a white helmet who was actually nice and talked to me. "That giant boulder down there," he pointed to a green, house-sized rock siting on another rock, "was rotated 25 degrees, changing this whole section."

After the Funeral Crew had paddled through, one taking the next rapid below backwards, Tim said, “I’m glad they’re gone. Their mood’s even bringing me down!”

That was bad. Tim’s an eternally upbeat guy.

I was surprised that none had offered us any safety, that once again they hurried off to leave us. They hadn’t even given us the chance to say, “Heh, look. You don’t need to wait for us. We can take care of ourselves.”

“I dunno what’s up with these guys. They don’t seem to have any river ethics. Most kayakers aren’t like this”

“It’s me and the packraft.”

Anyway, we made it down 'L-Bow' and the next three must-do rapids satisfyingly and it was adventure boating at its best. This Second Gorge's three must-do rapids are stacked back to back, and it was a must to do them with Tim. He told me the “L-Bow” turn entrance would actually be easier in a packraft. He ran it and signaled me to follow, warning me off the sucking sieve to the left after passing the house-sized boulder that teetered overhead. Next we scouted for a way to avoid the main flow forcing us into an undercut.

I pointed out a ferry that looked packraftable and Tim ran it, hopped out of his boat on a huge, flat boulder with only inches of cuurent flowing over it, and hooked his foot in his boat's cockpit as he set safety for me.

To the right was the meat feeding the undercut beast; to the left a blind drop; in the middle a wood sieve pinned against a boulder sieve. Must-make moves in a sheer walled room of horrors.

The next blind drop went fine into a circulating pit that Tim let me circle in my boat a few times before fishing me out.

Then three big drops led into a long pool set below the narrowest section of the Second Gorge -- gorgeous!

Almost immediately after leaving the Second Gorge we found two waterfalls that both of us portaged, but Tim said they were both runnable, one upstream and one downstream of another hotel-sized rock, this one we portaged over. It was neat adventure boating here, too.

Below these came a big slidy drop leading into the Third Gorge. This third one began with some ugly sieves, then a must-do blind corner in its middle. The Third Gorge opened up to some easy rapids leading into the highlight of the Upper Hokitika, the Gates of Argonath.

All of this ran pretty much back to back. We’d put-in at 11 AM, caught the Funeral Crew around quarter to one at the First Gorge and again 20 minutes later at the Second Gorge. They were long gone by the time we got through the Second Gorge at quarter to three. We’d spent a lot of time fretting over the must-do lines, two of which made me nauseated with fear – what I call “dread”. Dread returned in the Third Canyon at its must-do blind corner which we finally paddled at 4:30 and reached the fabled Gates of Argonath five minutes later, with its vertical boulder choked narrows and waterfall framing the three foot width of this Fourth Gorge. Half an hour later we’d dropped the last Class IV in the final Fifth Gorge above the intermediate Lower Hokitika run and its Kakariki Canyon.

The intermediate run has a sheer but gentle gorge with amazing water carved sides. We coasted in its gentle current, talking.

“It’s been alright without the Funeral Crew around. I wonder what got a bee in their bonnet? Must have been the packraft.”

“Yea, and those town pants over your dry suit, plus your split paddle. What you need is to pull out a round red clown nose, put it on, and lighten them all up.”

That seems like a good idea. I’m going to get a bozo nose to keep handy in my LJ pocket, ready at a moment’s notice to diffuse the “this-guy-in-his-boat’s-a-clown” attitude I seem to encounter too often -- even here on my own blog and in the Alpacka Forum!

“I think the video you make of this run should be called ‘Proof of Concept’. You just packrafted a West Coast test-piece.”

“I don’t really feel like I ran it. I swam three times and portaged a bunch of stuff.”

“Maybe so, but you swam in Class II and made all the must-do moves. I’d say you did it.”

Yea maybe so, Tim, but I’d already decided that the video of the Upper Hoki wouldn’t be about packrafts. It’d be a tribute to Tim Johnson, a big "Thank-You" to Tim for watching out for me and paddling the classic West Coast creek, not to test himself, but to help me find my way.

We reached the Whitcombe by 6 PM and the take-out below the tourist swing bridge by 7. Under the rental car’s windshield wiper was a note: “Call if you get out before dark.”

I guess more than one kayaker had a heart after all.

Here's Tim's video version:

Arahura -- Proof of Concept

Helicopters are routinely used to access the steep creeks and rivers of the West Coast. I hoped to discover if the classic runs -- like the Arahura, Hokitika, and Perth -- were manageable in what I consider classic Kiwi-style butt boating: hike up to a hut; sleep; walk farther up to the put-in for the helos; float out.

