Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes
Distance: 7 km
Start: End of Horotane Valley Road, Linda Woods Reserve
Finish: Same place (it's loopish)
Date: Friday 29th November 2024
Warning: No official track, and rockfall zones
Christmas soon. Busy times, so just two of us walking today. Jane is pretty gung-ho, so I suggested we do something a bit more adventurous, like circumnavigate Castle Rock for example, and she was up for that. I have done this walk a few times over the years, but after the earthquakes, there was so much rockfall that the official track closed and gorse grew up. These days, such an endeavour could be construed as foolhardy.
At the end of Horotane Valley Road, Christmas cherries were already on sale. Early for this time of year. There was a flash of a track cam as we walked down the thin path into the Linda Woods Reserve. Horotane Valley is a microclimate, and the apricot orchards were laiden with fruit. Over the stile - the possum skins, gathering pine needles, swayed gently in the breeze.
We took the left hand dirt track, heading east above the pines to the ridge. From there it was a straight forward climb, following the ridge on a small trail, up to Castle Rock - Te Tihi o Kahukura. According to
Kā Huru Manu (the Ngāi Tahu atlas), "tihi" means summit and Kahukura is "an important atua (demi-god) central to many stories including one that he took his celestial form as a rainbow".
At the end of the fenceline, someone had conveniently snipped the top barbed wire and we climbed over. The trail of sorts, marked with the odd cairn, continued on up to the cave. You could really feel the grandeur of the place by looking up at the rocky overhangs. In places large amounts of rock had been gouged off the wall and had fallen to the ground. Earthquakes.
From the cave, we followed the track that hugged the rock, eventually gaining the top. We dumped our day packs and my poles and walked, scrambled, climbed, hopped, jumped across all the cracks and crevasses to the end of Castle Rock. The trickiest bits had metal foot and hand-holds, so were fairly easy to negotiate.
We returned to the packs and poles and continued on towards Summit Road. Just short of the road, we crossed a cattle-stop, verring left where the track forked. A descent through gorse was required here. By scrambling down the rock, there was no need to use the gardening gloves and secateurs I had feretted away in my back pack. We reminisced about wedding days and anniversaries - a blast from the past. Time passed in a flash and we were suddenly on the ridge then back in the wild roses of the Linda Wood Reserve again. The leg bone of a large beast was quirkily balanced on top of a fence pole and we just had to stop for photos. Then it was back to the car and, with a flight to catch, no time for coffee today.
