Hidden Valley- Part 2

Continued on from Part 1

After soaking in the views from the top of Cobb Ridge we headed off down the steep road into the “hidden valley”. At lake level we turned and followed the road along the lake edge for 10kms right to the head of the dam where the Cobb River flows into the lake and where there are a number of tramping tracks, & DOC huts further up the valley.

As we approached the end of the road we could see the Trilobite Hut tucked into the bottom edge of the bush below Mt Peel.

We could also see that there were a number of cars in the carpark. Something we never get used to; we drive all day on the rugged-ist of roads, out the back of beyond, without seeing a soul or passing any vehicles and then when we get to the end, the carparks are full! Well, by full, I mean 3 cars. Three cars but no people, they must be all off tramping or hunting or mountain biking. There was no one at the hut either. Trilobite is a 12 bunk hut and those are all the bunks right there in the middle right photo, 8 on the left of the door and 4 on the right. You’ll now understand why we only do day walks.

While we were checking out the hut and the beginning of the tracks another weka came striding down the path to see who had arrived. This time I was able to take a few good shots as it moved about the open ground slowly. It came quite close but was quick to take off at any sudden movement. He (or she) was very curious and at one point I thought it was going to even peck at the lens. I noticed that this one had grey legs & bill, with a hint of orange whereas the one we saw at the top of the ridge had bright orange legs and bill. Maybe this one is a young bird or the orange is part of their breeding colours.

We drove back down the road a few hundred metres to the large tussock covered camping area beside the Cobb River to have a late lunch at one of the picnic tables. I’m guessing that this area would be very popular during the summer but having now driven the road I would say that it would mainly be families in tents or small campervans as anything larger wouldn’t make it through.

I would have liked to have done the tramp to Asbestos Cottage but we decided that we’d just explore by vehicle today as we wouldn’t have had time to get this far into the valley and then do a walk. The start of the track left the access road halfway up the range between the power house and Cobb Ridge and finished half way along the road beside the lake. It was 6km to the hut and then another 7km via the Bullock Track to the lake and unless we had someone to collect us, no way of getting back to the ute without walking. And now looking at the terrain, it would have been very tough going.

Asbestos Cottage (4 bunks) is now a DOC hut but it was once the home of Annie & Henry Chaffey for 40 years. Annie left the isolated valley only once in 40 years. From the DOC website-

Asbestos Cottage was built in the 1890s by prospectors looking for asbestos in the area. From 1914 this isolated cottage was home to Henry Chaffey and Annie Fox. Escaping an abusive husband, Annie left her two teenage sons in Canterbury and fled with her lover Henry to the mountains of the Cobb Valley. The couple stayed as virtual recluses in the tiny hut for nearly 40 years. 

The couple were largely self-sufficient; Henry would hunt deer and goat, and a well tended garden supplied various fruits and vegetables. The little money they needed was earned by taking rainfall readings for the Meteorological Service and Henry’s gold fossicking.

The cottage had a tidy homely interior with walls papered with pages from magazines and mining journals. The large smoky fireplace over which all cooking was done had given the walls and ceiling a brown patina. The floor was covered in deer skins and the few pieces of furniture had covers and white doyleys. Shelves around the walls and in the bedroom were laden with preserves, jams and pickles. From about 1936 a battery driven radio took pride of place in the living room. 

Chaffey spent many years mining and trying to encourage commercial interest in the local asbestos deposits as well as searching for other minerals. Henry was in regular contact with the outside world through his mining ventures and trips out to Motueka and Takaka for supplies. Annie however remained a recluse leaving the hut only once for an urgent operation at Nelson Hospital. She always dressed in Edwardian-style clothing for visitors who were required to signal their approach with a loud “cooee!”

Almost 20 years after fleeing, Annie’s first husband died and she was finally free to wed. The couple were married at the cottage on 5 April 1932 by both Anglican and Presbyterian ministers. The ceremony was followed by a wedding feast of roast goat, potatoes and bread with toasts of whisky and water.