The New Zealand trip has emerged as a collage of mountains and huts, rivers and tracks, people and bush. From sub-tropical tree ferns and warm, amber creeks to talus hopping songbirds and glacial blue rivers. From a 32 person dorm on a water-taxi served lake filled with people from around the world to a remote tin shack stuffed with girlie magazines and three grinning packrafters.

My skills have improved, my body has leaned, the kit and techniques for making the most of this civilized mountain-forest-river landscape have been sharpened.

All my camping gear and food fits in a 15 L dry bag strapped inside my boat, nothings on the bow.

The center-entry boat with five inches of Velcro closure and air bladders on the belly band has thigh straps and a seat moved forward of the top-off valve with a thick, six-inches of backrest. The seat and backrest Velcro in for easy removal and faster drying.

Overnights in huts provide the best night’s sleep, as the mattresses are thick and comfy. No need to carry a tent or a pad, my partners and I park at the trailhead late in the afternoon and hike-in two hours to the first hut, below which is usually a bunch of boogy water and maybe a gorge with plenty of water and Class III rapids.

In the morning after coffee, we leave the dry bag of camping gear (food eaten) and hike up 2-4 hours with lunch, boats, dry-suits, helmets, throw bags, paddles, clothes –- we then boat down with fully unloaded boats, pick up the dry bag and float out to the car-park, usually with enough daylight to dry our gear in the hot sun and afternoon breeze, two meteorological conditions that keep the flesh-hungry sandflies at bay.

It’s a really good system for seeing New Zealand by foot and packraft.

Back in the Fall, while planning for this trip, the Arahura River sat near the top of my West Coast wish-list, above the Perth, Hokatika, Whitcombe, and Styx, but below the Landsborough. The Lansborough seemed doable, but the Arahura felt unattainable -- that is, before Tim Johnson arrived.

Tim flew in on Sunday. We met at high noon in Cathedral Square, downtown Christchurch among the buskers and their spectators. It was the last day of the 10 day International Busker’s Festival, an extravaganza of gags and acrobatics, street gymnastics, juggling, and jokes. Many of the Buskers stayed at the YMCA where I was drinking cappuccinos, making videos, and writing blog entries waiting for Tim to arrive.

Monday we planned to drive over and hike in to run the Taipo. But when we got there the gauge was out of the water, so dry had it been the last couple weeks.

“Let’s go look at the Styx,” I suggested, and we drove on to Hokitika eating some fish and chips and looking at the shops in town. But the Styx looked too low, also, and the Arahura was just a 10 km gravel drive away.

“Why not?” was Tim’s response. He’d been down it six years before.

By 7 PM we were camped in the Lower Arahura Hut, a dirty old thing currently being replaced with a new one by a three-man Kiwi crew who’d flown in with all their materials.

“Who’s got the boat?” they asked.

“We both do.”

“Oh, packrafts, hay,” said the oldest one. “A couple blokes were spinning yarns about them when I was working in Alaska a few years back.”

In the morning we busted out 3 miles to the usual helicopter put-in for this West Coast classic of multiple drops, boulder gardens and infamous rock sieves. The water flowed clean and low under the swing-bridge.

Within five minutes we’d come to the first big drop, scouted and run it. The next slot Tim hit his tail bone hard -- he has not moved his seat forward and the thigh straps pull him off his seat -- and the drop after that he banged his elbow, hard. All this within 20 or 30 minutes of the put-in. It would be another hour before he was not so gun-shy as to portage a bunch of super drops that I plopped in the sunshine.

We scouted just about every foot in this upper “Third Canyon”, knowing that “Curtain Call” and “Dent Falls” lay lurking behind one of the almost continuous horizon lines set between massive boulders. At least this situation kept the camera dry and the video coming. I was determined to run everything – until the whole river went beneath a single flat boulder. And then came “Curtain Call” where the whole river slipped smoothly and seamlessly into a pool of backwash.

“Oh man, Curtain Call’s super dangerous right now.” Earlier Tim had promised we could run laps on this photogenic drop. “Look at that current coming right back over. It’s like a low-head dam right now.”

I recognized the smooth plunge from a day at Bird Creek when Brad M and Jeff C and I could not get past a similar water structure. We both portaged this.

Soon after we came to “Dent Falls” -- or what was left of it. Its boulders had collapsed leaving a massive sieve twenty feet high, with the 700 cfs running behind and between narrow slots no boat – or body even -- could fit through.

A Blue Duck flew in and landed, foraging in and out of the narrow slots of the bank-side sieves, slipping into and out of the whitewater with ease. Eventually the river’s gradient slackened and the boulders shrank enough that we could boat scout, boulder hopping from eddy to eddy, creeping down the drops one tongue at a time.

