Big Bay Dec 26-30

I have never managed to string together logistically intense fieldwork quite like this Boxing Day! Making the most of weather windows, we managed to get a helicopter from Kaipo Hut back to Milford, drive to Te Anau to restock food and repack, and then drive to Manapouri for a fixed-wing flight into Big Bay! The flight in was fantastic, one of the better ones I have had in NZ. The Australian bushfires gave everything a sunray effect. Things got cloudy as we got to Fiordland and we flew over the ocean of clouds with only Mt Tutuko emerging as an island. We landed on the beach at Big Bay (which was in great shape allowing landing pretty much everywhere), and strolled the 5 minutes to Big Bay Hut. It was 7:30p but being mid-summer we still had hours of daylight!

         Lake Manapouri

        Lake Te Anau

        Mt Tutuko

        Martins Bay

We found a couple people already set up in Big Bay Hut. We started unpacking gear to settle into the hut but then had second thoughts. We could stay the night at the hut and wait until the morning to walk the 4km to McKenzie Creek where we would be camping the rest of the trip (per the plan). Or, we could use the pleasant weather to walk and set up camp tonight while things were dry. We both felt like walking a few miles would do us good after a day of planes, cars, and helicopters and so we left our emergency backup supplies at the hut and walked out to Three Mile Beach. With the low evening light piercing beneath the clouds (frontispiece), it was a spectacular walk and we were both thrilled with our decision. We crossed McKenzie Creek at the south end of the bay and set about looking for a choice campsite that would be centrally located, not flood, and not be too swampy, dark, or lumpy. We also wanted to go far enough away from the coast to get beyond the sandfly isograd (600m I guessed). It took some searching but we finally decided on a solitary beach tree on an alluvial flat a little out from the bush edge. It ended up being a great campsite and the sandflies were overall manageable.

The days were long and the weather was not great. On the second day we hiked all the way up McKenzie Creek to the Pacific Plate. It was cold and very wet and rough on the feet. We both felt very ragged by the time we returned to our camp.

The third day the weather improved. I wandered off to chase down marine terraces in the bush, while Andre sampled along the coast. I found some interesting things but generally the terrain was quite stubborn and hard going. In the afternoon we both hiked up to Point 340, which was disappointingly unfruitful.

The fourth day it rained again. We tied up some loose ends with the marine terraces and coastal sampling, and then shouldered our horribly heavy packs back up the beach to Big Bay Hut. We had a great feast for dinner at the hut. There were two other trampers. As I settled into my sleeping bag for the night exhausted and began putting in my ear plugs I heard the unmistakable sound of a mosquito. The sound prompted a razor-sharp memory of the last night I spent in this hut years ago and the all-night torture of mosquito buzzing and biting. I set up my tent on the patio of the hut and slept in it. The trampers got up early the next morning, and as they walked out said that they reckoned I had the right idea. Apparently everyone in the hut had a miserable night.

We finally got picked up around 10:00a and had yet another nice flight back to Manapouri. Amazingly we managed to wrap up our Fiordland fieldwork goals and so drove on to Wanaka to stage ourselves for the Jackson Bay area fieldwork.

Kaipo Slips Dec 22-26

After a few hours of sorting logistics in Te Anau and driving to Homer Hut to spend the night, next up was a longer but hopefully more comfortable trip mapping and sampling the enigmatic Kaipo Slips area of the remote Kaipo Valley, only really accessible by aircraft. Fixed-wing charters are no longer allowed to fly into the bush-style airstrip and so a helicopter from Milford was our only option. The weather was clear and calm allowing a relatively direct flight past Mt Pembroke. We were dropped off meters from the hut, unloaded, and the helicopter was gone in minutes, leaving us to the quiet of the valley. 

        Carpark kea

        Uber-plush Kaipo Hut (and below)

I was unaware but in the years since I last went into Kaipo the hut had been more or less rebuilt. I was expecting a spartan affair that was probably not sandfly or rain proof. What we found was one of the most kitted out huts I had ever seen. An extensive collection of utensils, and most notably a stove with wetback that allowed for hot showers! We got our gear settled in and then headed out to to geology in one of the four major slips adjacent to the fault. The slips exposed a bizarre collection of rocks altered, deformed, and faulted in strange ways. 

We had several very productive, very long days mapping three of the prominent slips. The excellent weather and comfort of the hut meant that it was easy to stay out working until 8p or later. Mapping on the tablet with lidar also made a huge difference in enhancing our understanding, accuracy, and efficiency. I collected a few samples from trees to try to date the drowned forests associated with some of the landslides and their downstream sediment pulses.

