28 July 2007

Goodfellow Track

page 2

More steps

More views out.

A large rimu provides some of the frame. Speaking of which, I have never seen Alice more completely entangled with pieces of dead rimu leaf than she is today. I am obliged to spend nearly 45 minutes combing and cutting these free when we get home.

I seize the opportunity to take 5.

The view is right out across Auckland and the harbour.

We carry on downward, gently when we are not doing steps, and

steps when we are not doing gently

We pass a biggish kauri right next to the track

and a look upwards gets something of the grandeur I love in these trees.

There's a small more or less open area just along here where the canopy is sparse and low, and Corokia buddleioides thrives here. It's a handsome shrubby tree, though I'd be hard put to define handsome in this context — a certain vitality perhaps...

A medium size tanekaha extends a branch across the track just above head height

and another member of the open and scrubby community, the Dracophyllum, or what I've always called the Dr Seuss tree.

and rather special, a solitary karapapa flower, (Alseuosmia macrophylla) the only one I see all day and about four months out of season. Even so, I can still smell it from a metre off.

Around a corner we go, and there, right across the valley in a wonderful setting is what I later identify as Waitakere Park Lodge. When Neville Jackson began building this in 1940, he pretty much had to carve his own passage in to the site. Today it sits in 37 hectares of privately owned bush with magnificent views right across the city.

Further along, on the horizon, sunlight glints off a large metallic sphere whose purpose escapes me at present, but is presumably connected with electronic communications of some sort or other.