6-7 July 2019

Leader: Elisabeth Hynes

On a very overcast Saturday morning 7 keen club members headed off towards the Manawatu Gorge carpark. At the carpark we met up with John S as well as Steve, Cathy and 4 of their friends who came to join us for the gorge walk complete with their mobile homes.

It was very pleasant walking the Manawatu Gorge track. We stopped at various look out points and decided to have lunch on our way back next to the wind turbine. As soon as we unpacked our lunches it started to drizzle. After a short lunchbreak we started to head back towards the car park in misty rain.

Before heading towards Pohangina Base for the night we had a warming coffee stop in Ashhurst. Pohangina lodge was very cold when we first got there but it didn’t take long to get a roaring fire going and it soon warmed up to be very nice and cosy. As usual we had a great variety of food for dinner. Steve and his friends joined us again and parked up in the Pohangina Base grounds for the night. Paul who also joined us got out his ukulele after dinner and then one of Steve’s friends joined in with his guitar so we had a very social night with lots of singing.

On Sunday we had planned to do the Maharahara crossing but the forecast wasn’t very good so I made the call to do plan B, the Coppermine Creek walk instead. It didn’t take very long to clean up the lodge on Sunday morning before heading towards Woodville. Coppermine creek is always an interesting walk with lots of signs about the history of copper mining in the area. Copper was first found in the creek in 1887 but despite several attempts over the next 100 years extractions were never enough to make it commercially viable. Still in existence is a magazine shaft which is well worth exploring. We even spotted some cave wetas. We had a very cold and wet lunch stop and were pleased to get back to the cars after about 4 hours of walking. We finished the weekend off with a coffee stop in Woodville. Overall a very sociable great weekend.

Those on the trip were:

Peter Davis, John Glover, Pam Glover, Helen Baber, John Sturgess, Penny Currier, Paul Michl, Steve Hudson, Cathy Hudson Neville Grubner, Elisabeth Hynes

No photo album was created for this trip.