Henry died on the side of the track in August 1951 aged 83. He had been returning from a provisioning trip. Unable to stay at the cottage by herself, Annie was taken to live with relatives in Timaru. However, she found it difficult to adjust and took her own life on 14 July 1953.

What a sad ending to an extraordinary life and how intrepid were the ministers that came to marry the pair?

It was a beautiful late winter’s day; warm sun, blue sky, no wind and the whole valley to ourselves, lunch was a leisurely affair as we soaked up the peaceful surroundings.

David checked out the river for trout but found none (the season was closed on the river but open on the reservoir). We stopped near the river inlet and couldn’t work out why the water was dirty on the edge. The river was clean and the lake was clean but this area a muddy colour. There were a few ducks milling around but I don’t think they had stirred the mud up, I think the lake had been quite low and had exposed some mud flats.

We headed back down the road and stopped at the dam wall and intake to check it out. It was here that we saw our first cars, two with four older couples in them, out on a Sunday drive. The wives sitting in the back and the men chatting in the front. I bet some of those women thought “Where the heck are we going”,  as they drove the road in. I know I’d have been car-sick in the back.

Here are a couple of photos I took of the information boards back up at the top of the ridge in the shelter (which is up at the top of that line in the bush in the photo above, bottom left). The 596m height between the power house & the penstocks is the highest of any NZ power station which permits a considerable amount of power from a relatively small water flow. The dam was completed in 1953 and has a storage capacity of 25.6 million cubic metres.

We wound our way back up to the top of the ridge and stopped for one last look at that fabulous view again, this time taken in the late afternoon sun, before we dropped over the top and out of sight of the stunning “hidden valley”.

And one last photo of the power house as we crossed the bridge, this is the one I used for a blog header last week where the 'spent' water is exiting the side of the building.

I hope you enjoyed your guided tour of the Cobb Valley, it was a magical place and well worth the 120km round trip to visit it.

Hidden Valley - Part 1

The Cobb Valley is a spectacular hidden valley located 30kms inland from Upper Takaka within the Kahurangi National Park. During the ice age the valley filled with a glacier which then carved the classic U-shaped straight valley, polishing and smoothing bedrock and dumping ridges of moraine (soil & rock) as it went. Today the valley has been dammed to form the Cobb Reservoir.

We had wanted to visit Cobb Valley after our trip to Mt Arthur & the Flora Area of the Park a few weeks ago where we saw on the information board that there were quite a number of points of interest on the otherside of the range, which actually wasn’t that far away from Flora as the crow flies. Of course there were a few very large mountains to cross in between, that’s the problem with leaflets & sign boards, they are flat and give a false impression of how difficult some of these tramping tracks are.

Initially I thought we may have taken the 5th-wheeler someway up the road and freedom camped on the side of the Takaka River but as we had already set up camp at Pohara we decided to do the 120km round trip to the valley. The road was great at the beginning, it followed the river inland and although it was narrow in places, it was sealed for the first 16kms right up to the Cobb Valley Power House.

We discussed whether we’d get the van in as far as the Power House and decided that there would be some areas like the one below that might give us a few issues. Solid rock overhangs or vertical walls tend not to move. This shot is a bit blurred, I took it through the window as we edged our way forward hoping that there wasn’t a vehicle coming the other way.

We stopped numerous times along the way so we could check out the river, David for trout & me for Whio (Blue Ducks). We saw neither but at one stop I heard a familiar honking. It seemed to be coming from above and I expected to see a pair of Paradise Ducks fly by. The honking continued but no ducks flew by and the noise definitely wasn’t coming from the river level. So I scanned the trees above us and then spotted a female paradise duck roosting on a dead tree high up in the forest canopy. And beside her but slightly lower and in the shade was her mate resting up too.

I wonder how many know that Paradise Ducks land in trees. I have seen it before, there was a huge gum tree at my old golf club and a pair of ducks often roosted in it. I’ve watched them fly in and land on the narrow trucks too, something you wouldn’t think a duck could do. Obviously Paradise Ducks love high points, remember the pairs on the picnic tables at Totaranui?

