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Tararua Tramping Club

Te rōpū hikoi o te pae maunga o Tararua   -   Celebrating 100 years of tramping

Trip Reports 2016-06-15-Whakanui

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This article was first published in the Tararua Tramper Volume 88, no 7, August 2016

Whakanui Waterfall MF 15 June

15 June 2016

My first ever TTC day trip, led by Peter Jagger and Michael Bartlett, visited a waterfall on the Whakanui Stream. In the twenty or so years since then I had often crossed the stream and travelled up and down it but never once happened again on the waterfall. Advice from both Michael and Lynne Pomare suggested an area below the very top forks. So, on a fine if windy Wednesday, up the Old Whakanui we went, around towards the saddle, down to the top forks, into the stream – and there were the falls!

Moving around off track we had noticed several 'Jagger markers'. Peter certainly left his mark on the hills and red paint and red-painted tin lids tied to trees still act as beacons guiding the adventurous to out-of-the-way places.

After finding the waterfall we climbed back up to the Whakanui Track, lunched, and then crossed the Turere Valley. No problems descending and on reaching the stream, almost inevitably we found trap line markers which took us up to the McKerrow Track. Thence via the 'McKerrow Shortcut' to the Sunny Grove Track, followed only briefly before we plunged down the ‘Nikau Track’ and along the pathway back to the road end.

It may be worth adding that the May 1997 waterfall incident, in which a club member tumbled over a Whakanui waterfall and had to be airlifted out the next day, occurred not at the waterfall we visited but higher up the headwaters, probably on the TL branch above the upper forks.

Thanks to Michael Bartlett for information about the 1997 accident.

Party members
Joan Basher, Tony Black, Colin Cook (leader and scribe), Susan Guscott, Gerald Leather, David McNabb, Peggy Munn, Marg Pearce, Bob Stephens, John Thomson, Lynne White, Warwick Wright

Page last modified on 2022 May 14 02:51

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