By Jack Huygens, 30 March 2025
Canyoning is amazing! It's the sport of making your way down a river gorge using ropes for abseiling, mixed with swims, jumps and climbing. Our club seems to have the occasional canyoning trip (maybe once a year at most) but hopefully this will be the year we dig into it a bit deeper.
After doing the beginner introductory trip to Dry Creek a mere few days earlier, we made plans to head to a "real" canyon and do some more that weekend. The Little Akatarawa river is perfect for this, it's got all the fun parts of a proper canyoning trip, but it's short and close to Wellington.
Calling this trip "scuffed" would be an understatement, considering none of us were really anything more than beginners, and each abseil rigging setup included lots of umming-and-ahhhing and re-tying the knots a few times. I also managed to "loose" my abseil device only to realise later that it was just folded up in my multiple layers of thermals, wetsuit and rain jacket. My favorite quote of the day being Tommy's "I can see how this would be tricky for 8 year olds" (in reference to how guided canyoning trips are run here, with the age range being 8 to 88 years old). Overall this canyon is remarkably chill while still delivering all the excitement of a stunning river gorge and heaps of waterfalls.
Frankly the whole day went off without a hitch, though when we got back to the car Tommy's keys had managed to vanish, which resulted in quite possibly the largest faff of the year involving digging through every inch of his car, our gear, and all our surrounding bushes and rocks. Hot-wiring was attempted (twice) and we even rang the AA to see if they would come save us but it was too expensive so we scratched that idea. In the end our saving grace was a local hunter who offered to drive us back to Wellington (and even drive Tommy back up again once he grabbed his spare key from home). This hunter also managed to sell a dog to Sarah's dad, and gave us quite the education on what 1080 does to hunters dogs on the drive home.
We can all agree that canyoning is awesome, and the next chance we get we've got to go see the 3 other named canyons in the Akatarawa forest, and work our way towards the famous Chamberlain Creek in the Tararuas. We'll keep a better eye on the car keys next time though.