Next stop was the Power House. If you’ve been following the blog headers then this will look familiar. Although the header photo was a side view showing all the ‘spent’ water exiting through the side wall of the Power House (I'll post that photo again in Part 2). I’ve never seen water coming out the side of the building like that before.

David spotted his one and only trout at the bridge, a large rainbow who obviously knew it wasn’t the season as he was happy to stay put as we moved about above him. Another month and he’ll have to be a lot more wary.

The road turned to gravel (custard?) after the power house, it was extremely narrow and wound it’s way upwards through beautiful native forest, we were now in the Kahurangi National Park proper. There were very few areas to pull over if another vehicle approached and we sat on the edges of our seats peering around every bend hoping like hell nothing was coming.

Usually the road from the power house to the dam is just a short climb but this one was 6km, 5 of them at a very steep angle with very tight bends right up to the top of the range. And then, as we neared the top, we struck snow again, just as we did at Flora. In fact probably the same snow fall but luckily, there was just one thick ice patch to cross in the shade and a lot on the side of the road.

Once out of the bush the road levelled out and we were into an alpine landscape with the Cobb Ridge shelter and information kiosk ahead of us on the side of the road.

We pulled up ahead of the shelter and this was the spectacular view that greeted us; the Cobb reservoir stretching up the valley towards the snow capped mountains of the Peel Range. The dam wall and intake are hidden in the bottom right corner, and the building you can see to the left is one of three that house Hydro employees although only one was occupied. The track along the lake on the right is part of the walking track to Sylvester Hut & the Sylvester Lakes, it turns inland and heads uphill at the first valley. The road on the left side is where we’re headed, from the top here, it’s another 11kms to the head of the lake just out of view at the end.

While we were reading the information board I caught sight of a movement out the corner of my eye. It was a great delight to see that it was a weka, a large flightless bird that has a famously feisty and curious personality. He (or she) burst out of the scrub growing on the steep slope, gave us a cursory glance and strode off around the shelter to the sunny side where it set about preening and fluffing it’s feathers.

I’ve been waiting to make a weka’s acquaintance, this was our first weka on this trip, another bird to tick off my birder’s list. I’ve seen them a long time ago when we did a trip to the Westcoast but nothing since then as there are only a few small pockets of wekas in the North Island.

The weka let me get reasonably close but it wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to get a decent shot. And while I was trying to take photos it took off again, straight down a rocky slope in front of it where it suddenly grabbed something in it’s bill from underneath the scrub. It turned around and headed back up the rocks at full speed, crossed the road and disappeared under the bush on the other side, never to be seen again.

Not usually known for their speed, my shutter wasn’t set to "fast for weka dinner” and I only managed to grab a blurred image of what it grabbed. I thought it looked like a lizard but when I uploaded the photo and “enhanced” it as best as I could, it appeared to be a small frog (or, I even thought a chick at one stage). David thought it might have been a weta or a grasshopper. And all of these were suggested when I posted the photos on my bird forum (except the chick; it looked too small). See what you think. Here's the original-

And the "enhanced" & cropped shot- 

While I was trying to do the weka photo shoot, I heard a shout. It took me a few moments to find out where David has disappeared to. He had climbed down a bank and out to this marker post right out on the edge of the cliff. It had some sort of measurement indicator on it and there was another post down below on the dam wall with a measurement too.

We had a look across the road to see if the weka might make another appearance after it had eaten dinner but all David found was, what was probably the left-overs of his dinner last week. The empty shell of our giant native land snail, powelliphanta. A snail that is greatly endangered and only found in a few areas around the top of the South Island and the bottom of the North Island.

I should have taken a photo of this in my hand so you could get an indication of the size but it had about a 50mm diametre (2 inches). Powelliphanta can live up to 20 years & can grow up to 90mm. You can see where a bird has punctured the shell to pull out the body. Another first to add to out list, now we want to find a live one.

…….to be continued- Part 2