Tim’s paddling technique and confidence was amazing. It is a real gift he shows for water, and I was flattered he was here to paddle this in a packraft with me. Twice he posted safety below drops that flipped me and as soon as my head surfaced the throw line was on me. Don’t come to the Aruhara without someone so skilled.

His paddling style reveals his kayaking roots: aggressive strokes; multiple boofs over holes, drops, and rocks; long pauses above big drops circling and eyeing and picking his line; and a tendency to forget he had no stern but with the reflexes and strength to brace unfailingly. While he walked more drops than I, he never fell out of his boat.

Running the river required four boating techniques: the first was easy floating through pools or boogy water (Class II) – this was quite rare in the first six hours – sort of like easy cramponing up a firm, moderate slope.

The second technique was boat scouting by eddy-hopping through boulder gardens, a classic Kiwi style of boating, and quite emotionally draining. Apprehension of big drops or sieves with no way out, quickly followed by the adrenaline of drop-able falls works your body through the hormones sent from the mind. I was reminded of simul-climbing on alpine ice.

The third technique was liked belaying pitches: getting out and scouting a rapid, picking a line, setting safety and then making the moves and re-grouping below. Sometimes you “fall” on these and your “belayer” “catches” you with the throw line. It was good to have a helmet, elbow pads, and above all a competent partner.

Finally, there was the walk-around. We did portage every guidebook-named rapid except “Alzheimer's”, and a couple others un-named but dangerous. After six hours and five kilometers I was wupped and happy to see the river let up.

The best rapid was at the end of the “Second Gorge”, below our portage of the deadly “Billiards”, in the rapid called “Alzheimer's”. This had a an s-turn slalom between holes, followed by a big ferry left, a slot into a pool needing a quick 90-degree right turn and a drop off a six foot waterfall. Stunningly satisfying to run.

We picked up our gear at the swing-bridge near the hut , checking up on the workmen’s progress and amazed that they’d framed the hole thing in the eight hours since we’d left: two hours to walk the 5 km up and six hours to boat it back down. From the hut down it was just boogy water and a couple Class III drops that felt like little more than a roller coaster ride. And the “cesspit”

The final canyon, “Cesspit”, is an ugly name for an amazing horseshoe-shaped waterfall into a deep polished schist gorge. A twenty foot wide falls plunges into a fifty foot gorge that is narrower than it is tall, made of polished, vertically grained schist. Below the main entry drop churned more rapids in a gorge I had no interest in running.

In all honesty, I was satisfied, ready to fly home with the best packraft creeking experience I could imagine. How could it get any better?

Landsborough: Mountain and Wilderness

The Landsborough may be the wildest multiday whitewater run on the South Island, but I don’t know, there may be something wilder in Fiordland.

I do know The Landsborough’s thirty mile length is fully boxed in by glaciated mountains on three sides, including the Southern Alps' craggy divide, and a canyon on the fourth.

Last year I’d run the north West Coast’s Karamea River solo after walking into its tropical feeling headwaters with Peggy and Jazz, as a substitute.

But the Landsborough’s been what looks best for a packrafter to explore.

Every packrafter I’ve ever talked to who knew anything about NZ has wanted to do the Landsborough, remote and wild. No sheep, no cattle, no 4x4 tracks. Helos aren’t allowed above Mckerrow Creek, 20 miles up. There’s no map-marked trail as such into its wild heart -- only a single, shabby, old hut and two bivs, one a “rock biv”.

With glaciated mountains and beech forests the Landsborough Valley pulls like a magnet for an Alaskan wilderness packrafter. And after three trips and four rivers Erik Tomsen was ready.

“I like the idea of a source-to-sea trip,” he said.

“I don’t think we have enough time to set the shuttle, do the hike from the headwaters, and then run the river to the ocean before your girlfriend comes in on the thirtieth. But Gavin says its pretty easy in through Brodrick Pass, over by Mt Cook. He’s been up there before. And that way we can run the river the commercial groups do, maybe a little higher”

Thirty-year old Gavin Mulvay is the real deal. A scrappy, fit, classic Kiwi adventurer, he’s a third generation mountaineer: his grandfather was a Mt. Cook Guide, his grandmother the first to climb all NZ peaks over 10,000 feet in a single season. He’s also an innovator and a tinkerer. Before he’d started packrafting, he had created several versions of an “alpine bike”, used for riding downhill but shaved of all weight. And as I write this he’s working on making another kite for skiing in Antarctica.

