Pelorus Track

Buoyed by the success of my last tramp along the Abel Tasman Coast Track, I am now looking for a more roughty-toughty experience. I want to try a tramping track that is not a ‘Great Walk’.  There are over 7000km of maintained tramping tracks in New Zealand that are not so well-known and offer more challenging hiking. The path may not be so well-maintained, developed or defined and the huts have more basic accommodation than the huts on the Great Walks. I want to stay close to Nelson for now, while I am sussing out a possible opportunity to get a van, so I choose to walk for 3 days on the Pelorus Track (pronounced Pelor-us). The start is not far from Nelson and then I will walk back to the city in a loop. The track description promises ‘a remote forest experience’. I am a little nervous; but well-prepared.

On Saturday morning I catch a bus and travel for an hour to the east of Nelson and get dropped at Pelorus Bridge. The only things here other than the bridge are a café and a camp ground. The track begins 14km up a gravel road which goes along the Pelorus valley past several small farms and houses. I start walking and hope that I might get a lift to the track head. In the grounds of one property there is a sculpture of 2 horses pulling an authentic plough. From the road I can’t make out what the horses and people are made out of – it gives the impression of corrugated iron, or maybe it’s wood, carved to look like corrugated iron.

Rustic sculpture

After walking up the road for about an hour an enthusiastic New Zealand woman in a van stops and offers me a lift, which I gladly accept. She is going tramping with her two young teenage children, before they go back to school next week. A little further on she picks up another tramper. He is from Austria and is walking selected parts of the newly-opened 3000km Te Araroa path which stretches from Cape Reinga in the north of the north island to Bluff in the south of the south island.  Further on again two Americans with massive beards are also offered lifts, but they have already walked the majority of the road way and are happy to continue on foot. So I’m not going to be on my own on the track.

The track starts at a small car park at the road end and I head off into the forest on a narrow path with glimpses of the clear waters of the river running below me on the left.

Paths through the forest

The path requires some sure-footedness and from time to time I have to climb over tree roots, rocky outcrops or sections of the path that have partly collapsed. I am glad to have my walking poles, which compensate adequately for my lack of sure-footedness. After about an hour I drop down to a section of the river called ‘Emerald Pool’. The place is correctly named and the deep pool is clear and green like a swimming pool. The woman from the van and her children are already swimming here and she asks me to take some pictures with her camera as they lark around jumping off rocks.

Emerald Pool

The path continues  along the river in the same way for another 3 hours until I reach Captain Creek Hut, where I will stay for tonight. This is my first back country hut experience. It is a tiny rustic hut with only 6 slightly mouldy bunks, a stove, a long-drop toilet behind it and the water supply is the river. I am the first person to arrive, so I drop my backpack in the hut and take my book and sit in the sun by the river.

Captain Creek Hut inside and out

The river at Captain Creek Hut

Over the afternoon two couples arrive - one New Zealand couple from Blenheim and a student from Christchurch with a German girl. In the evening the student goes off to fish in the river and the rest of us potter about in the hut cooking dinner, chatting and trying to kill the sandflies. The river is lovely to swim and wash in and because I don't have my costume with me, I go in when no-one is looking in the evening and again in the morning. No self-portraits of this event, you'll be glad to know!

The next day the walk continues further along the river for a couple of hours, crossing several swing bridges, to another hut.

Swing Bridge

There is not a lot of bird song in the forest, but one time I stop for a rest a New Zealand robin comes to visit me. When I was staying in a hostel in Tarkaka I was chatting to a Canadian-German biologist who had just finished working in New Zealand on a project counting these robins. She told me they are totally unrelated to the European robins, but because they look and behave similarly the settlers named them robins. She also told me that New Zealand birds give off a scent, whereas European birds don’t. This wasn’t a problem originally; as New Zealand had no indigenous mammals to prey on them. When the settlers introduced mammals such as rats, stoats and weasels, the birds were easy prey and this is proving to be such a problem today that in some areas mammals are now being systematically trapped or poisoned to try and give the birds a better chance. Her project was also trying to find out the purpose of the scent the birds have.

New Zealand Robin

After the hut the path turns away from the river and climbs steadily for the next 3 hours as it climbs 850 metres. I take it very slowly and the roots of the beech trees are by turns helpful as steps and unhelpful as things to trip over.

Rooty Path

Then the path becomes stony and rocky outcrops loom amongst the trees. I am glad to reach the next hut and rest my legs. This is a larger modern hut, sited just at the bush line and with a view to the Richmond Range of mountains on the opposite side of the river.

Rocks Hut

Mountain View

I am the only one at the hut and I spend a pleasant afternoon reading my book on the veranda. Just as it is getting dark I hear voices approaching and 3 girls arrive who I have met previously in the hostel in Nelson. They have come in the opposite direction from me, so we share descriptions of the walks ahead for each of us, before tucking into our sleeping bags for the night.

The next morning the mountains are hidden in cloud as I set off, but this soon dissipates. Today’s walk goes across an open rocky area with views all around and up to a saddle below Dun Mountain. So much of New Zealand walking is in the bush and it is refreshing to get uninterrupted far-reaching views.

Views from Dun Saddle 32, 36

Dun Mountain was named because of its brown colour, both of the rock it is made of and the vegetation covering it. They even named the rock ‘Dunite’. This is a mineral belt and not much grows here because plants struggle to grow in the mineral-rich ground. The slippery shaley path continues to Coppermine Saddle, named after the settlers’ hope of finding copper here. There proved to be very little of the metal; but they did find chromite, which is a black crystalline chrome iron ore that was used in the manufacture of dyes, in tanning and then later in steel manufacture. In the 1860s 5700 tonnes of the stuff was exported from here to England.

Me at Coppermine Saddle

What is claimed to be New Zealand’s first railway was built up this mountain in order to bring the chromite down. Horses pulled the empty trucks up the track from Nelson to the terminus at Coppermine Saddle and then the full trucks came down with gravity and a brakesman to keep control of the speed. Nowadays the track is for walkers and mountain bikers. I follow the track gradually downhill for 3 ½ hours. To begin with it is open and barren and then as it leaves the mineral belt it descends into bush and the views are lost once more. Along the way occasional original wooden sleepers are still visible as a reminder of the original purpose of the track.

Old Railway Track

The track pops out of the bush on the southern limit of Nelson and I walk back to the hostel, feeling pleased with my achievement.