Following the Swampy Cattle Track

Oct 3

3 min read

Friday 25 September

A lazy morning at the lake - we had a lovely vista with light cloud at 9am but the rain & cloud rolled in so we hunkered down in Banjo, Louis working on a video & me updating our website.

We met a lovely couple mid morning - Julie & Peter from Perth who have an SRC22 over there and were amazed at how many Snowy Rivers they have seen over here. Had a great chat and hope to stay in touch.

Early afternoon the rain stopped and the sun popped through giving us false hope, as more rain pushed through a few minutes later. The triptych above covered just a twenty minute period of time! Finally, around 3.30pm we sucked it up, put on our boots and rain jackets and headed out to walk a km or two of the Haast- Paringa Cattle Track, a 33km path which was originally beaten by herders, driving their cattle to the West Coast markets at Whataroa.

The sign warned us it was damaged by slips & windfalls, had stream crossings and was not exactly a walk in the park. What they didn’t say was that most of the actual path becomes a stream in wet weather!!!

Considering ourselves warned - we headed into the Haast Paringa Cattle Track by the wonderfully named Windbag Creek! The actual cattle track came down by the creek, but its too swampy there now so instead we climbed up through the forest. The path was well marked but soggy as - bits were a veritable stream, there were rocky stepping stones, sunken ponga trunks, wooden slabs and a lot of climbing - mostly round the edges of the water, but also under fallen trees and over a very soggy big tree trunk! I struggled a bit but celebrated every time I negotiated a tricky bit without falling in… turns out my boots have sprung a small leak so I had to be extra careful.

Walking the track I spent quite a while listening for birds on the Merlin app. We heard Tui, koramiko, piwakawaka, miromiro & some others I could not identify. The app was struggling too!

Part way along we came to a large soggy tree trunk we had to scramble over. It was so sodden than when you leant on the wood with your hand, water squeezed out like a sponge! Further down the track there was a huge slip - one path looked like it should have carried on straight ahead but not any more; fortunately our path diverted around the slip to the left.

We managed 1.3km in before the swampiness became too much - at this point there was no way through for the next 10+ metres without risking falling into ankle deep water and mud. So we doubled back. Cool walk though and some great birdsong in the forest around us - and one of us got back with rather wet feet (hint, not the guy with the brand new Merrill walking boots, but probably the woman with the cheapo Mountain Warehouse boots that have already been replaced once for exploding at the Blue Pools a year ago!!!)

Mist was rising out of the forest valleys and rainbows kept popping up over the mountains as the clouds cleared a lot more.