Gav’s alpine bikes sport hard tails with small diameter rear wheels and larger diameter front ones. They have no seats, no derailleurs, no chains, nor cranks. He stands on the foot pegs and coasts down shingle scree ridges and twisty sheep trails. He even has a modified baby-backpack for carrying these fly-weight downhill bikes up the mountains he rides. He and a friend once climbed to the alpine divide near Mt. Cook and rode down a steep glacier’s morning crust with special bladed wheels. Watching his video and I held my breath as they swooshed past cracks and crags.

Before the alpine bikes there’d been little motor bikes he’d take on long off-road mountain journeys; a split board snowshoe/snowboard; and this past winter while he over-wintered at NZ’z Scott Base in Antarctica working as their engineer, he and an electrician friend built a series of snow-caves to occupy their time.

The first snow cave was a sleeping shelter where he tested his latest soda can alcohol stove creation. Next he and his friend carved out a “lounge” big enough to hold 25+ people. It was wired with light switches and a central, vertical pillar hollowed out for a fluorescent tube light. They hosted a party there with Americans visiting from McMurdo and the Kiwis from Scott. The last room they made featured a movie screen and projector where they showed “Happy Feet.” Featured on NZ TV when they auctioned off their caves on NZ’s version of E-Bay called Trade-me, collecting $2,000 for charity.

Gavin had answered my post on the NZ-rivers.org forum, saying he’d like to try out one of the Alpacka Rafts I’d brought over. He sent pix from his own latest adventure with his girlfriend down the multi-day Clarence using “Warehouse” rafts. The Warehouse is sort of like a NZ K-Mart and the rafts are about what you’d expect at K-Mart. Knowing how fragile they’d be, he wrapped the boast in blue tarps for protection.

Like Erik, Gavin was game for the Landsborough, too, even if it was his first Alpacka trip. All the big Class IV rapids are portageable, according to the guidebook. Hearing his stories on the seven hour drive to the Haast River to set the shuttle and looking him over he seemed fit and experienced, with a good sense of humor and wit.

We left Christchurch at 5:30 PM and by 4:30 AM we’d set the shuttle at the take-out along the Haast and driven Gav’s 4x4 to the Monument Hut near Lake Ohau. The outlook was for a week of great weather.

From the Hut a series of orange marked tracks, complete with huts and swing-bridges leads across open flats, through shady beech woods, past long waterfalls, and beautiful snow capped walls and peaks to Brodrick Pass on the Alpine Divide.

We made good time and reached the Brodrick Hut early, reading hunting and adventure magazines until the sunlight faded. DOC (Department of Conservation) had left brochures and other information on birds of interest: the whitewater Blue Duck; the smallish, peregrine-like NZ Falcon; the Kea, an alpine parrot; and the intriguing Rock Wren.

The Rock Wren is a small, primitive songbird with essentially no tail. An alpine bird, it lives high in the mountains, gleaning talus for small insects. It mostly hops, rarely flies, spending much of its time bobbing like a Dipper. Apparently it spends winters beneath the snow, feeding in the sub-nivean space among bushes, grass and boulders.

Above tree-line in New Zealand’s mountains live geckos, parrots, and wrens, as well as a number of flower from families usually associated with low altitudes and latitudes.

Climbing up to the pass, we looked up to the screech of a Kea, the parrot soaring high over glaciers. On the other side of the pass I found three rock wrens and videoed their rock hopping and dipping (see below). Apparently they are very tame, like many NZ birds (most notably the NZ Bush Robin), and can be tempted closer with offers of feathers for their nests. I had no feathers and they were not interested in toilet paper.

Moir’s Guide describes the route down to the Landsborough from Brodrick Pass as it gets use but is un-marked on topo maps. We found the multiple, towering cairns where the route leaves the creek-bed and climbs to the steep, forested arête dropping into to the valley floor.

The narrow trail twists and turns on a forested ridge only a few meters wide, following orange metal plates nailed to fat, twisted beech trees. For me it was the most amazing trail I have hiked in NZ. There’s enough trail to make it good going, but not so much as to make it boring. It’s no wonder New Zealand produces some of the best navigators in adventure racing: they have a great place practice. At one point we came across an old, metal plate nailed to a tree and punched with holes: a name and the year 1941.

By late afternoon we were down to the Fraser hut, a ratty, tin shack appropriately enough filled with Aussie porn. The light and views were spectacular and the hot sun and wind kept all the sandflies (endemic NZ black-flies) away until the sun dropped and they came out for their last vicious meal before bed: thankfully they don’t bite at night. That’s the time reserved for mosquitoes.

In the morning we followed the stoat (European weasel) trapper’s track up valley. The stoats and bush-tailed possums are two nest predators of native birds that DOC targets for pest control. The possums are exotics from Australia and they poison them by dropping green-colored baits laced with “1080” from airplanes.

