By Richard, 05 April 2008
I'm lying upside down with my legs in the air. My pack is jammed against the slippery log I had been standing on five seconds earlier. I stand up wincing and kicking myself for rushing. Up ahead I can hear Quentin burrowing into another thicket. The boat is only 10 minutes behind us but may as well be on the other side of Lake Te Anau. A few sandflies touch down on my bare legs. Bastards. Welcome to Fiordland.
20 minutes earlier we'd been cruising into the South West Arm of Lake Te Anau, and jumped out at the Doon river, Quentin in his guise of the Bludger from the Scrub having scored us a free boat ride. Now there's just two of us in a land of moss, I gingerly start to walk after the noise of Quentin's violent thrashing, thinking that if I stay here any longer I'll have moss on me.
On the boat we decided to ignore Moirs advice and take to the TL side of the Doon where there was an old track. Moirs has just been republished but we think the beta on the Doon is wrong. After the initial thickets where I ended up upside down we find old markers and a strong deer trail. We have an account of a Tounge and Meats trip from 6 years ago. They took to the TR of the Doon in appalling weather and had a real grovel. By contrast we are now flying. Despite the fact we are only a few k's into a week long trip hubris reigns. "Lets cut the corner" shouts Quentin and plunges off the good deer trail and into the shallow clear water of the Doon. As he gets halfway across I notice he is going downstream more than sideways and trotting more than you would expect on an easy crossing. I wander in and am surprised by the force of the current. I back out in time to watch Quentin tangle with a log jam. I wait for him to extricate himself and realise he is stuck. So I head back in and get to within a long arm of him before the water takes me. Like Michael Jackson I moon walk down the bed of the Doon with the water rising over my waist and a swim coming alarmingly close before I grab the end of the same log jam and crawl to dry land. Quentin finds his own way out and we stand wet and sheepish on possibly the wrong side of the Doon.
As it is, travel is a wee bit worse but far from horrendous and we reach the Doon bivy rock - our intended lunch stop and the tounge and meats first night - for morning tea. Lunch is had at the confluence of Campbell Creek and the Doon. We had intended to climb over Mt Donald to the head of Lake Wapiti but limited route information and the view of snow on the southern aspects (we had no ice axes) makes us reconsider. Over lunch we estimate that we can be at the head of Lake Wapiti tonight if we go up Campbell Creek, whereas it would be tomorrow night via Mt Donald. We do know from the tounge and meats that Campbell Creek is horrible. So it proves. It takes 2hrs to move 500metres (horizontal not vertical!). Huge boulders and bottomless holes spanned by rotten logs and vines. It's dire. Our route reflects our idiosyncrasies. When Quentin is in front we climb high, only to invariably hit an impassable bit and while we backtrack I move to the front and move us closer to the river, when that is invariably blocked I backtrack, Quentin takes the lead and we climb again and on and on for two hours. After 2 hours we get to the top of the Waterfall and pass the tounge and meats second night campsite. The river flattens off and we find a few more deer trails. It is well and truly evening by the time we break out into tussock and more boulders and get a view of Lake Wapiti. It's an impressive place but I am impressively stuffed and don't get my camera out. Quentin is like a manic energiser bunny and wants to push on. To get around Lake Wapiti you need to climb 150m then sidle ledges above the lake. The tounge and meats did it in snowfall (a break from the rain) and described considerable discomfort. While I digest all this Quentin has climbed 50 of the 150m. I haul arse up the steep tussock. The ledge proves to be OK. Better than that really. It's a neat route. Bluffs above and bluffs below but the deer come this way, the grass is long and on a dry afternoon it feels safe, easy and dreamy. Fiordland at its best. We camp at the far end of the ledge, where it is more of a bench and get swarmed by sandflies. At 1050m. Bastards. Welcome to Fiordland.
Moirs describes an easy walk off to the heard of Lake Wapiti. In the clag the next day we can't find it. Before the trip we had debated carrying a light rope. We decide that good sense will guide us and if we need a rope we will turn around. As a concession to the wildness of Fiordland we buy a ball of string from Mitre 10. So it comes to be in the clag above the Lake Wapiti delta I am perched on a bluff unrolling the aforementioned string and doubling it and lowering our packs down the "easy walk off." Below the bluff it is quite easy. The Tounge and Meats got stuck here by snow, so in really a smidgen over one day we are seeing the country they took 4 days to see. And that is the essence of Fiordland, it is the weather that provides the texture. Their trip is nothing short of epic. Ours merely curious.
