Woodhill Diary

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17 August 2006

I rang CHH a few days back and spoke to Andrea Collinge, the CHH recreation officer, to ask about progress in access to the walking tracks at Woodhill. She told me that tree-felling crews had just completed their job and other crews reinstating the walking tracks should be finished about mid-September, but that if I wished, I could make my own way across to the Conservation area without risk of endangering myself.

The management of the walking tracks has been taken over by Bikeparks New Zealand whose principal interest is the network of mountain biking tracks in the forest.

For "security reasons" parking has been centralised for walkers and bikers at the new mountain bike headquarters which has been shifted from the far end of Boundary Rd to the old Bluegums carpark and campground, just over a km from Restall Rd. The old walkers carpark, about 300m from Restall Rd has been wired off.

This adds a couple of kilometres to any walk to the nature conservancy, which is a pain, as the less road walking and pine tree walking, the more interesting is the outing. The immediate short cut from the new carpark to the conservancy is blocked by the rope course, but there is an arrow pointing a little further down Boundary Rd, so there may be a new route in the offing.

I had expected to find acres of devastation and the rank, raw smell of pine gum hanging heavily over the area, but as far as I could see without going up to the lookout, logging has been confined to a few hectares either side of Walkers Rd.

I hitched Alice to her lead, and headed cautiously up the hill to where we used to start from. All normal. Up the straight track to Walker Rd, and the first signs of harvesting were a few hundred metres north.

What was very evident was Walker Rd had been constructed with much lighter loads in mind than it's been carrying recently. It will be interesting to see, given CHH's record of maintenance elsewhere, whether the road will be returned to anything like its previous state. At present, I'd be cautious about towing a horse float along it.

I cross over and head up past the water tanks and hang a right down the hill. Several hundred metres and I can see light through the trees ahead.

It's nowhere near as much as I expected, but theres something about a cutover forest I have trouble getting used to. Same applied when I was living across from the Riverhead Forest in Ararimu Valley Rd, and all the area Babe and I used to walk through was levelled. Call me sentimental, but I hope it went into posts and timber, and wasn't merely chipped for paper pulp or particle board.

The old walking track borders this area for a few hundred metres.

What was a quiet horse track through the pines is now widened and scraped flat.

We head along here. I have cautiously released Alice from the lead and she is thoroughly enjoying herself and more or less behaving. Suddenly she stops.

A small group of fallow deer. I wished I had Miranda's camera with me and a decent zoom, but even so, this is one of the best deer shots I've managed.

They head off up the hill into the pines and so does Alice for about 20 metres before she heeds my whistle. We head back south along Selwyn Rd, past the gate to the conservancy. Mingimingi is in flower along the edge of the road.

I try for a closeup. Once again, I wish I had the macro capability that Miranda's Sony does. It's possible, but difficult to get focus absolutely sharp with the Canon.

We turn left back up to the water tanks and back down the hill. Somebody else has been here today with a dog and Alice races around sniffing at footprints.

Back to headquarters and a feeling that I can probably count on doing the Mavoro lakes trip next year without my leg being too much of an issue. I am feeling good, slightly sore, and not in the least out of breath, given my lack of exercise in the last few months. Alice is slowing down, thank heaven.

I'll probably come up again on Saturday and get up to the lookout.