Like Blue Creek, Granity Creek is another one of the rare, mostly dry slot canyons in New Zealand. It cuts through marble on the north side of the Mt Owen Massif. Water drains into a cave system near the start of the canyon and does not emerge again until the end of the canyon.
It was round about midday by the time Neil and I turned up at the car park. Ideally it would have been earlier as the canyon was rumored to take a long day to complete. We exited the car and were almost immediately bombarded by well over a hundred bumble bees encircling the car, landing on all our gear and flying at our faces. I had never experienced anything like it. Amid girlish screams, we ordered a full retreat. We carefully got back in the car and drove back a few kilometers back down the road. Here we organized our gear so that we could drive to the car park, get out, and immediately head up the trail.
It was a sweaty hot day and we were right in the middle of it with 600 m of elevation to climb. We made steady progress up the trail and at least were rewarded with nice views of the Mt Owen karst near Culliford Hill and the bread-slice thin slot canyon of Granity Creek.
Eventually we reached 900m and veered off track to begin our descent into Granity Creek. At first we made excellent progress through open bush, but the last few hundred meters to the creek were horrendous. At last we were in sight of the creek. Unfortunately we saw head high stinging nettle forming a thick force field between us and our goal. I was not about to make the first move and was ready to find another way when Neil grabbed a stick and forged on through the nettles. He yelled in pain from wasp stings and I ran like hell to get away from him. In the end he ended up with three painful stings and a very swollen hand. He powered on through the nettle in his shorts, suffering many more stings. I chose another route and took my time. I got a few nettle stings but made it through comparatively unscathed. We scrambled and downclimbed our way downstream, eventually reaching an obvious place to put on a wetsuit. A nice jump of about 4 meters and away we went. More downclimbing and scrambling. The creek disappeared into the bedrock and we entered the narrow slot.
We worked our way down the canyon, finding ways to downclimb virtually all the obstacles we encountered. There were several brisk swims through still karst blue pools. The scenery was great and the light was pretty descent but the canyon was still over before we knew it. There were supposed to be six abseils to 17m height but we only found a need for one of about 11m (we had found ways to downclimb all the rest. The canyon ends abruptly with the sound of a waterfall. We skirted around the resurgence pool and continued on down the creek back to the car. We then drove to Kumara for our next adventure, Griffin Creek.
No comments:
Post a Comment