        Remnants of a drowned forest

        The Wolf River headscarp

On one of the days I went for a solo 2km cross-country mission through the bush to reach the head of the Wolf River, where I had previously flown in to collect uplifted marine shells. I was able to grab a sediment sample that hopefully will yield a well-constrained age for the sediment and allow me to determine uplift rates.

Christmas Day came and went like any other, a long day of work. Overall the trip was very productive and the Kaipo Slips make a lot more sense to me.

Hollyford Valley Dec 19-21

Land into Dunedin hours later than scheduled, stock up on supplies in Dunedin before everything closes, drive to Te Anau. Wake up the next morning and drive to the Hollyford Road end to start fieldwork in the rain. It was a rather frantic start to the field season. The focus of this season would be to collect samples for my student Andre's thermochronology project, which would allow us to better understand the history of uplift and exhumation in the critical strip of land between Fiordland and the Southern Alps. Unfortunately this requires collecting many large samples in remote locations and so needs creative logistic solutions to carry out the fieldwork. The rough plan was to packraft down the Hollyford River, grab samples on both sides of the Hollyford Valley and the Pyke Valley, and somehow hike back out the Hollyford Track with four heavy samples between two of us.

It was cold and rainy when we finally put on to the Hollyford at a very late 4:45p. Andre quickly got the hang of the packraft as we negotiated around plentiful logs and down small riffles. The scenery was stunning between the deep blue-green of the river and the lush bush draping over the banks. The occasional torrential downpours certainly added to the drama. Right as Andre and I were right in the middle of going down one of the more significant riffles a deafening boom of thunder hit. It gave us both an adrenaline rush and felt as if nature was coming to get us!

We did a long, muddy portage around the 500m-long Hollyford Rapid, the only real rapid of consequence on this section of the river. If this was a pleasure trip I would have definitely liked to have run it.

        Hollyford Rapid

This all took a while and the day was getting on. The original plan to paddle to McKerrow Island Hut seemed a little ill-advised (especially with the now continuously torrential rain) and so we exited at the Pyke Confluence (packrafting 20km) and walked over to Lake Alabaster Hut to weather the storm. At Pyke Lodge we were greeted by the friendly hosts, who after we mentioned the packrafting and fieldwork, suggested we stop by for tea tomorrow. This ended up being a crucial connection. It was 9:30p by the time we reached Lake Alabaster Hut which was quite busy with two large groups. With the low latitude mid-summer days it did not finally start to get dark until after 10:30p. The rain raged until the early morning.

We awoke to a very swollen Lake Alabaster. I managed to spectacularly stub my toe on a hut bench, a painful injury that would stay with me for over a month. We took our day trip field gear back down to the Pyke Confluence. The Pyke and Hollyford were well into flood stage! Fortunately this would not make the river much more challenging and would allow us to make much faster progress to Lake McKerrow.  We were able to take a sneak route to bypass the brunt of the Chute Rapid. I enjoyed the interesting exposures of the deltaic deposits in the river banks. We made the 9km to the lake in 45 minutes!

We found an excellent spot to take our first sample on the west side of the lake. We paddled across the strong Hollyford inflow, checked out McKerrow Island Hut briefly, and then paddled to the east shore of the lake. With a little more effort we eventually found a good lithology to sample. We collapsed our boats on the mega-driftwood beach and switched to hiking mode. Some annoying off-trail travel allowed us to intersect the equally annoying Demon Trail back towards the Pyke. The trail was a mess of slippery rocks, 3D root networks, and steep slopes. At the west abutment of the Pyke swingbridge we found the perfect place to grab yet another sample. 

We stopped in to say hello to Murray and partner at the Pyke Lodge where we chatted about geology and the valley over tea and tasty home-baking. To my great joy I did not have to ask and it came out organically: "Would you like us to take your rock samples out on a jetboat and fixed-wing backflight?" YES! They found us a cardboard box and we reinforced it with duct tape. We still had one extra sample to grab the next day and would drop it back. We stayed the night again at Lake Alabaster Hut and plotted our last sample location.

The next morning was particularly beautiful with clear skies and a complete lack of wind that turned the lake into a magnificent mirror. It was our first clear view of the Darrans and Mt Tutuko asserted itself. We chose Grebe Creek as our sample site and so set along the lake shore until we reached the creek. The creek was a typical steep frictionless, bouldery creek that required caution and multiple crossings. Andre was not a fan. It was slow going but we eventually reached a suitable outcrop,  sampled, and headed back to the hut.

