A dreary start

Wellington, 22 Aug.


I’m back in Wellington for a couple of days following our first week in the Tararuas; returning to Masterton this afternoon.

Our team was choppered into Dracophyllum Biv on Monday morning; three trips were required in order to get all our camp gear in as well. We had a base camp site organised in the headwaters of the Otaki River, so most of it was taken straight there. The biv was a good start point for the first days work, though. It was a great day; Mt Taranaki was clearly visable from our vantage point. While we were waiting, Mark and I checked out the bush line vegetation. It being my first time in the interior of the Tararuas, I was struck by the load of moss and lichens on the tree trunks. It’s usually a sign of a persistently cloudy climate around the tops.

The first day was unremarkable; I slipped going up a bank and smacked my head on a rock, just on the eyebrow, giving rise to a wee bit of blood. Nothing too serious. We managed to get two 10x10 plots finished, but it was quite slow going due to showing the two newbies (including myself on this project) the ropes. By the time we finished and reached our campsite, it was nearly dark, and just starting to rain.

It rained heavily all night. We rose at dawn to find the river flooding, and our campsite under threat. There was a mad (but organised) scramble to move our entire camp up into a clearing in the bush. Seven tents and a tarp in an area that turned out to be rather boggy, and getting boggier as the day went on. With the river flooding, we were more or less stuck until the rain stopped. I started reading my book. My eye was rather swollen, and was starting to bruise into a classic shiner.

Over the next two days, the rain came and went, but never went for long. All we could do was sit and wait, trying to keep warm. Everything was wet, including sleeping bags, ‘dry’ clothes, and food. I finished my book, all 700 odd pages of it. We played cards, told stories, snacked on our supplies. The river dropped marginally, but by the end of Wednesday evening, when the rain finally stopped, we were still uncertain as to the weather forecast, or even if there was one for the Tararuas. Fresh snow on the tops demonstrated how cold the weather had been. All in all, not a highlight of my fieldwork career.

To finish off the week, we got a good days work in on Thursday, and Friday looked promising, too, until we got a call from the chopper pilot that the weather forecast was looking bad for the weekend. We had a narrow window of opportunity for him to collect us before strengthening nor’ westers on the tops prevented flying, which would have stranded us in the wet for another three days. Needless to say, we were all only too pleased by that point to come back to base slightly earlier than scheduled.

Cheers
Matt