riverECHO

On Sunday, our early morning pack up and go turned into a second cup of coffee and stroll, but we were still on the road plenty early for our weekend plans. We drove north, through the town of Westport, to an area that we had read about in our NZ Mountain Biking book called Denniston, located high up on a plateau that overlooks the Tasman Sea. The sun was barely shining through the clouds and the air had a very wintry smell to it, but we ramped up our courage, picked a trail (known as the local’s favorite), tossed on our puffy jackets AND beanies, and hopped on our bikes. The first part of the trail wound along the plateau on a mixture of red rock and tacky dirt, reminding us a lot of the mountain biking trails we have come to love in Southern Utah. The big difference being the temperature and we stopped a couple of times to warm up our hands. The trail then dropped into a canyon where we discovered a historic coal mining camp. Our bike ride quickly turned into a history lesson. We learned that the big debacle after discovering coal up on the plateau in the early 1900s was how exactly they would get it down to the coast. There was no road up to the plateau at the time, so they engineered a system known as The Incline, which consisted of two tracks that led straight up from the coast to the top of the plateau. Carts would run down the track full of coal, acting as a counter weight to pull the empty carts back up. If you were working and living up on the plateau the only way to town was to ride on the outside of a cart on the way down and jump in an empty cart on the way back up. After the ride, we drove to the top of the incline. The track has since crumbled away but just looking over the edge from the top of the plateau made us appreciate the engineer’s skill who designed it.

After our ride and unexpected history lesson, we continued north to the small town of Karamea, which is basically the end of the road for the northern West Coast of the South Island (that’s a lot of directions). We spent the night in the sleepy little town, where I am pretty sure everybody who lived there knew about us 10 minutes after we arrived, and spent most of the next day exploring a few different trails in the Oparara Basin. We had no idea what we were in for when we read about the two limestone arches that we could hike to. As we came upon the first arch, the larger and more impressive of the two, we were blown away by its size, 43 meters tall, 79 meters wide, and 219 meters LONG . . . as in length . . . as in the distance you can walk through it while it’s towering 43 meters overhead! It was so long that we actually had to use our head lamps to make our way through it. So how was it formed you ask? Well the river is to blame. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that a river runs through the arch too? The river slowly carved out a layer of granite below the tough limestone rock, leaving behind the limestone arch and tons of stalactites. Once again, we’ve discovered another beautiful piece of nature in New Zealand.