Day 59 – Blue Lake Hut to Sabine Hut

Many times while hiking on Te Araroa I’ve had the pleasure of watching a river grow from its trickling headwaters into a massive waterway, as I walk down along its valley.  Not so today, though.  The Sabine never trickles; instead it springs, fully-formed as Athena, from its headwaters beneath Blue Lake.  Water pours through large gaps between boulders and creates an impressive waterfall that gets the river off to a very respectable start.

I walked alongside this sudden torrent all day, descending the Sabine valley through honeydew beech forest.  These beech trees look like chimneys peeled inside-out: tall, straight, and covered in thick black creosote.  But no fire has touched this national park in recent history.  The “soot” is actually a black fungus that thrives on refined beech sap.  This refinement is courteously performed by the female beech scale insect, which burrows into the bark of the tree to feast on the protein contained in the sap.  The excess sugar is excreted by way of an anal filament which protrudes out of the bark even though the insect is completely concealed.  Looking closely at these trees you can see hundreds of fine white hairs standing out from the black fungus.  At the tip of each hair is a drop of honeydew, a favored food of bellbirds and other nectar eaters.

As with most New Zealand ecosystems, there’s a war story waiting to be told, and in this case the invading army is comprised of wasps, and to a lesser extent honeybees. These exotic species thrive on the honeydew and reduce the supply available for nectar-eating birds.  I saw few wasps directly, but whenever I was far from the rush of the river, I could hear a low omnidirectional hum like a massive piece of machinery operating just out of sight.  It gave the forest an oddly industrial feel as I descended to Lake Rotoroa.

Walking a nice trail through beech forest was a pleasant change from the rough alpine routes
yesterday, and from the river flats of the day before.  This is the most enjoyable sort of
tramping, when each day brings changing terrain and different challenges.

Now that I’m in a national park, the huts are bigger.  Sabine Hut, on the shores of Lake Rotoroa, sleeps thirty.  Luckily when I arrived there were only four people playing cards around one of the tables, with a couple of hunters due back later that night.  A wood stove in the center of the room was doing a very effective job of pumping out heat, and I was still warm from walking, so after dropping my bag I donned my swimsuit and ran down to the lake for a dip.  Sabine Hut is serviced by a water taxi, so there’s a wooden jetty near the hut.  After splashing around a bit I lay out on the jetty and watched the clouds dimming as I cooled off.

The hunters returned well after dark, as hunters typically do, and started cooking dinner.  There’s no love lost between trampers and hunters, and the card players took this as a good time to retire.  From the younger, slightly less brusque, hunter, I heard that there were lots of eels down by the jetty and I went down to take a look.

It was eerily silent at this time of night – the wasps were in bed, and there were no birds about, not even the nocturnal morepork.  The air felt surprisingly warm, much warmer than when I arrived.  When I lay down on the jetty with my head sticking out, and pointed my flashlight into the waters, I was delighted to see a cluster of longfin eels swimming in, out, and around the pilings below.  The water was so crystal clear they appeared to be floating above the ground, and their silent movements were hypnotic.  I watched them for almost an hour between rolling over to gaze at the now-visible stars.  By the time I left I could identify a couple of eels by their habits.  One of them in particular was fascinated by my flashlight and would alternately charge towards and shy away from the source of the light.