Windy Tops

  • Daywalk: Point Dorset and Wellington’s Eastern Walkway

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    Waves breaking north of Point Dorset.

    I haven’t been tramping for over 2 months thanks to some logistics, and it feels like ages. I hoping to get away to the Ruahines next weekend, and that’ll be nice. Meanwhile however, I had reason to drop Stacey off at Seatoun near Wellington’s south coast and next to the harbour entrance, and I thought that I might go for a walk around there rather than heading straight home. It was really only a 2 hour walk, but I’ll label it here as a daywalk because it could consume a day for someone who wanted it to do so.

    Seatoun is a Wellington suburb out past the airport. It lies on the eastern edge of the peninsula jutting into Wellington Harbour. It’s very accessible to the coast, and there are a few walking tracks nearby which provide a really good experience of interaction with the sea both from beach-level and from the hills above, especially during a strong southerly where the wind comes directly over the sea from Antarctica and thrashes the coast. There was something of a southerly today but not a strong one and it was rather pleasant wind mixed with the sunshine and high cloud. My basic plan was to go for a wander around Point Dorset somehow, then come back along the coast to Tarakena Bay near the Wahine Memorial, and back to where I started (Seatoun) via what Wellington’s city council calls the Eastern Walkway.

    Date: 14th March, 2009
    Location: Wellington’s south coast.
    People: Just me.
    Route: Looping clockwise around Point Dorset starting from the Pass of Branda, then looping clockwise around the coast and up over the Eastern Walkway.
    [Photos and Videos]

    This post is a trip report. You can find other trip reports about other places linked from the Trip Reports Page, or by browsing the Trip Reports Category.

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  • Te Araroa, National Cycleways and Recessions

    This morning I was reading Michelle’s latest post about the NZ government’s pending plans to help offset the recession by spending $50 million to build a length-of-New-Zealand cycleway. Michelle’s thoughts, which have been similar to mine, reminded me of how weird I thought the idea of a cycleway was when I first heard about it a few weeks ago. It’s not so much aversion to having a cycleway as the suspicion of why its has suddenly emerged now.
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  • Stolen Shingle Slip Knob Plane Wreckage Found in Masterton

    Just as a follow-on to my previous post about the Shingle Slip Knob plane wreckage having been stolen, it seems that the wreckage has now been discovered in an aerodrome at Masterton, care-of the NZ Sport and Vintage Aviation Society who intended to display the wreckage in a the George Hood Aviation Museum which they’re building.

    Apparently they had no idea that they might be breaking some kind of law by fly into conservation land and taking things! I’m not sure why — if I wanted to reconstruct a New Zealand back-country hut for a museum in my back yard, would it be okay for me to fly in with a helicopter and take that from conservation land too? Perhaps the leave-it-as-you-found-it rule isn’t quite so obvious for people who don’t spend a lot of time in or near New Zealand’s conservation land.

    It sounds as if it was some kind of misunderstanding and I haven’t exactly figured out what I think about this at the moment. Supposedly DOC’s lawyers and the families of the pilots will decide what happens next.

    There seems to be a continuing discussion about this issue over at the NZ Tramper website.

  • Tararua Plane Wreckage Stolen

    This is quite bizarre and rather concerning.

    [Edit 22-Jan-2012: This post seems to turn up quite often in search engines. For the more complete media narrative of what happened after I posted this, you should also read Stolen Shingle Slip Knob Plane Wreckage Found in Masterton and Tararua Plane Wreckage to be returned to Tararuas]

    The Tararua Range is dotted with plane wrecks which make up much of the history of the region. A particular one of these wrecks is very well known to people who visit the area, as it’s clearly visible from Mt Holdsworth and the surrounding ridges. It seems that recently, this wreck has been raided and major parts of it have been stolen for unknown reasons.

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    The Shingle Slip Knob wreck of 1955 is clearly visible from the ridge between Jumbo and Holdsworth along the popular Jumbo/Holdsworth loop. (This photo from December 2006.)

    According to the linked article from the Dominion Post, an unidentified helicopter was seen making three trips to the wreckage, and further investigations have now found that the plane’s engine has been taken, and other parts have been moved to other places for easier removal.

    From the linked article:

    The wreckage of a plane strewn near the gravesites of two pilots killed in the crash in the Tararua Range more than 50 years ago has been stripped in an act damned by the Conservation Department “as daylight robbery”.

    “In the past week, parts of the plane’s remains, which are now owned by the Crown, have been whisked away and other sections have been moved into clearings for easier removal.

    [–snip–]

    Tramper Barry Durrant told The Dominion Post he saw a red and white Hughes 500 helicopter make three trips to the site of the wreckage last Friday.

    The Department of Conservation staff who administer the park are fairly dismayed, and I don’t blame them. So am I. It’s disrespectful to the pilots who died in the accident, and it’s disrespectful to everyone who enjoys the history of the Tararua Range.

    Update 8-3-2009, 9pm: There’s a conversation thread about this topic running over at New Zealand Tramper.