“The best way is to drop it in winter,” said Gav, “when they are hungry. It doesn’t take much 1080 to kill a possum. The deer hunters all spread mis-information about the poison. It doesn’t kill birds at the level found in the pellets – tea has as much of the same poison. It doesn’t make the water toxic. It doesn’t kill deer. Hunters just like to complain. If there was something more effective, Doc says, they’d use it.”

The stoats were a different matter: they couldn’t be poisoned. Every 100 yards it seems there was another two-foot long, low, box trap with what looked like a leg hold trap inside, and baited with a chicken egg. A small hole was cut in the mesh on one end, just big enough for a lithe little weasel to sneak in.

I wondered at all the expense NZ goes to control their pests. From helicopter hunting and poison baiting to building and maintaining all these box traps, to eradicating rats from entire islands.

“All these huts were built for the deer hunters after WWII when the boys were away shooting Nazis and the deer reached plague numbers. But serious deer control got started when Tim Wallis and others started using helicopters to hunt them in the seventies and eighties. He got rich doing that -- introducing helicopters as working tools in NZ. As the meat prices climbed and the deer numbers dropped, Tim saw the future coming and started live-catching the deer with Kiwis jumping from helos to wrestle them to the ground! Later they developed pilot-fired net guns. Using the deer caprtured, Tim started farming deer to satisfy the European meat and the Asian medicinal products demand, getting even richer. He went to Russia and taught them how to raise deer and one city built a statue of him.” Today, fields and fences with sheep, cattle, and deer make up a large part of the countryside.

Gavin was an endless fountain of Kiwi lore, exactly the kind of companion you want on a trip to a foreign land. He shared his food as well as his knowledge and expressed daily gratitude for the “flash” paddle and boat I lent him.

About the time the morning fog burned off we’d hiked as far as we wanted, a good four hours above the hut, inflated our rafts and hopped in. The first bend revealed a meaty Class III rapid. Gavin flipped midway down and as I floated alongside him, making sure I was there to help, I grinned and watched him successfully self-rescue, climbing back into the boat and paddling to shore.

“Good job! You passed the first test!”

“I figured when you were smiling like that I wasn’t in any real danger -- it gave me confidence!”

This was the burliest rapid of the day, but there were many more Class III and miles and miles of Class II. The fast-paced current through endless rock gardens; water the color of a precious stone; the mountain scenery; it all combined to offer up what must be one of the best days of packrafting I have ever enjoyed, especially on a big river. The experience and Gavin reminded me of Jim Baughman in 1988, when he ordered a Sherpa Packraft from Fairbanks, had it delivered to Eagle, then used it as we paddled a high water Charlie River in the Interior. Like Alaska, New Zealand really is a packraft paradise.

We spent another night at the Fraser Hut and left at 9 AM for the final 25 km paddle to the Haast River. Below the hut the river enters a canyon that frames stunning views of the mountains behind and dishes up big, juicy drops and waves.

At the water level that day we enjoyed running every drop. Even the crux “Hellfire” while challenging was not terrifying. There were three big rapids that we needed to scout and several others that we scouted anyway. Everything, even at higher water would be portageable.

All in all, the low water Landsborough by way of Broderick offers great intermediate trekking (unmapped routes) and great intermediate boating (NZ Class III/IV). It is yet another world-class New Zealand packrafting route. Upstream of where we’d put-in, there’s another canyon, just downstream of Zora Creek, called “What the f*ck am I doing here?” with what the guidebook (http://rivers.org.nz/nz/west-coast/landsborough/kea-flat-to-clarke-bluff) says are six waterfall drops. Sounds like an expert run, as does the trek in over Karangarua Saddle (http://tramper.co.nz/?3671).

Midway down the final canyon, I twisted my boat around and said, “You know Erik, I thought that it couldn’t get any better than the Sabine -- and then we did the Taipo. And now this. It just seems like it gets better and better.”

“Yea, that ‘s the thing about New Zealand paddling. Each river just seems better than the last.”

Taipo: Never a Dull Moment

As we left Murchison, Mick offered us a final tip. “Go have a look at the Taipo. It’ll be a nice one at these summer flows for your little thingies.”

We’d bailed on the Oparara due to no water and abandoned the plan of meeting the fisherman-with-packraft, Aussie Andrew Allan and his fishing buddy on the Karamea, since the water thre was racing so high that we’d be walking the Karamea Gorge both in and out (sorry Andrew!).

So the Taipo it’d be.

