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.

Nelson Lakes National Park

“I’m givin’ it to ya!”

Mick the Brit with a kayak school in Murch for six months and a house in Teton Valley for the other six, smiled, holding his hands together, palms up.

“The Sabine River. Up in Nelson Lakes. It looks like a beautiful kayakin’ river. Lotsa Class III, a spot or two of IV and the rest Class II. I looked at just two weeks ago with my family on a tramping trip there. It's never been done.”

Nelson Lakes National Park is a smallish park, long and thin, straddling the north end of the Southern Alps. The Buller River valley separates it from the bigger more tropical Kaharungi National Park where the mighty Karamea River flows.

But in many ways I found the Nelson Lakes to be quintessential New Zealand, with big lakes, blue, snow-melt streams, steep craggy mountains whose bases were draped in southern beech forests. It differed from Chile’s beech forests in that here the tree trunks are black from a mold feeding on the exudates of a native scale insect living in the bark. The female scale insect drips honeydew from an inch long projection. This sweet drop attracts non-native yellow-jackets; the whole forest sounds a buzz with them.

After the Mukihinui mission, Allan and Rob dropped me at the Murchison Riverside Campground where I met Erik Tomsen, a graduate student in Auckland University’s Geography Department. Erik’s from Eagle River and he just graduated fromWest Point last May. Erik stands six foot four and weighs 200 pounds and is strong and fast on his feet as all that muscle would suggest.

He’d come to NZ with his Alpacka raft but finding no one willing to paddle with him, decided to join the Auckland University Canoe Club. To get a kayak he worked at the Bliss-stick kayak factory on the North Island in their “Ambassador Program” where foreigners work for a cheap boat (NZ$500) to take back to their home country and spread the word.

By the time I’d met him he’d made nearly thirty runs since before Christmas. He was primed and ready to go, especially eager to get away from the road and use packrafts as they were designed: walk-in, float-out.

And he was intrigued by the thigh strap idea after feeling the snugness of the hardshell kayak.

I suggested we walk in and do the Sabine.

We could do it as a three day trip, driving southeast out of Murch on the Mangles Road about 10 miles to the Tutaki junction. Hiking into the Park via the Tiraumea Valley we could see if that stream was packraftable, maybe return to the car by floating out, after doing a circuit up the D’Urville and down the Sabine.

But once we’d slogged the 27 km into the D’Urville we realized that there was no way the Tirumea would be worth our return. Similarly, our plans changed when we saw the inviting Class II and III waters of the D’Urville, something of a local Kiwi classic packraft trip. We also balked at the thousand meter climb out of the D’Urville.

Our new plan was to stay at the Morgan Hut, leaving our camping gear and food there while we hiked up to the George Lyon Hut, dressing and inflating our rafts there sheltered from the sandflies.

The plan went beautifully, although by portaging what looked to be a rock tunnel about 45 minutes downstream of the Georg Lyon Hut, we missed some good Class IV water too. The D’Urville was a little scrapey in places, especially for big ole’ Erik, who sometimes seemd like a rock magnet, but a classic traveling run.

After the a three hour hike and two hour float back to our stuff at the Morgan Hut, we continued down more splashy water to Lake Rotoroa. Here we paddled a mile over to the big 32 person Sabine Hut. It was more than half full with hikers doing the popular Travers-Sabine-Speargrass Circuit. It also had a radio to a water taxi.

We made arrangements to have the water Taxi pick us up on the morning of our fourth day, even though we only brought food for three. We spent our third day hiking up the wonderfully scenic Sabine River Trail, a much tighter valley than the D’Urville with a steeper, higher volume river. It looked well spiced with Class III and even Class IV rapids. One section of big boulders and tight drops looked especially appealing.

As usual hiking u and rafting down the same river valley in New Zealand are two entirely different, but complementary experiences. Unfortunately, I had little battery remaining on my camera, so missed filming the best rapids (a 5 move series of drops including sticky holes, 4 foot boulder boofs, a narrow passage past stick-jammed sieves, and a final 3 foot log drop) and the wild portage around the final Class V-looking 500 m long gorge (also at the 500 m contour) through forests toppled by heavy snows of two Augusts ago. Back in below the gorge we paddled to the lake and the Hut.

The next day we took the water taxi out (20 minutes, $NZ 40/pax), as we had no food and didn’t fancy slogging through all the tree fall out around Rotoroa Lake.

Nelson Parks snow-capped crags, aqua-blue waters, and open beech forests seemed quintessentially Kiwi wild, with no cows, sheep, roads, or 4x4s. It feels remote and unspoiled and offers a wonderful packrafting experience of good waters, trails, and huts.

When we got back to Murchison I bought Mick a good bottle of Pinot in thanks for the gift of this first descent.

(Post Script: Apparently someone had called the water taxi operator earlier in the season about running the Sabine, but when she told them the water was high then they decided not to come. So this was a run that others had been watching.)

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.”