The pass to Twin Falls stream is easy from the top. In the top basin on the Lake Wapiti side Kim Hollows buzzes us in his chopper a culled deer swinging Saddam Hussein style below the chopper. They do a few loops around us and then disappear over a different pass to the Stillwater. A helicopter-only pass. Looking back at our pass from Twin falls creek it looks helicopter-only too. But it's actually really simple and quite pleasant. Over lunch we observe a pair of Whio. By reporting the colours of their leg bands we later find out that they were released in the Takahe area a couple of years ago. Quite a journey for the little ducks.
Quentin had his eye on a 'new route' from the Twin Falls creek to the lower Stillwater, but we're making such good time that we decide to follow Moirs. The Stillwater is a huge flat Fiordland valley filled with log jams. The gorge by Ethne stream is small. We're nearly through it on good deer trails when the deer take off up the hill. We ignore our good senses and a basic tenet of Fiordland travel and don't follow them. We are lucky to get through on a hairy low sidle. The deer of course knew best and they climb high and early to avoid a huge bluff. Fortunately part of it is vegetated and that's how we sneak across, but it is slow and ugly and we are angry at ourselves for ignoring the good deer trail.
Our second night is spent in incredible pepperwood forest. Incredible because the Horopito is the dominant species and has grown tree like. There's plenty of room for a tent underneath. Kaka threaten to keep us awake with their raucous cries at dusk. Silvery silt high in the trees indicates the depth to which these flat Fiordland rivers can back up in flood. A phenomenon which has made many tourists (and Kiwis) into swimmers on the Dusky track. By now the Tounge and Meats trip report had departed on a different route (happily for them with good weather) so fatuous comparisons of travel are out of the question, we're still pretty happy with progress mind you.
The next day we charge down the Stillwater on strong deer trails. There is one annoying gorge with attendant swamp forest which slows us down but other than that it is pretty straightforward all the way to Lake Marchant. This lake is impassable by foot, although Quentin's swim seems to take him about half way across it before it gets over waist deep. Such is silting. We spend the night at the historic Caswell Sound hut. It's very dark although this means the sandflies don't come in as historically there was no bug protection in Fiordland. Caswell sound is surprisingly anti-climactic, although it's always pretty cool to tramp to any wild coast.
The next day we retrace our steps all the way back up the Stillwater, our hut-bagging duties discharged. We make better work of the gorge and even disturb a large mob of track builders resting in the ferns. After a few days in the bush with a vegetarian I suddenly wish I had a rifle. From the base of the gorge that gave us problems a couple of days earlier we head up Ethne stream. This stream is tiny and features the ugly thick bush and small scale steepness normally associated with search and rescue missions in the Akatarawas or side streams south of Otaki Forks. The map is marked incorrectly here. A cursory proof read would reveal that streams don't normally cross spurs into new catchments. The Moirs description also leaves a bit to be desired. However we do find a good place to camp - not where Moirs says but at C41 690632. It's roughly about the 600m contour, quite a bit higher than Moirs says. Male and Female kiwi call near our tent. A tent we have tried to make bomb proof as plenty of rain is forecast. Unfortunately the tent is not bomb proof, and with only a ¾ length thermarest it is Quentin who finds the water pooling first
We spend all morning in pit waiting for the rain to stop and when it does we carry on over the Overlander ridge. Moirs describes it as a well marked day trip from George Sound hut. We find one marker, very thick bush and lots of bluffs.
On reaching George Sound we are pleased that we consulted a tide chart. Rather than being desirable (Moirs) low tide is essential. It is slow travel on slippery rocks and the sandflies move in for the kill. Bastards. We collect pockets full of mussels instead as our strike back against nature.
We take a pit day at George sound hut and feast on mussels and food left by boaties. After a pit day we head for Lake Thompson with a side trip to Mt Henry a main divide bump with superb views of this part of this gloriously beautiful, rugged wilderness. We reach Hankinson hut quite early and with a long wait for our boat Quentin goes to work on the DoC staff to try and get a chopper ride out. They decline, but our luck holds and when two foreign fisherman turn up by floatplane to spread Didymo. We get ourselves a cheap backflight. 15 m later we are standing on the waterfront at Te Anau ringing the boat operator. "picking who up" he says. "I'm not picking anyone up from Hankinson, they never confirmed." Whoops. In Fiordland you've got to make your own luck.
Richard Davies - scribe
Quentin Duthie