Urumau Reserve, Lyttelton

Time: 1 hour and 35 minutes
Distance: 5 km
Start: Lyttelton Information Center, 20 Oxford Street, Lyttelton
Finish: Same place. It's a loop.
Date: Friday 15th January 2021 (updated May 2024)

To the east of the Lyttelton township is a lava flow ridge that ends in a small cluster of pine trees. This is Urumau Reserve: a higgeldy piggeldy of walking tracks and mountain bike paths. There are a couple of maps online (here and here) but both are seemingly unrelated to each other and only vaguely like the experience in the field. The council has plans to develop the tracks with better signage - in the meantime it is probably best just to follow your nose and hope that a mountain biker doesn't come flying around the corner. However, I would not attempt this track at 11am on a Saturday morning for example.

We met at the Lyttelton Information Center on 20 Oxford Street and took the path that runs along the south side of the building, up the steps, across Sumner Road then up onto St. Davids Street. Between numbers 29 and 31 there is a stairway that runs all the way up (crossing Reserve Terrace) to Randolph Terrace. We then headed towards the Time Ball Station before turning left onto Gilmour Tce - which swings around before eventually petering out to a farm track. A few minutes on, there is a southerly turn off and an actual track sign to Urumau Reserve. Yay. I tried to find a translation for Urumau but a Google search did not enlighten.

It was cloudy and humid and we were sweating like anything after our hill climb. We entered the gloom of the pine trees keeping on the low track and almost immediately came across a troop of mushrooms - which our mushroom expert (Zhanna) identified as the edible but not easily transportable Shaggy Parasol (Chlorophyllum rhacodes). The name is apt - they really do look like shaggy parasols -but I reckon it would also be a good name for a pub: "The Shaggy Parasol".

We continued on, almost always taking the low track and so we more or less followed a contour line around the coast and eventually popped out onto Sumner Road. This was slightly unplanned so we retraced our steps to the "Wrong way" sign (hardly reassuring) thereby looping back and up the hill. It's all a bit of a blur. You could wander around in circles for days in there. Luckily we managed to pop out onto the top ridge and out of the pines without seeing one mountain biker.

We descended to Reserve Terrace via a slightly different track, then at the bottom of Stevenson's Steep we took a left onto St. Davids before taking the walkway down past Lyttelton Primary School. The architecture of this school cleverly resembles a large box with virtually no windows. Probably designed this way because the views out to the harbour are too stunning (this is one of those obscure connections brought to you by the Ministry of Education).