Time: 4 hours
Distance: 11 km
Start: Small gravelly layby on the right, 1 km north of Parapet Rock, State Highway 73, Castle Hill Basin.
Finish: Same place (it's loopish)
Date: Friday 6th September 2024
Notes:
- The walk described here crosses Flock Hill Station which is private land (a working farm) and permission is required. See the Castle Hill Community Association website for contact details of the station managers.
- Flock Hill Station is closed to all visitors 1st Oct - 25th December for lambing.
- Wilding pines are a pest - take a saw and cut them at the base (or if you are strong enough - pull them out).
- Read the Flock Hill Safety Notice.
- Read the Flock Hill Basin website Kaitiakitanga. It mentions poo pots (poo wots?) which is a commendable idea - albeit logistically tricky and requires knowledge of pooh size (in millilitres).
Wow - Flock Hill. This was a pretty spectacular day. We parked at the gravel pile layby, climbed the turnstile, and followed the fenceline for 10 minutes back to Parapet Rock. This entailed jumping a few swampy streams, getting wettish feet and bypassing three guys scaling a large power transmission pole.
From Parapet Rock we took the left farm track at the forks. Down the hill, over the bridge (Cave Stream) and up onto the terrace, mostly following the gravel road built for the filming of The Cronicles of Narnia. After about 60 minutes (4 km from the car park), we arrived at the rock cluster closest to Cave Stream Scenic Reserve. We rounded the corner and, what a sight!! A grassy valley, strewn with ginormous boulders and lined with impressive overhangs. The Battle of Beruna. After a few minutes of walking up the valley, we had a serendipitous encounter with a strategically placed (probably by helicopter) designer picnic bench. The clock had just struck midday. Lunch time! I munched happily on Michael's superior sammies.
Ngāi Tahu are tangata whenua here - but the Crown procured the land by dubious means in 1848 (
Kemp's Deed) and transferred ownership to the University of Canterbury via the
Canterbury Reserves Sale and Leasing Act 1876. Interstingly, UC have quite an extensive land portfolio in the South Island and currently lease (long-term)
Flock Hill Station to an American company. A luxury lodge has recently been built and you can stay there (if you are filthy rich) for between $9200 and $32,370 per night (depending on the season). Gosh. Wot a lot.
After lunch, with apple cores safely packed away in lunch boxes (actually I ate mine), we were keen to explore the upper valley. At the top, the terrain flattened and we wandered around a fabulous limestone boulder field - skeletal and shell remains from creatures in a warm ocean 30 million years ago. Tectonic plate movement and erosion have all had their part to play here. I gleaned this from
A field guide to the geology of the Castle Basin.pdf. The boulders look tiny from the highway but they are massive once you are walking amongst them. These limestone formulations have warped into a phantasmagora of shapes and sizes: a frog about to jump, a teapot with a nipple finial, a massive dildo and something that one of our crew reckoned looked a bit like a clitoris.
We ascended to the ridgline and had a bit of a photo shoot because the scenery was so fabulous. Snowy peaks in all directions. To the north, the Craigiburn Range; To the south, the Torlesse Range and The Gap. There was a path along the ridge with a bluffy drop-off. We followed the fenceline and had a go pulling out a few pine seedlings. No easy task. We flourished gardening gloves, trowels and a grubber. I pulled and pulled and nothing happened. Jane and Nicole added some extra muscle. Anything above about 10 cm in height was almost impossible to extricate.
We split into two parties. Nicole and I continued on up the ridge and "summitted" Flock Hill (998 m) - while the others meandered through the rocks further down and chatted to a bunch of rock climbers from Chile.
We managed to phone each other and agree on a rendezvous point. There was no actual track down but both parties managed to find a way through the maze of spikey matagouri and a million pine seedlings [Gosh. Wot a lot.] back to the Narnia Road.
From there, to be honest, it was a bit of a slog up the hill to Parapet Rock and then along the fenceline to the car. We all felt shattered but happy - heading home to our wines and four pints of beer.
