Black Birch bivvy, Kaweka FP, Wednesday 18 January 2023
Banner Photo: The newly refurbed bivvy
Drizzle and cool temperatures greeted us at Little’s Clearing. This was to be the first tramp of the year for most and in some cases the first for a year.
We check out where we are headed
Having checked the board for directions, we were off into the beech forest. We spotted quite a number of toatoa and a mistletoe in flower which was low down so we were able to have a good look at it.
The native bush section was pretty wet underfoot with some impressive puddles. It wasn’t much better when we came out of the bush and into grasslands and regenerating manuka. Here it was very boggy. We did have the distraction of a variety of flowering plants, mountain daisies, gentians, harebells, edelweiss (I think) to name a few, as we forged through the worst of the swamp.
Out of the swamp, we started to climb a little into rocky contorta country. Ted did his best to deal with new pine seedlings with some help from me but we were fighting a losing battle. Views of the Kawekas on our right were lost in the low cloud.
We all made it to the bivvy in under an hour and a half. The bivvy has recently had some work done on it. We were quite impressed by the addition of a sizeable deck but not so the new paint colour which instead of the usual orange colour is a bright tangerine.
Pinus contorta along the Black Birch Range track
Only three had tea in the bivvy, a two-bedder with a very low profile. The rest of the party sat outside in their coats in the drizzle. Then three in the party headed back the way we had come. The remaining five decided to go further on to where the track starts to drop down to Lotkow Road. It took more than ten minutes each way, once again in pine and rocky underfoot.
We stopped off at the bivvy again, for lunch. Then it was back on the track to Little’s Clearing and the rest of the gang. We were back in sunny Napier before 3pm. Most were pretty pleased with not having taken on a more strenuous tramp.
Trampers: Su Nugent, Jane Thomson, Cherie Le Lievre, Ted Angove, Juliet Gillick, Kate Fuller, Rosemary Jeffery and reporter Marie Deroles
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