TRIP REPORT : Rimutaka Range

 29 – 31 March 2002 :   Rimutaka Range

Well-laden, we walked from the Catchpool road end along the Orongorongo Track and established ourselves at Tararua Tramping Club's Waerenga Hut, on the True Left of Browns Stream.   After lunch we botanised up the spur above the hut to about 435m above sea level, seeing plants ranging in size from a tiny strap fern, Grammitis ciliata, sapling ramarama and small-leaved milk trees, to a large karaka and northern rata.   We noted with concern that hut owners have a variety of weed species near their huts, including Mexican daisy, Erigeron kraussiana, hydrangea and montbretia, and hope that DOC will enforce the condition in hut licences which requires licensees to remove such species.

Saturday was the day we had been looking forward to, botanising from the Orongorongo River up the Mt Matthews Track to the summit, 941 m.

We had the luxury of Tony Druce's list no. 85 for Mount Matthews from 1500 – 3086 feet, prepared during ten visits between 1947 and 1987, and an article by AD Bedde in the BotSoc Bulletin, no.33 February 1966.   Despite drizzle, we began listing species as soon as we left the Orongorongo River, thus expanding the range of Tony's list.   Highlights of the climb were additions to Tony's list including a seedling and a sapling narrow-leaved mahoe, Melicytus lanceolatus, and a sapling raukawa, Raukaua edgerleyii, the roar of the severe gale, and the heaving of the root plates of the silver beech trees lurching in the wind.   The range is a harsh environment the indigenous flora and fauna have evolved to cope with severe weather, which includes winds up to 330 km/h and intense rain storms.   As well as occasional large earthquakes, the depredations of pest animals such as deer, goats, pigs, possums, mustelids and rodents, and infestation by pest plants have the power to tip the balance of nature against our indigenous flora and fauna.   The Department of Conservation is not sufficiently funded to destroy these alien invaders.

On Sunday, we botanised up the spur on the True Right of Browns Stream.   Here we saw northern rata windfalls being cut for firewood, and about twelve Hericium coralloides fungi on the side of a windfall.   It was this spectacular fungus which featured on the $1.30 stamp issued by NZ Post, with other fungi stamps, earlier this year.   We then packed up and tidied the hut, and left for home.   About 10 minutes beyond the bridge over “Jacobs Ladder Creek”, we dropped onto the abandoned and pleasantly – reverting Old Five Mile Track.   Soon we stopped for lunch, inspired by our finding a scrambled-egg yellow Myxomycete fungus on a dead beech log, a photogenic combination!   And the most amusing memory of the trip?   Perhaps it was the sight of Ted, sheltering from the gale among the leatherwood on Mt Matthews summit, trying to talk to a relative by cellphone.   The roar of the wind was almost too much for the technology!

Participants: Bev Abbott, Ted Abraham, Chris Hopkins, Chris Horne, Rodney Lewington, Barbara Mitcalfe, Darea Sherratt, Julia Stace.

Chris Horne