Day 34: Hunua Range to Mercer

Distance Covered: 27 km

What a day. Mentally, this was about as low as we’ve been. To the point that we brought up leaving the trail to go hike the Great Walks or National Parks instead of whatever mess this is. It feels like they needed to link sections together and (years ago) put this day together as best as they could manage with limited resources. Then the trail deteriorated rapidly from that low point. 

We started by climbing to the ridge. This part was nice. The trail was decent bush trail, which means muddy, rooty, and steep, but nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s funny, though, because as soon as this trail in the middle of nowhere got close to a Kauri tree, suddenly there were stairs and boardwalks. Maybe 100 or 200 people hike this Te Araroa specific trail and a lot of money and time was spent to build these things. Must be some kind of law?

At the ridge, the trailnotes described 6 km note of “arduous, steep, and overgrown” trail. I took a picture of the first few meters. Not a good sign. The trail is right in the middle of this picture.

And then it went up. Hand over hand through the thickest vines we’ve yet seen. Any given meter had us pulling vines left, right, up, and over. That “and” in the last sentence is definitely not an “or”! The first 2 km were as advertised, taking us over an hour to bushwhack through, and we felt we were in it for the long haul. 

But then it got better. Like, better than the 6 km from yesterday that advertised “views across the reservoir”. It wasn’t good trail, but it was decent trail for New Zealand.

One surprise was hearing a bunch of voices in front of us. Who else could be on this trail? Turns out 90 high school boys were on an end of term excursion for school. Every year they hike the track, which starts just outside their school, as part of an overall journey to Auckland (about 100 km). Kind of a "toughen them up" adventure. Good for them, we say. We should have asked how much road walking they do, but forgot. Also in this forest, we found a marker celebrating 700 km. 

The track dropped us at the high school and then it was… wait for it… more road walking! Zoom go the cars. Ouch go our feet. One thing we haven't talked about is the subtle tilt to the road. Our ankles are bent inward slightly for hours at a time from the road's roll-off into the ditch. We've tried walking the ditch, but the grass is tall and hides uneven terrain, making it an ankle twisting risk.

After a while, the track branched off of the highway and onto something new: a stopbank. These are the berms or dirt mounds paralleling the river that prevent overflowing into farms and houses. It was great in the sense that there was little mud, open views, no cars, and no roots. We were pretty excited, really.

But then we got off the nice stopbank and onto one in a cow field. This one was dense with cow hoof prints that were molded into dried mud. This was bad walking as the prints are all over, next to each other, overlapping and etc. They can be 10 cm deep and are just the right size to get only part of your foot in. This means rolling your ankle in any given direction with each step. It’s also hard on your knees as they end up providing a lot of your stability as you wobble to and fro. 

For this kind of walking, you want very short grass or very long. Short grass means you can see where you are going and react accordingly. It’s still work and it slows you down as you pick your way, through, but there are few surprises. Very long grass means two things: it’s been a while since cows have been around so erosion has decreased the danger and also, the long grass cushions and fills in holes as you go. 

The worst is ankle to shin high grass as it means the prints are relatively fresh and you can’t see them. You’ll be walking along and your foot will unexpectedly roll or twist sharply in some direction. In the worst areas, just about every footstep carries this unseen risk. The bottom line is you have to focus on each step and accept the rolling and twisting and work your legs accordingly. It’s exhausting. And everything from your knees down feels worked over.

So, back to the story, this stopbank section had kilometers of the bad stuff. Emily walked in front and it was like watching someone walk on marbles. On and on it went. The one (very good) silver lining was that you could stop and actually see some cool things. It was hard to walk and look, but stopping and looking was rewarding.

Several hours later, we got to the busy highway. But there was a surprise! Instead of walking on the highway, the trail paralleled it, in that green strip of government controlled land next to every major road. So the ground was softer than hard asphalt. What a pleasant surprise! Sure, we had to walk kilometers next to a loud highway, but our feet would be much better off.

But there was another surprise! The trail hadn’t been maintained for some time. It was thick with bushes. Quite attractive bushes filled with wonderful flowers blocked us nearly constantly, forcing us to push through. Then the path went along the slope of the raised highway and wasn’t leveled so your feet were angled. And we were stepping on hidden glass bottles, red bull cans, and McDonald’s trash. And it was swampy in parts. And then the trail just kind of seemed to end with no more markers. So we pushed up to the highway and just walked on that instead.

We got to Mercer to find that it was essentially a Mobil Station and a McDonalds. It looked like any rest stop in the US. But! It did have a pub/motel that let TA walkers camp for free. Sweet! And free showers. Awesome! Once again, the people saved what was a mediocre to poor day of hiking.

Over a pizza dinner, Emily and I confessed to each other about feeling frustrated about the trail. In the beginning, road walks linked long trail sections. Lately, it’s seemed that terrible trails are linking long road sections. We are feeling beat up by days like today where you walk all day without just being able to hike. It’s either Indiana Jones trekking through vines, roots, and mud, or hard highway walking with semis screaming past you within a meter or two, or rutted out pasture that contort your legs, ankles, and feet. The trail since Auckland has seemed to be unmaintained for at least a couple of years too, with missing signs and all the other aforementioned overgrowth problems. The pub patrons say no one in their right mind would choose to hike where we have, so only TA people are on it, which means nobody local is going to volunteer to do trail maintenance.

And a lot of it is without reward other than the benefit of moving the dot on the map a little further south. Is that worthwhile? Does that have meaning? Is there nothing more interesting and fulfilling we could be doing with our time and money than carefully eyeing highway cars to make sure they see us? Hmmm….

So we are in bed now. It’s Friday night so the pub is rocking. People are loud, the highway is loud, the music is loud (all 80’s classics from the US). Today was not fun. Hopefully, the trail improves or we can continue to dig deep for understanding as we head along the river valley for a few days.