Day 8 - the forest
Blackbridge Campsite —-> Puketi Forest Hut 20km
After cleaning our gear at the Kauri Dieback station, we descended a very steep slope down to the river. There was no real track to follow, instead we just followed the mud. I have seen photos of others tackling this section a few weeks before us and they literally slid on bums the whole way down. We were very grateful we’d not really seen any rain since arriving in Northland; our mud had at least dried up a bit.
Upon arriving at the river, again we saw no track. We re-read the trail notes and realised that the river was the trail! 2.5km of crossing shore to shore and wading through the deeper sections of the river: We took our time, this was by far the most beautiful section of trail we’d been on yet.
We sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine and attempting to let our feet dry before continuing along the river, but this time following a route through the forest. It took us almost 3 hours to “walk” 3km. Half the track had been destroyed, either from rain or from land slip. We were bush bashing, dipping under trees, hanging onto trees, pushing branches out of the way; constantly searching for the next orange marker to tell us where to go. It was a jungle.
Exhausted, we sat down for a late lunch realising we still had another 15km to go for the day. We definitely under estimated how hard this section would be - I’d laughed at the 9.5 hour DOC estimate at the start of the day. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Josh as I was sure it must be wrong…
The next 6km was a never ending staircase out of the forest. I have no idea how we kept going up for that long, as we for sure didn’t come down that distance... just the thinking about it now makes me tired. We clearly did not have our trail legs yet!
When we got to the top and onto the forestry road, we debated just setting up camp on the roadside. Neither of us wanted to walk another 9km. However, we’d suddenly come into phone signal and we’d had a message from Milton telling us to go to Steph’s for Christmas, and then a message from Steph inviting us to Christmas. She had a whole gang of family heading over for the day and we could absolutely join. She could even pick us up from the hut in the morning. Incredible.
We’d been electrocuted. No longer dead to the world, the remaining 9km felt like a small inconvenience that stood in our way of a day off and a Christmas dinner. Headphones in, we power walked all the way to camp - with easily the most tired legs we had on trail, we blasted our fastest walking pace to date.
We arrived the hut around 7pm, and wonderfully no one else was staying there - we had a whole 18 bed building to ourselves. We cleaned, we ate, we collapsed. It was the earliest either of us had gone to bed on Christmas Eve for a long time…!
