Trip intentions

Since the weather is a bit wet (but calm) this weekend, how about a relatively easy overnighter to Herepai hut!
It has no river crossings and is an easy 2hrs from the road end.

Once we arrive at the hut anyone who is not keen on tops travel can stay at the hut and relax while a smaller division of the group can spend a few hours exploring the nearby tops.
We'll hopefully visit places like Haukura Ridge and maybe as far as either Walker or Massey Knob depending on the direction. Weather will likely be rainy so we'll just see what we feel like on the day.

Most importantly we need a car!
Hopefully someone with a car will sign up, if none have by Friday I'll put this trip on the back burner for another time when we can sort out a driver.

Welly's Hungry Botanist (Joe Dillon - our resident extraordinaire of most things chlorphytic) is looking to run a trip to the Taruarua tops between Powell and Jumbo huts this summer. The idea is to look for a tiny population of tiny plants which grows nowhere else on Earth, spending two nights in Powell/Jumbo and a full day looking at the most diminutuve and easily missed organic details as we go. We'll also gladly put names to the bigger leafy faces you've walked past a million times, and maybe even chew on a few supplejack shoots.

The plan: Two nights

The first day: - Start walking up to Powell Hutt as early as possible (~10am) up the Gentle Annie. This usually takes 5-6 hours, but we’ll go pretty slowly, maximizing the sun hours to see as many plants as possible. Ferns, mosses, and liverworts are amazingly abundant in the beech forest section here, so we’ll do lots of looking at them. I’ll bring a handlense so I can show people how to tell the difference between some particularly tiny ones. This is also peak time for many orchid species that like beech forests. Near the top, we’ll be looking carefully for Myrsine umbricola, a shrub whose entire world population is within the beech forest about 5ha around Powell Hut.

The second day: - We’ll try to leave around 9am from Powell, but it only takes ~3-4 hours to get to Jumbo so we can be pretty leniant. We’ll start by ascending toward Holdsworth peak, looking for five plants that are only found in the alpine area of the Tararua Ranges (Euphrasia drucei; a tiny parasitic plant with a gorgeous white flower, Veronica evenosa; a species of hebe only found between Powell and Mitre, Aciphylla dissecta; a beautiful little speargrass, Raoulia rubra; an incredibly well-adapted plant known as a ‘vegetable sheep’, and lastly Wahlenbergia pygmaea tararua; a minute plant with blue and white flowers which as far as I’ve found has no publicly available photos). These and many other fantastic alpine plants should be in full flower around late January, so we’d be crazy to miss them. This part is best taken very slowly, I’d be keen for us to get as many photos as humanly possible, which can be put on iNaturalist after we’ve done as a way of contributing to science.

The third day: - We’ll leave via to Atiwhakatu track which goes through some nice beech forest. We won’t have many time constraints, so we can go as fast or as slow as we want. We’ll aim to be back in Wellington well before sundown.

More details to follow!

Help out with some weed control on the cool new track that runs from Kelburn to Aro Valley! The KCN people are lovely, I'll be there too, and there's usually tea and baking afterwards. I hear that giving back to the community is a great hangover cure ;)

Meet at 2pm on the back lawn of 22 Hadfield Tce! Text me 0274924796 if you get lost

Change of host/ venue

Please bring $5-10 worth of ingredients! Soft shell tortillas, beans, mince, spice mix, capsicum, sour cream, avos, cheese, corn chips etc

99 Creswick Terrace
Northland
Wellington

Public Transport: get the number 22 bus to Northland Shops, or number 2/21/18/[one of the weird Karori commuter busses in the 30's] to The Rigi by the Kelburn viaduct and walk up Northland Road. Then walk up Farm Rd > Norfolk St > Creswick Tce

There is a swing chair...and you might have to protect your food from kaka attack