A Daytrip to the Pinnacles

We had planned to leave from uni at 8:30 but it was a cold morning in Karori where I live and my car took a long time to start. The battery was nearly flat before I even turned the key. One of my neighbours came to the rescue, if not altogether willingly, and shuffled his black 4WD monster forward far enough to give me a jump-start. I thanked him as best I could and told him my name and got going.

When I arrived late at the Hunter carpark some of the waiting group looked a little impatient, and fair enough too. If days were designed for different purposes, then this one was surely shaped just for folks to get in cars and drive somewhere nice. It was cool and very still, with just a few high clouds. Sometimes driving days as good as this one turn up on a Tuesday or a Thursday, and annoy hell out of just about everyone in Wellington.

We headed from Kelburn down the motorway and out through the Hutt, over the Rimutaka hill to the Wairarapa. There are long straight stretches of road through grass there, and the heat coming off the tar seal hid the corners at their ends and sat in the dips. On summer days it can get very hot on those roads, so that sometimes stop signs and fence posts and treetops and cows hover in the haze as you drive along.

The road heading from Martinborough south toward the coast winds more as it passes through fields and pine plantations. We drove behind a truck that had been transporting wood shavings for a good deal of the way. The driver had dumped most of his load but had not put the cover back on the trailer, and so we trundled along through Tuhitarata and then Pirinoa in a pretty cloud of shaved wood. We spent a good half an hour happily watching wood shavings getting blown off that truck. The light pieces floated past the windshield and the heavier ones hopped past us down the road. Distracted, we didn’t actually notice that we had passed through Tuhitarata. Even if we hadn’t been distracted, we probably wouldn’t have noticed. There is nothing there to indicate a town. It is just the joining of two roads. They aren’t even very big roads. Pirinoa in contrast has a big white building with ‘Pirinoa Hall’ written on it, and some houses.

Shortly after Pirinoa we turned left onto Whangaimoana road, towards the south coast. It was just a short trip from there, and halfway through another discussion on whether there is likely to be more inbreeding in Carterton than anywhere else in the country (I doubt it, but last time we went into a service station there asking for firelighters they sold us a box of matches and a 67 cent litre of diesel in a plastic bottle) we arrived at the entrance into Aorangi Forest Park.

The other car had been waiting for half an hour. They had taken a shorter route than us, skipping Martinborough altogether. We shouldered our daypacks and started walking, up a small flat-bedded river toward the Putangirua Pinnacles.

We spotted the first one about 10 minutes up the stream. The pinnacles are a collection of eroded columns of sedimentary aggregate, cut out where small streams flow down off the sides of a valley to join at is base. We ignored a marked track up the hill beside the river to a lookout, and instead kept walking up a side shoot of the main stream. Rather than proceeding on up the hill, this stream cut off into the hillside and separated into a maze of high walled valleys and columns. With each turning, the route we were taking became thinner and the sides of the little valleys higher. We took photos and got our boots muddy while we clambered on up. We arrived after 20 minutes at a dead end, staring straight up at several stories of large rocks loosely packed into fine gravel. We turned back, and after making a couple of attempts at alternative routes, took the lookout track up the hill.

It took only 10 minutes to get to the lookout. From there we could see over the valley to its spectacular eastern wall, or rather, the towering maze that sits in place of a wall, or south, down the valley to the Cook Strait and the early snow on the mountains of the Southern alps. We dropped packs there and sat down on the boards of the lookout platform. One by one we stretched legs and arms out into the sun and started passing round high-calorie processed food.

After lunch we walked southwest out of the Aorangi forest, through farmed fields over the hills that bordered the coast. We popped out about 30 minutes later on the coastal road we had driven in on, and walked back north beside the sea until we came to our carpark. The only point that I would make of the drive home is that there is a very nice café at the highest point of the Rimutaka road, and that it has a fire, a TV, good couches, and sells $2.50 mugs of filter coffee with a free refill.

Cheers to my tramping buddies of the day, Kirsten, Eric, Andre, Guy, Kieran, Connor, and one other whose name I forget.