        Lake Alabaster Hut, above and below

        Grebe Creek

We dropped off our rock at Pyke Lodge and had some more tea and baking, this time also meeting Bruce the valley's resident hermit. We had a nice chat but we had miles to go. Despite the gracious lack of rocks our packs were still exceptionally heavy and painful to lug along the Hollyford Track despite good trail conditions. Progress was slow, we both were in pain. The swingbridges and Homer Falls broke up the tramp a little bit. We stopped to collapse on the spacious Hidden Falls Hut desk and have a snack. We detoured to Hidden Falls, and then continued our grind to the car park. A quick hovel to check out the Humboldt Falls viewpoint, and then we drove back to Te Anau.

        Hidden Falls

San Jacinto Dec 1

With so much snow around from the Thanksgiving storm, it seemed like a prime opportunity to go play in the snow. Thinking that the local mountains would probably be a mess of poorly skilled drivers, we opted to go up the Palm Springs Tramway instead. Arriving a few minutes before 8a was sufficient to get us on the second gondola to the top (by 3pm it would be a 3.5hr wait!). The scenery up the gondola was impressive as always: seeming more in place in Patagonia than southern California.

Once off the tram, we ambled down the slippery icy switchbacked path to the forest's edge. 2 ft of snow! We went for an out-and-back to Round Valley and had a snack at one of the campsites there. The weather was pleasant enough and the snow conditions were decently firm with some snowshoes underfoot. We saw few people on the way there but on the return we passed many people aiming to summit San Jacinto Peak. Effortwise I feel like we could have easily done it but we hadn't really aimed to spend the whole day out.

No wait to get down the tram, we dropped back down to the low desert. We had a particularly tasty lunch in Palm Springs and then headed back to Riverside. A nice little excursion.

Temecula Gorge Nov 29

An unusually rainy Thanksgiving Day boosted the Santa Margarita River to a 1200cfs peak with a second unforecast peak delaying its decay just long enough for a morning Black Friday run. And cold! There was snow on the San Gabriels, Santa Anas, and San Jacinto like I had never seen. Like my previous run I was unable to find anyone to join me and so ran the 10 mile Temecula Gorge Class IV run solo yet again. It was just after 9a by the time I finally inflated and suited up in the Jack-In-The-Box parking lot in the lingering rain and walked past homeless tents and through dense willows to the river's edge. The Temecula gauge would say 350cfs nearby when I started and 270cfs when I finished, though the flow was noticeably higher than the last time I ran it when the gauge also said 350. The two other times I ran Temecula Gorge were late season February-ish runs where the native cacti and succulents were green, swollen, and happy. This was the first major rain after summer so instead I saw a much less vibrant landscape with plants holding on for dear life. Relatedly, there was considerably more foam in places and I don't think I was imagining that the water appeared extra gross. Also the first waterfall was at a trickle and the second was bone dry, which was new. The left gasket of my drysuit failed spectacularly when I stopped at the first waterfall and so I had a trickle of water working its way into my suit for the rest of the run.

The rapids filled in very nicely at this higher flow and I was able to read-and-run everything from memory. The only quick scout was at the rock ledge rapid near the prominent house sized boulder which previous times I had portaged or sneaked. This time and at this flow I was confident in a line down the center and this turned out to be one of the more enjoyable rapids. I made good work of the major rapids, only getting beached on a rock and flipping in a minor rapid towards the end of the gorge (self rescue was instant). I made it through the 6 mile gorge in an hour and a half, very analogous to my run last time when I was paddling hard to beat sundown. The remaining 4 miles of willows seemed more challenging at this flow and I had a couple near misses and one surprise sweeper that sent me for a swim. I was on high alert after that. I made it to the Sandia Creek parking lot at about 12:15p, only a few minutes after 3 hours. I chatted to a few friendly hikers seeking a ride but they were all headed the other direction so I summoned an Uber and was whisked away after 15 minutes. I was thrilled to get outside and be the only one on the river. I realized the wind was favorable and almost tried to hike up the Box Springs to fit in a paraglide flight but the day was just a little too short by the time I would have been able to mobilize. What an epic Black Friday that would have been: 10 mile Class IV packraft and paragliding in the same day within 45 minutes of my house!