Gosh, have we been so lucky on this holiday as except for the overcast days in Golden Bay it has virtually been sunny every day and we are now well into week 3 of the trip.
You would think that with the sun shining the way it is outside that we would be up and about early and getting in a couple of planned forest walks.
But with everything we wanted to do close by we indulged with a little bit more of bed time with the curtains pulled open of course so we could enjoy all that sunshine.
With breakfast eventually out of the way and the motel proprietor taking over the clothes washing duties using their household machine as the motel one needed fixing, we set off north up SH67 prepared for a few hours on 2 different trails adjacent to each other with what turned out to be some remarkable scenery.
The Karamea township was quiet this morning except for a few locals at the 4 Square shop and a small handful of people, probably tourists like us, having a coffee at the local caf where we picked up a sandwich to sustain us
Since the closure of the Heaphy Track due to storm damage late last year when 2 significant and important bridges were damaged beyond repair, the area hasnt seen the usual number of walkers/tourists to either start the track here or finish it having walked from Golden Bay.
SH67 would take us all the way to the end of the highway and start of the Heaphy Track if we stayed with that road.However, we turned right towards the nearby hills and mountains further behind on Mccallums Mill Road which although unsealed had a good surface to be able to at 35/40kph except on the tighter corners were there some corrugations.
We had no idea where we were going to end up as we hadnt looked at Google Maps before we left the motel but all we could see ahead of us was land in the form of hills steadily rising to the mountains in the distance. We did know that it was 18km from the SH67 to where the first trail started.
the mountains.However,we figured out that after you took off all the twists and turns that we took as the kilometres to go counted down that the distance from the main road to our destination was probably only about 4 or 5 km ‘as the crow flies.
There was thing for sure though we were definitely in a heavy forested area and we hadnt seen another car on the road in the total 18km travelled which was just as well as some of the corners were tight and meeting any of the 4 wheel drives in the car park at the start of the trail would have been an ‘interesting experience!
We must say at this point that Dept of Conservation have done a wonderful job with a brand new flush toilet block, a couple of large shelters with tables to have a cuppa or lunch and detailed presentation with pictures of the history of this area from early European times through the logging of the native trees to the 1960s when felling ceased. The last firm that logged here was McCallums, hence the name of the road.
attraction, the Oparara limestone arch, a young French sounding woman from a contracting firm repairing some damage to a track let us know that she was just about to close that trail as they were expecting a helicopter moving crushed rock to be in the area for the next couple of hours.
So we took the other trail first to the Mirror Tarn and the Moria Arch which would take us away from where the helicopter would be operating.
Again we must congratulate DOC for the construction of the easy walking trail through the regenerating native forest. Here and there you could make out very tall rimus that were either not big enough to be felled back in the 1960s or simply missed by the logging firm all amidst smaller native trees and ferns etc..
It was great to see native forest regenerating in this way and gave us an insight to what it would have been like in early European times.