The Taipo is a West Coast run just west of Arthur’s Pass National Park. It has a 4x4 road-accessed lower gorge and helo-accessed upper run. It’s structured like many Kiwi rivers: the lowest bit cuts through a gorge with a highway bridge downstream. A marked and mapped trail follows the river past a series of three huts. The lowest hut makes a good camp, just a couple hours from civilization. The upper huts are good fro blowing up boats and putting on dry suits out of the sandflies. Follow the track up from the lowest hut for an hour to run Class I; two hours for Class II; three hours for Class III; four hours for Class IV – you get the picture – but we haven’t yet hiked five hours above the lowest hut.

Erik Tomsen and I left his car at 6:30 PM or so, the river gauge reading 2.4. We found the hut among thickets of pokey gorse and muddy paths and fresh cow pies. Leaving the hut at 9 AM the next morning, we wandered up an increasingly beautiful valley following a splashy aquamarine stream through mixed podocarp woods. Snow clung to craggy peaks beneath blue skies.

Where the trail climbed uphill we caught glimpses of the river crashing through big granite boulders in smooth tongues that ended in misplaced rocks. Twenty-something Erik is the strongest walker I’ve hiked with in a while and the only way I could keep up was to take off from the hut before he did and have the skimpy trail markings and faint trail slow him in confusion while I made wily time: “Old age and treachery stay ahead of youth and fitness every time,” I couldn’t help thinking.

By noon we’d made it to the Mid-Taipo Hut, below which Graham Charles had described “13 kilometers of class II-III” in New Zealand Whitewater and above that was moderate class IV for four kilometers . We walked another km to the swing bridge and put in at 2 PM for a fast and furious roller coaster ride, twisting and turning steeply between smooth granite boulders, like a NZ version of the Little Susitna River.

Lower, from the Mid-Taipo Hut downstream, the run was characterized by wide splashy runs that funneled into steep, boulder-choked drops, crashing downward into 3-4 foot tall breaking wave trains. After each of these I’d look back and see Erik’s big grin. The valley was open and the river braided around islands in the flats, but the river never slowed.

We reached our gear at 3:30 and shoved off for the last steep boulder funnel at 4 PM. From there the creek picked up water and channelized, then entered its Class III canyon, reminiscent of a fall-time Talkeetna in its constrictions, wave trains and water color.

“Heh Roman! I gotta name for this. If we were to give this run a title it’d have to be, ‘Never a Dull Moment’!”

And here I thought it couldn’t get any better than the Sabine….

Upstream of the final canyon the cow pies and gorse had detracted from the walking, making the route four stars rather than five. But the final canyon made up for that.

The Taipo is world-class packrafting.

Oparara Mishap

“Walking in? Never heard of anybody walking in, but plenty of stories of people walking out!” quipped Mick when queried about the possibility of doing the Oparara, the West Coast’s northernmost class IV run, as a packraft loop.

On the map it looked superb. A “stunning new” trail leading 8 miles from the take-out to Moria Arch, the limestone gateway to the Oparara River.

The Oparara had come highly recommended but carried with it a warning: “too much or too little water in the upper bit leads to more walking than you’d bargained for.”

“This is the nicest day I’ve ever seen on the West Coast,” observed Erik as we headed up the trail with blue sky showing above the tree fern crowns.

We made good time on the new trail of granite cobbles, twisting and climbing through a valley full of mossy trees covered with climbing pandanus.

“Boy, I’d hate to have to walk through that. It looks really thick.” Unlike the new trail we walked that was suited for mountain bike racing, the woods were filled with diverticulating shrubs, vine tangles, and mossy tip-ups.

After about three hours the trail passed over the massive Moria Arch. The arch is so massive that it offers no indication, other than a disappearing river to the side, that the trail passes over the arch and the river. We scrambled down a slimy trail into a cave that opened to a massive chamber where the Oparara River slid through. Water dripped from stalactites and the cave floor was polished limestone and sand.

“Let’s put in here!” Erik was excited by the magic.

Brown water rich with tannins slipped by and clouds now filled the sky. The guidebook had promised flat water after an hour or so of “wood and rocks”. Unfortunately we never got to the flat bit. We spent more than an hour portaging and scouting in the low water.

Rocky shallows crowded with black soggy wood led to narrow crashing slots and boiling pools. We portaged almost immediately on limestone cliffs and boulders when the river slid in a half dozen sieve holes beneath sharp sticks and rocks.

We rafted through a nether world of dripping, overhung, black walls above water the color of a deep porter brew. We made maybe five drops and another two portages, the last following a swim and a paddle that was swallowed up by a sieve. While the moves were generally simple the consequences of a swim were not always safe.

The very low water exposed the ragged black heart of the Oparara, a heart jammed full of tree trunks and spiky, honeycombed boulders. In higher water all of this would be covered but it still all looked like entrapment.

