An ‘easy’ weekend overnighter in Te Urewera turned into a battle of wits against a seemingly endless stream and a miserable night of camping.
After seven hours of splashing through a cold Te Urewera stream, Chris and Tami Green knew they wouldn’t be sleeping that night in a hut. Exhausted, stumbling and cold, the Whakatane couple were long overdue and forced to admit defeat. They had made good time walking from the car park to Koranga Forks Hut, but nearly doubled DOC’s conservative four-hour estimate for reaching Tawa Hut. It wasn’t supposed to be a difficult tramp – just a simple training weekend for the couple’s planned Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike in 2020. Spirits were high as they left the track near Koranga Forks Hut for the streambed. “The route description said most of it is in the stream, and we were happy to practise our stream crossings. The water wasn’t high, but it was higher than usual,” Chris says. Four hours and a dozen stream crossings later, however, they realised something wasn’t right. “We looked at the GPS so see where the track should be, and we were standing on it, but there was no track at all,” Chris says. As darkness descended, fatigue further weighed on their sodden boots. “We were a lot more tired than we’d thought. We’d had a couple of falls, and we started to think we’re going to get in trouble here, we’re going to break an ankle,” Chris says. “We made the right choice by stopping – if we had gone further, we would have walked into an issue.” By this time the couple had been hiking up the stream for nearly seven hours, and some of the crossings had been “a little hairy”, coming up over their knees. With rain forecast and daylight failing, they climbed to higher ground and set up camp. That night, the ominous pitter-patter on the tent roof announced the arrival of rain – and the rising of the stream. “We had a new single-wall tent. It weighs nothing, but the problem is you have to set it up perfectly for it to work.” Unfortunately, they didn’t, and to make matters worse, Chris had left his tramping clothes hung outside in a tree. They rose at six to more rain, a saturated tent and sodden clothes – “everything was soaked,” Chris says. [caption id="attachment_128186" align="alignnone" width="1280"]