  • Rain rain rain

    I like rain, and so far it’s been raining a lot this weekend. I have several friends spending their time in the Tararuas this weekend, mostly in the region of Totara Flats. It’d be really nice to have been able to be there, but unfortunately I’m still catching up with a few things that fell behind during the few weeks I was overseas. Last time I visited Totara Flats was also a weekend full of weather warnings, and we nearly became trapped there as a consequence of rising side-creeks flowing over the tracks, which made the excursion a nice little adventure. I imagine they’re having quite an exciting time right now, and a few days from now I look forward to inquiring as to how it went.

    I did get out for a walk in the rain this afternoon, however, starting in Otari Wilton’s Bush (a 10 minute walk from our current residence), and walking up towards the Skyline Walkway. The Kaiwharawhara Stream was as full as I’ve ever seen it — probably still safely crossable (not that there’s a need with all the bridges), but much higher and faster than its usually tame appearance. Walking along it for a few hundred metres was a telling experience, every so often seeing another temporary ad-hoc creek racing down the hillside and crashing into the stream valley at the end, making a lot of noise.
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  • Final thoughts

    Travelling is a really fascinating thing, but something that gets me about it is that it’s a way to notice just how screwed up the world can really be. I’ve just come back from the USA where briefly I visited San Francisco, stayed 2 weeks in a hotel prison stuck behind a highway in New Jersey, and eventually escaped into the Manhatten metropolis of New York City for about a week at the end. This will probably be the last post I write about my recent trip, since I’d like to keep the focus of this blog on walking and tramping related topics.
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  • Daywalk: Pencarrow Head and Lake Kohangapiripiri

    One of the places in the Wellington region that I’ve never properly visited, which I’m almost embarrassed to admit, is the area around Pencarrow Head within East Harbour Regional Park. Though it used to be remote, it’s now very accessible from Wellington, just down the road from Eastbourne on the eastern side of Wellington Harbour. It’s still very unpopulated though, despite the accessibility.

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    Lake Kohangapiripiri.

    I arrived back in New Zealand from the USA at 8am Tuesday morning and it was an awesome day for blue sky and sunshine. As I’d already decided not to go to work, I thought I might try and go out for a walk instead rather than just sit around at home and try to sleep off any possible jet-lag. I’m very glad I did, because I think I needed the recovery time after being trapped in a concrete jungle for so long. I like coming home.

    I think it’d be possible to catch a bus to Eastbourne and do the entire thing with public transport, but I drove there on this occasion. The legal part of the road ends a few hundred metres south of Point Arthur, at a gate called Burdans Gate. From here it’s necessary to get permission from the Hutt City Council to drive any further, but it makes more sense just to park a car and start walking.

    Date: 17th February, 2009
    Location: East Harbour Regional Park, Wellington.
    People: Just me.
    Route: Along the coast to the Pencarrow Lighthouse, around Lake Kohangapiripiri, and back the same way along the coast.
    [Photos]

    This post is a trip report. You can find other trip reports about other places linked from the Trip Reports Page, or by browsing the Trip Reports Category.

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  • How to be less insane

    Apoligies for the double negative. The work things have finished and I’ve met up with Shaun and Sarah. We’ve already been to DC for a couple of days, which I heartily recommend — the Smithsonian Air and Space museum and the Spy Museum are both awesome. I won’t dwell on these in this post, however.

    After 2.5 weeks stuck in cities (or hotels), I finally had an opportunity to get out and go for a walk. This is good, because being stuck in hotels and in the city has been driving me insane. The only problem is that I don’t know exactly where I went. Shaun suggested the Blue Mountain Twin Summits Trail, which is part of Blue Mountain Reservation. I caught a Metro North train from New York up to a town called Peekskill, on the edge of the Hudson River. From the local railway station at Peekskill, it’s a roughly 1.609344 km walk to the entrance of Blue Range Reservation at the end of Lounsbury Lane.
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  • A world of small differences

    This isn’t a trampey-related post, but I thought I’d write an update about what’s going on. In short, I made it to the USA without any incidents.

    After an overnight stop in San Francisco, we flew into JFK in New York last Saturday (Sunday NZ time), and were taxi’d to our hotel in New Jersey, which is the main base for a couple of weeks while we do some work-related things with a company that’s 5 minutes down the road. And I use that phrase loosely, because as with everything here, it’s a 5 minute drive. It’s actually very frustrating, because although the hotel is quite nice there is nothing nearby. It’s an island in the middle of a freeway, and it’s impossible to get anywhere without driving, which is a a problem when there’s no car. Even food is a problem, because the hotel doesn’t have any proper restaurant — they just expect people to have cars.
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  • Outdoors in New York

    I was all set up to enjoy a nice trip to the Kahurangis over Wellington Anniversary Weekend, which is this coming weekend. The bad news is that I had to pull out, which I’m quite saddened about because I haven’t yet seen the Kahurangis up close, and I was really looking forward to it. The good news, however, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that the reason I pulled out is because the following weekend, work’s sending me on a 3 week trip to New York. We’re getting diplomatic passports sorted and it’s quite exciting.

    It’s actually only 2 weeks of work, and that part is really over the border in New Jersey. I’m tagging an extra week to the end to take a look around New York during which I hope to be accommodating myself on the floor of a friend’s apartment. I suspect the time of year is very against me and so far I’m not planning to take a lot of outdoors gear with me. If anyone can suggest some interesting walks or outdoor things to see that might be conveniently accessible in the region during the early to middle part of the winter month of February, though, I’d be interested to hear about them.