Sunday 27 January 2019

Leader: Tony Quayle

While it’s immensely popular with mountain bikers, trail bike riders and the like, the Akatarawa Forest isn’t visited much by trampers. Perhaps they’re put off by the various forms of wheeled transport using the park, but as well as the more-commonly visited Wainui and Maunganui summits there are some excellent walking routes there.

Much of the forest was heavily logged up until the 1960s and with many the former log extraction tracks being re-opened by keen users and there are myriad possibilities for exploration. An unexpected bonus of the intensive logging is that the regenerating forest - and it’s regenerating vigorously - puts beautiful dense rimu and miro foliage at about eye height rather than high in the canopy. Every cloud has its silver lining!

Sunday was a drizzly sort of day with cloud hanging low over the hills, but with warm temperatures the damp didn’t bother us. Our group of 9 started out at Kapiti 4X4 and headed up Perhams Road for a few minutes before branching off onto a lovely track known as Western Front that runs between and more-or-less parallel to Campbell’s and Perham’s roads, to eventually reach Titi Road. A few metres along the latter and we turned off onto Co-op, with the intention of following it all the way down the leading spur to near the Titi Stream / Whakatikei forks confluence (as we had done 6 months or so ago).

Maybe I wasn’t concentrating as much this time, because we took a couple of wrong turns and eventually wound up at the lower end of Hydro Valley, a few minutes upstream from Orange Hut. No matter, it was, after all, a bit of an exploration trip. Lunch was at Orange Hut, then - because the day was fast disappearing and we were a long way from my intended route - we walked back up the Hydro and retraced our steps down Western Front.

In all, we were away from the cars almost 8 hours and - depending on whose GPS you believe - walked something between 25 and 30km. It felt like 30 !

Those on the trip were:

Tony Quayle, Chantal Heller, Elisabeth Hynes, John Rowland Neville Grubner, Paula Richardson, Sandra Rowland, Brian Solomon

No photo album was created for this trip.