Honora & I had a few days off for a five day tramp into the east of the Poulter River (Dampier L33). The weather forecast was perfect.
We started with a walk up the Andrews valley. I love the Andrews so it was no hardship even with a 30 kg pack.
The first side stream at the bottom of Hallelujah Flat was bathed in sunlight so that made an ideal lunch spot for us.
Onward. While walking over Casey Saddle a stoat in its white winter coat ran along the boardwalks ahead of me, the black tip of its tail flicking in the air. I'm reading Kerry-Jayne Wilson's Flight of the Huia at the moment and that's increasing my understanding of the relationship of the introduced predators with the native fauna.
Down at Casey Hut we discovered it was being used as a base for two DoC workers, Julie Walsh and Carrie Lakin, to check and maintain the stoat traps in the Poulter. They arrived back on dusk along with three others who were repairing the fence across the river to keep cattle out of the valley.
Somebody had ranted in the hut book about DoC workers going into the Poulter on quad bikes. I'm not sure if he (?) expected them to walk in carrying the 60 dozen eggs and wooden stoat traps in their packs. I was just happy they were dealing to the stoats.
The evening was fairly quiet for Honora and me as the whole DoC group were engaged in internal DoC chit-chat until lights out. It's odd thinking of the outdoors as being just a workaday world. Not for me.
In the morning we took the now familiar road up the Fenwick Stream spur to Ranger Biv. On the way up we took some time out to finish clarifying the route through one big gap we'd left from last time.
At the high point we'd got to last time I thought we might be only a hundred metres travel from the ridge the biv is on. However it was more like 300 m. It was slow travel too as a lot of it was tightly crowded beech pole forest, and we were carrying big packs with a lot of hardware attached. But never mind we got there soon enough.
It was fantastic being at Ranger Biv again, and it was even more fantastic seeing how many visited Ranger last year.
Eight parties got up there in 2004, and that's the biggest number of visitors in 20 years.
Read what Nigel Jordan said about the condition of Ranger.
It is true that Ranger's in the best condition of any biv in the Arthurs Pass region. DoC's rating of it as being derelict is just nonsense. I hope I'm not being foolishly generous in believing that's just an honest clerical error.
Anyway, click the thumbnails and see for yourself how sound,neat and tidy it is.
We settled in for the night, with a gentle fire in the rustic hearth to keep the frost away.
The only sound during the night was a male kiwi whistling nearby.
In the morning we spent a couple of hours tidying around the biv and restocking the firewood.
But when the sun reached us we knew it was time we should be moving on.
We climbed easy slopes through inanga up the broad spur behind the biv. The whole of the Poulter valley opened in panorama behind us. At the crest of the Poulter Range we turned north. The ridge stretched away, slowly descending toward the head of Row Stream. A cool westerly drifted across the ridge but the sun was bright and warm in a perfectly clear sky.
I wouldn't have been anywhere else, but I wasn't enjoying it with my full vigour. I'd come down with a sniveling virus in the evening at Casey that had become a full headcold the following day. I woke at Ranger with a raging headache and lassitude. I wasn't perfoming well but I was still making sure I took in everything around me. Discomfort doesn't stay with our memories. That's probably why we keep going exploring.
Ok I know some will disagree about this. The world does have plenty of quibblers and pedants.
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