We paddled a few more wonderful drops but each horizon line prompted us out of our boats for a scout. The last one showed a big drop of maybe thirty feet through a sieve of enormous granite boulders down to a sharp left turn. We’d be unable to extricate ourselves should we commit to this.

“Erik, it’s time to exit.”

“Maybe we can put back in to the calm stuff below. The guidebook said there were flat bits.”

We traversed under a limey overhang on a narrow goat trail choked with vine cane. It was slow going. We made a 100 m in half an hour.

Eventually we deflated our boats and -- pinched off by a cliff below and discouraged by the deep base sound, if not the sight, of plunging whitewater -- we climbed out. Passing paddles and pulling up on hardwood handles and limestone grips we climbed vertical jungle for about 100 feet.

I knew the trail would be somewhere “uphill” but without map or compass we’d have to follow the topographic gradient and hope that in this veg-covered karst landscape we didn’t end up confused atop a limestone spire.

The gorge walls ended and we scrambled through a kie-kie thicket, a climbing pandanus that obscured the knife-edged ridge. It was technical bushwacking in our water suits with packrafts strapped to the back of our PFDs. The twisting brittle stalks of the kie-kie supported huge grass-like blades obscuring sinkholes and pockmarks. This ridge, too, ended eventually in a flatter ridge that we followed tentatively upward for another half hour until we stumbled onto the cobble covered track.

“Trail!”

Erik busted out of the bushes and held his hand high. “Give me five!”

I pulled off my dry suit and readied myself for the two and half hour hike back to the car.

“You know, ya gotta have a day like this every so often. A real adventure to keep you honest.”

Maybe so, maybe when your twenty-something. But I’m looking at 50 soon, and these kinda days are hard on an old guy like me.

And I don’t think I’ll be going back to the Oparara....at least not on this trip.

Mokihinui Mission

Forrest had lined me up with Allen O’Bannon, the New Zealand Branch Director of NOLS. He’s led the notorious Drysdale River NOLS course in Western Australia's Kimberly, where it’s so hot it cooks your brains and the crocodiles wait to eat the students on the last day. He’s taught NOLS courses in Alaska, Chile, Wyoming, and Africa. He’s worked on “The Ice” and traveled the world.

He is familiar with water as a canoeist, kayaker, and big rafter. Allen’s hearty, easy laugh recounted many a story of friends we had in common, but it took packrafting to bring us together.

We emailed back and forth about possibilities, settling on a few days around Murchison for Allen to get oriented with the new-fangled, thigh-strapped rafts and for me to get oriented to the New Zealand waters. We’d follow this with a hike in to the West Coast’s Mokihinui by way of a run down its south fork. We tossed around ideas, the most interesting one being a hike over the “Thousand Acre Plateau” by way of a trail out of the Matiri River Valley to Poor Pete’s Hut, then dropping down the Larikin Creek.

Allen made some phone calls to all kinds of characters, including a guy who’s collecting all 1000 huts on the South Island. The man-of-a-thousand-huts suggested a trail from the west over the Glasgow Range followed by a bushwack along Mountain Creek. The loop aspect had a certain appeal.

Allen also visited with Murchison kayaking legend Mick Hopkinson.

“Mick says they’re working on an old trail up to Lyell Saddle. They’ve cut all the logs to there and made it darn near wheelchair accessible most of the way. He also says that nobody’s run the South Fork. It’d be a first descent.”

Good news there.

After running the sweet little Glenroy canyon, Allen and I met Rob in Murchison, a bearded, muscle-bound, twenty-something, hunter-fisher, climber-boater, NOLS instructor, then ran the shuttle and made camp in Lyell. In the morning we packed up and fairly ran to Lyell Saddle on a trail suitable for mountain biking.

Gold miners had left their mark in the Lyell Valley with the track, a cemetery, old cart and wagon wheels , shovels, bottles, and even a moss covered shoe. The trail led to the ridge where we cruised along the tops among stunted trees covered in bryophyte mats. In places gym-sized mattresses of sphagnum moss, twenty feet and more across, billowed across the trail. Weird Dacrophyllum trees, looking like something out of a Dr. Seuse book, poked out of the bush adding to the overall weirdness.

The Mokihinui is a river with a price on its head. The power company Meridian may soon have the govt’s go-ahead dam the Mokihinui Gorge, drowning what is an exceptional big-water, pool-drop run. It’s a northwest coastal river, the next big one south of the Karamea and has both limestone and granite in its headwaters. Its central valley, above the forks, is broad and flat, the bottom of a drained earthquake lake from 1929. It’s also a so-called “Ecological Area” designation, so putting in the dam is creating a stink.

