This article was published in Tararua Tramper, July 2025
Staying close to home
Easier Easy-Medium - Wednesday 28th May
Contrived during Tramper packing and club night the evening before, three of us decided a shorter tramp with minimal travel time was all we could cope with this week. We met at the Ōtari Visitor Centre car park at 9.30 and headed out via the canopy walk to the Troup picnic area and across the stream up to ‘Moko’ the 800+ years-old rimu tree. From there we continued on up the Blue Trail for a couple of 100 metres, turned off the main track on a little known or used track through kohekohe glades. Abundant understory ferns skirted the fairly narrow footpad
Our hopes for the day were to glimpse kohekohe flowers but for much of our surroundings the best we saw was one kohekohe seed on the ground! As we progressed onward we eventually found a few rather immature flowers perched on their trunks before we crossed the virtually dry watercourse and turned sharply uphill. Moments of anxiety were felt for a while as we gained more height on the sometimes tricky, narrower track where one side dropped away down a gully. We also had to cope with a few steep and difficult ‘u-turns’ where storm litter and fern fronds needed to be cleared out of the way. When the track widened out again with more native trees either side we found a suitable place to enjoy a leisurely morning tea. On then uphill until we emerged onto a more familiar track sidling amongst scrubby vegetation that took us over a stile and on up to the Skyline.
From there we turned north downhill on the four-wheel pylon road to the Ōtari turnoff. It took us further down amongst pretty flowering kohekohe and then we came across tiny brilliant red fungi (Hygrocybe miniature?), on the side of the track. After photo shots we carried on down though native bush to the ‘Flax Clearing’ where we had a restful lunch break. Returning to the car park we took the track down toward the Troup Picnic Lawn turning left downstream to the waterfall track. We crossed the bridge up to the lower end of the waterfall then took the left fork to join the circular walk path. We turned uphill and were back where we began. And the light rain began! In all, we achieved a circuit of around 7 kms in about 3.40 hours. My companions both commented that they had never experienced a couple of the tracks before.
Penny Salmond (leader and scribe), Diana Barnes, Muriel Christianson