Mission into the Akatarawa's to locate NZ's largest Northern Rata. Total time out 3hrs, but a fair bit of grid searching and faffing.
A good group of 8 of us, headed out along the same old and overgrown track as last Monday (found the track end straight off this time though). After negotiating the now ropeless cliff, we reached Little Ak stream, and this time headed straight up it. A few nice small gorges to negotiate, but water levels were low so all good. There'd obviously been some impressive flash floods through though, with big trees all but blocking some parts of the stream gully.
Following old Ak-attack maps, we passed #34 from the 2011 race, before bushbashing up the hill from the next junction. We immediately found a quite large but fairly dead Rata, but quickly decided it wasn't impressive enough to be the one we were looking for.
My watch was at about 60mins here...we then spent 45mins+ searching the nearby ridges for the giant Rata. It turns out that an 18m circumference tree is surprisingly hard to find! Or maybe it was a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, too many orienteers searching for a control?
Visibility in the native forest was super low with low trees and vines everywhere, while the tree cover is dense enough that a) GPS is bad (and Greg had left his in the car anyway), and b) It's hard to see through the foliage to see tall trees. That said, there were many smaller Rata and the whole forest area was beautiful and impressive. I can only assume that the destructive felling of the 1900s didn't get this far in the Aks.
We decided to pack it in and start heading out when Sarah and Magnus saw what might/might not be a large tree about 30m away from us...cue Greg sprinting through the forest to claim the glory of 'finding' the giant Rata! Wooooo. A really special tree, all the more so for it's remote location. >1000yrs old, and yes, massive.:)
Another 10mins while Caspar figured out the self-timer on the camera, a few photos to prove we found the giant, and then headed back out the way we came in. People were far more graceful climbing the (admittedly small, but tricky) cliff than they were descending it...