That’s why the trail has been re-cut with plans for an extension: to mollify the out-cry for drowning what’s arguably one of the better Class III/IV paddles on the West Coast.

Rob, a keen naturalist and observer pointed out New Zealand Falcons and parakeets, noisy Tuis, Bellbirds, White-eyes, Rifleman, and the startlingly tame New Zealand Robin on the trail and as we rested on our last break before descending into the South Fork.

“Doesn’t matta what why we go,” drawled Rob, a South African by birth with a Canadian dad and British mom who’s grown up in New Zealand, “’cause we got gravity workin’ for us.”

Unfortunately he was drawn by gravity to the slimiest, stick-infested, slot of a creek he could find and he darned well wanted to stick with it.

“Dear me,” muttered Allen in a few spots on slippery logs over shallow pools.

While we’d made the saddle in 5 hours, a good 18 km, the next “gravity assisted” 7 hours gave us only 3 km, this including the last 2 hours in the South Fork where it was deep enough to float the raft with our packs.

My feet were beat from the slimy rocks and water of the NZ bush-boy’s route, so the literal “pack rafting” (as distinct from “packrafting”, which is an actual form of boating, aka “butt-boating”) was welcome. Where the water was deep enough to packraft, we pulled over, set up the tents, and cooked over a small fire. The sand-flies were manageable, the forest beautiful, and a rare Blue Duck, an endangered New Zealand whitewater duck (like the Harlequin in Alaska and the Torrent Duck in Paragonia), sat just downstream. It was my first and I was excited.

They are slate gray colored, with a mallard-like body, a purplish breast, white bill, and red eye. Not as handsome as a Harlequin or as svelte as a Patagonian Torrent Duck, but still a neat bird. Rob said that he’d seen fifty on one trip!

In the morning we paddled off downstream, from about a mile or two below Slate Creek. Rob pointed out a pair of Blue Ducks .

Above Mountain Creek we paddled very shallow water through narrow slots and chutes, the kind of stuff only a packraft can manage and good fun in spots, like a 20 foot water slide.

Still, and as usual, the kayakers, Allen and Rob, looked mostly like a house pet getting a bath. They wore that forlorn look of a dog standing in the bathtub, soaked and wondering, “When is this going to be over so I can get back to what I really like to do?”

But I loved it. Lots of wiggling down narrow slots and careening off boulders. Classic PR 3 stuff. Still it was exhausting, spinning and digging and humping the boats over the shallows, pushing with the arms while still in the boat.

If I’d managed to pack lighter, it would have been better.

By the time we got below Mountain Creek the soft limestone of the “Thousand Acre Plateau” dropped down and crossed the creek bed. The water disappeared. For every tributary that entered, a similar flow seemed to drop into a limestone pit. Soft and slippery on foot, the rock abraded to the boat bottom. Still we managed a couple long slides into pools.

“These are like California slides with the water turned off,” quipped Rob.

Below the limestone beds, boulders again made up most of the creek but the water did not return until Larikin Creek. We paddled deep, still pools, each with a single enormous brown trout as long as my arm. One pool had an enormous eel, too. Below each pool we’d walk along sieved out “gravel bars” made of basketball-sized boulders. The creek had disappeared.

At Goat Creek Hut the water seeped back above the bed. Downstream we beat against the afternoon headwinds across lazy loops of the South Fork as it flowed through ghost forests, drowned in the last earthquake and now piercing the river like a devil’s maze of fence posts.

We pulled out at the Mokihinui Forks hut by 7 PM, 9 hours of paddling and wiggling and portaging past sieves, big and small, having made the first descent of the Upper South Fork of the Mokihinui (and the Upper Upper). But honestly it’s not worth repeating.

Better to just hike in the trail from the end of the Seddonville Road, the normal take-out for the Mokihinui, maybe 5-7 hours to the Mokihinui Forks Hut and then raft down the half dozen big-water Class III-IV rapids back to your car. The Mokinihui Gorge is a classic packrafting river of pool drop architecture, and beautiful glass-green waters. It’s clean and safe, and fun. I never felt apprehensive or even nervous really, except on the third big rapid.

We scouted three from shore and the rest were boat-scoutable. It’s on this river that I finally learned how to paddle the big boulder studded NZ flows by eddy hopping to boat scout your way down, a watershed moment for me, really.

It was fun to watch Rob and Allen start off sneaking every big rapid in the morning then plunging down the meaty bits by the afternoon as they discovered for themselves what the little boats were capable of.

When we got back to Murchison Mick asked us about the Upper S. Fork run.

“Not worth repeating,” we said, wrinkling our noses and shaking our heads.

“Yea,” he smiled knowingly, “you gotta kiss a lotta toads before you find a prince.”