Murchison, NZ

If you have a packraft and you are coming to NZ, Murchison should be your first stop. The campground is full of Class II and III boaters and it’s simple to jump on a shuttle for one of the dozen or so runs within a thirty minute drive from the riverside campground.

It’s a four hour drive from Christchurch to Murchison and if you get an early start then there’s time to do an easy run on the Buller, like the Doctor’s Creek run. There’s stuff to play on and a pretty canyon and it’s good to loosen up after the long flight on something really easy. It’s a big river, especially after rain, but perfectly suited for a packraft. I got my first moving current roll on the Doc Creek run and Allen O’Bannon, my substitute for Forrest got his packraft roll on it, too.

We’d forgotten to put thigh straps in one of our boats and when we switched I felt awful without them, like I was going to fall out of the boat at any minute. The seat in Allen’s boat without the straps (it had the D-rings, just no straps) had been cut free and moved forward and big ole’ Allen felt cramped – until he had the thigh straps in.

Anyway, “Once you go strapped, you’ll never go back” seems to be the sentiment of those who’ve used packrafts with straps. The control and the feeling of wearing your boat is really a qualitative change in boating.

One of the NOLS instructors that Allen knew, Dale, was at the campsite and told us it had been raining for the last week. The Buller was up around 140 cumecs (cubic feet per second – multiply by 35 to get cfs) and the Matiri was running at a really fun level he said.

“It’s a good next step after Doctor’s Run,” he said after I’d said that run had been pretty boring. Dale introduced us to Alex, a kid from Montana who’d come to Murchison to learn how to Kayak and was up to come along.

The Matiri was super fun, about 1,000 cfs or so, I reckon, in its short little gorgy section. The last bit was also good, a classic NZ giant boulder garden, I guess Class III-. It took us two hours and the day was beautiful. I did some more rolls, but it always took me one try to get it. It was satisfying to be rolling in a river.

Unfortunately Allen lost track of his jacket, and while he drove back to look for it, Alex invited me to join him and a couple young women and a Mexican engineer, Luis. Later I’d learn that Louis now works in Oz where he misses his homeland's food. Go figure. Anyway, this bunch were piling in to their mini-vans to run the Granity Creek section of the Buller.

Granity has a big powerful solid Class III, maybe Class III+ at the 115 cumecs we ran it at. The drop runs between a rocky cliff and a low alluvial bench. One of the girls was a kayak instructor and she was a bit worried about me in my packraft, especially after I flipped while surfing and didn’t roll it up. When we climbed out to scout it she said I could walk around it to the left, but it looked perfectly doable, sort of like Campground Rapids multiplied by five in volume, length and wave height, but pretty straight forward and fun.

Well I missed her line immediately, right at the top, hit a small hole there, flipped and pushed out of my boat, holding on to it and my paddle while I got flushed all the way down the 100 m run.

Jumping back in my boat when the water settled down, with Lois nearby giving me back-up, I paddled to shore where we regrouped and asked if they minded that I was going back up to try it again. They said I was a good swimmer and that they’d set safety at the narrow spot.

I ran it clean and down the middle and over the tops of the six foot waves in the beautiful blue water. It was great. Unfortunately all my roll attempts failed on the Buller today.

We went back to camp and picked up Allen, who’d found his jacket with cell phone and wallet hanging on a fence post just down from our take-out on the Matiri where some passing motorist on the country road had hung it for its owner to find. New Zealand really is like the US was in the 60s.

Dale had said the lower “Matak”, short for earthquake run on the lower Matakitaki, was his favorite run here. It’s short but technical and has a big drop and high volume, several thousand cfs it looked like to me.

At the put in it looked like the Karamea had, with big boulders from the 1929 landslide. Ferrying over to a rock I caught my left pinky nail on a tie down that I’d stupidly placed along the side of my boat and ripped the whole nail right off to the base. Eddied in the middle, I thought about just ripping it off but felt that would hurt, so I asked Dee, the kayak instructor, if she had any tape. She said no, but I remembered Allen had my black paddle with duct tape and he gave that to me and I wrapped my finger.

The rest of the run was good fun and the final crux big rapid was full-on wavy and powerful. Louis got knocked over by a wave near the end of the run and couldn’t fight his way back up, so he swam. Alex pulled him to shore, Allen grabbed his paddle and I grabbed his boat. Alex then paddled over to me and we emptied Lois’ swamped kayak and Alex towed it to shore.

It’s a great scene here, with kayakers from all around the world and all pretty much intermediates or beginners, so there’s no posturing or pretention. Everyone is here to learn and have fun and the concentration of short runs is amazing and when the sun shines it’s really beautiful.

Murchison offers a wonderful introduction to New Zealand paddling for kayakers and packrafters alike. Of course these are all roadside runs, none needing more than a ten minute walk, but to get a feeling for the water and your skills is super. A wet suit and paddle jacket is all most people wear, unless it’s raining, it seems enough.

But the real boating for we packrafters lies out there on the tracks and in the bush. Allan and Rob and I are heading out for a first descent mission in the S. Fork Mokenui for three days.

Should be interesting.