Jeff was immovable in his desire to spend our last full day in New Zealand packrafting the lower Young River. I felt like I owed it to him. The weather the last 1.5 months had been lousy which meant more waiting around than the promised action. I was somewhat keen though questioning how much Class IV I could handle. It was a beautiful sunny morning, unlike most other mornings we had seen in New Zealand. With light packs we made good time marching across the paddocks, across the Makarora River, and onward along the well-maintained Young Valley track. From memory we hiked something like 1.3 hrs up the track past the lower riffled stretches to near the top of the lower boulder gorge. Along the way we passed several intimidating waterfalls and hydraulics.
Towards the top of the gorge we inflated our Alpackas, and readied ourselves. This was a pretty intimidating stretch of IV+ with some real consequences in places. We took each stretch of river in sequence, tackling each obstacle one at a time with the other on throw rope duty. Though I didn't flip on any of these obstacles, Jeff generally handled things with more finesse and gave a couple things a go that I decided I would just as soon portage. A couple obstacles, including a beefy 4+ m drop we both said no thanks to. Progress was slow but it was pretty fun. It would have been better if we had the whole day and could lap the best features, but as it was I was rushed to get back to Dunedin to pack for our return to the U.S. Towards the end the boulders diminished, leaving a shallow riffled river completely different in character from the stretches above. This pleasant but slow moving portion of river sent us back to the Makarora River, which comparatively was a creamy blue color from the Blue River upstream.
I'd like to say the drive home and packing was uneventful but it was quite the opposite. A medical emergency ended up leading to a frenetic drive back to Dunedin followed by frantic packing between about 4 hours of sleep. I'm glad we were able to fit in some fun before the stormful finish to New Zealand. Unsurprisingly the NZ summer started improving considerably as soon as we left the country...
Photos of me by Jeff; thanks to him.
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