Day 42 – Mesopotamia Station to Boundary Hut

Reached the hut after sunset again.  I hope this isn’t becoming a pattern.  It’s been a good day despite that.  I started slow this morning, enjoying the space to spread out my things and plan. I drank a cup of tea while I took a hot shower, and then another cup of tea while I analyzed the maps for today. It looked like about a fourteen-mile day - easy. Good thing, too, because with all my dawdling, I didn’t put on my pack till 10:30.  The main challenge of the day would be cossing the Rangitata River.

I went by the main house to drop off my payment and chatted with a woman there about the river.

“Be careful,” she said, “It’s was high recently, and though it’s come down since, it’s still not what I’d call low.”

My trail notes say the Rangitata is crossable on foot, but qualify that with the words ”should be” and “usually.”  Even after my recent encounter with the Ahuriri, I’m nervous about river crossings - probably a good thing.  So I set out on the dirt road to the river, pondering what I might find, my pack liners doubled up and closed tight just in case.

Half an hour later I was passed by a four-wheel-drive. “You walking or do you want a ride?” asked the driver. The way he asked made it clear he understood the reasons one migh choose to remain on foot, and I politely declined.

He was followed right behind by another three vehicles. Just as I was about to step back into the middle of the road, another one came zipping along, and then another. It was a caravan of four-wheelers, fifteen of them all told. They stopped only a couple hundred meters ahead, where there was a carpark with a toilet. As I reached them I had an idea.

“Going across the river?” I asked a fellow who was looking for a rock or stick to let air out of his tires.

“Yep!  We should be going up a little ways further, then shooting across the river.”

This suited me just fine. Why worry about the crossing when I could get a ride across in perfect safety, and keep my feet dry to boot?  When the group started rolling, I got in his car and rode along. I had never gone four-wheel-driving before, and splashing up and down the various side creeks was a blast. My new friend had a CB radio in his car, and the ride leader was talking about some of the scenery ahead and around us.  The group was part of a four-wheel-drive club based out of Christchurch, some two hundred and fifty strong. I had a look at their club magazine, listing upcoming rides and equipment that could be borrowed by members. It was very well produced, and even had a section on their didymo policies.

The Potts River valley was my target across the Rangitata basin, and as we watched it scroll by on the right, my host picked up the radio. “Murph, just to check – are we crossing the Rangitata today?”  The answer came back “Unlikely.”  A misundertanding about routes, I suppose. I thanked my driver profusely as he let me out and I started walking again.

I crossed a broad shingle plain before I came to the first small stream of the Rangitata and splashed across it. This is one of New Zealand’s many braided rivers, an ecosystem supposedly unique in the world. The river is composed of a number of streams, joining and splitting repeatedly along its length. In between streams are rocky islands of shingle and sand, some of which go long enough between being flooded to grow a decent plant covering.

As I plowed handily through streams no higher than my ankle, I grew happy. This was easy going!  The fine sand gave the place a bit of a marine feel.  Some native bird shrieked like a seagull, and I imagined myself on one of the rockier beaches of Cape Cod’s National Seashore.

The riverbed was broad, and it took me almost an hour to get across it. Crossing a braided river is a matter of walking up and down the islands to find the right spot to cross. A stream that is deep in one place may get shallower as it slips sideways across the tail end of an island to rejoin its neighbor. Similarly it may be easier to cross near the head, where it first splits away. These streams were all quite manageable, and I didn’t need to do much walking to find crossings that never went above mid-calf.

The northernmost stream is called Deep Stream, so when I crossed a stream that went to my knees and could see no more ahead, I declared myself done and stopped for lunch.

Soon after I started walking again, though, I came to another stream. This one was rushing furiously. I found a diagonal path across it that looked like it would be relatively shallow throughout. But the current grabbed at my feet whenever I tried to walk downstream. I turned around to face the current and crab walked sideways and backwards.  The water came up to mid-thigh as I passed a boulder, and then quickly got shallower. My earlier cockiness was gone, but I made it across with no problem.

From here it was straightforward to head up the Potts River.  The trail through here hasn’t officially been put in yet, so I had plotted a course that looked good on the map, up the river a ways, then climbed the hills on my right to a fence line, which I could follow over a ridge to the hut.

On a map, it’s easy to look at a bunch of contour lines and say “it’s a bit steep, but no problem.”  In reality, those hills on my right were quite a bit bigger and steeper than I thought. My easy day was turning into a bit of a slog, but I was still in good spirits. The sun was shining, there was a cool breeze, and I felt like I could go all day, evem if I was resting every five minutes on this hill.

Up top, the fence line showed up just as promised, and as fences tend to do, took off in a straight line without the least regard for slope or convenience. Still, it was a great reference point in untracked territory, and it shot me right over the ridge, with a beautiful view, as I crossed, of Mystery Lake reflecting the lowering sun.

From there it was just a race, and once I found the four-wheel-drive track, I had an edge over the sun. There was still some twilight left when I arrived, but only by the slimmest of margins.