Maniototo- Out in the Styx; Part 2

Carrying on from Part 1

After driving through Patearoa, we continued on up the Maniototo valley passing along the way, quite a number of new dairy conversions and some still under construction. It was a surprise to see dairy farms all the way out here, I wondered where the closest dairy factory was, we haven’t seen any tankers on the road while we’ve been in the area. We slowed to let the tail-enders of a large herd cross the road, followed by a couple of quad bikes with farm workers on board. Most of the farm labour we’ve seen around the dairy farms here and further south have been Filipinos. I bet the Maniototo would have been a major culture shock for them, especially the isolation and the bitter cold.

We leave the dairy farms behind and move into sheep country, large station homesteads appear here and there and near the entrance of one, we stop to take a photo of this old salvaged & restored gold dredge.

Further on we pass Patearoa Station’s beautiful stone woolshed….

…which is across the road from this long abandoned homestead. The 5000ha Patearoa Station was purchased by the Hore family a few years ago and added to their own large station next door.

The 8000-odd hectare Stonehenge Station is home to the Hore family, this is the family farm of past All Black Andrew Hore whose great-grandfather came to the Maniototo in 1910.

Stonehenge Station cottage and farm shed.

 

We pass over the Tairei River once again, it’s getting narrower so we must be nearing it’s source. There’s also a couple of small power stations on the banks of the river. We start to climb again and we’re looking for a sheltered place to stop for a late lunch.

Towards the top of the rise we pass over a large pipe that is channeling water down to the power stations below. The view out over the vast Maniototo Valley is stunning, small irrigation ponds and dams are glistening in the sunshine, and across the valley is the snow capped North Rough Ridge.

At the top I spot an NZ Fish & Game angling sign beside a closed gate. There must be a lake or dam nearby so we decide to check it out and maybe find that place to have some lunch. We follow a steep track up the side of a bank and find ourselves on top of a dam wall and beside the intake to the pipe. This is the Paerau Irrigation & Power Scheme and a track follows the dam walls in both directions.

We head towards the far end of the dam and before we realise it, there’s a large mob of sheep advancing on us (coming round the mountain). They think we’re the farmer and have their feed with us.

They hesitate for a moment & we make a hasty retreat and finding no shelter beside the dam to have lunch, we park on the track between two huge rocky outcrops. It’s once again bitterly cold outside with a stiff wind blowing but at least the rock offers a little bit of shelter as I pour the soup standing between the open doors while David stays warm in the cab. The white on the rock beside his door are frozen icicles, water that has seeped out of the rocks has frozen on it’s way down the rock face.

We don’t hang about and nor have the sheep, they ambush us on the track over the intake. They must have taken a short cut because we didn’t see them pass us by.

We nudge our way through avoiding eye contact as they stretch their heads upwards looking expectantly for food. When we look back there’s still dozens coming over the rise. We can’t get out of there fast enough. What's with sheep and us, we seem to have spent much of our time in the Maniototo being harassed by hungry sheep.

We carry on down the road, we’re getting close to the end of the road. This is Paerau (meaning many ridges) and formerly known as Styx, as in ‘out in the styx’- and this really is out in the styx, the back of beyond, the wops, miles from nowhere. This road does end, but before it does, it crosses the famous Dunstan Trail, a trail used by miners on their way to and from the inland gold fields of Central Otago back in the late 1800s.

The Dunstan Trail is a Dry Weather Track (summer only), we drove part of it on our way to Poolburn Dam the other week and hopefully we’ll be back to drive it’s length next summer. There are other tracks that branch off from the Dunstan Trail, one heads to Lake Onslow- The Dismal Swamp, where we visited awhile back from the Roxburgh side of the range. Another track passes the most isolated church in New Zealand, the Serpentine, a rough stone ‘hut’ out in the middle of nowhere. Of course I’m hoping we’ll make it to there too.

We cross the Tairei again and as we head up the other side I spot some old buildings down the bank beside the river. These are what I’m looking for and one of the main reasons we’ve driven to the top of the valley.

At the top there’s a gate and a track leading down to the river. It’s private property with a sign on the gate.

This is where the old Styx jail, hotel and stables are located. This is also the junction with the Dunstan Trail and it’s where miners stopped for the night- there were originally two hotels, one on either side of the river so there were options if it was in flood. The Styx Jail was built in 1863, but rather than for prisoners, it was mostly used to secure gold during overnight coach stops.

I thought I had it sorted but the sign wasn’t to scale and didn’t quite make sense (to me anyway), we were parked at the sharp point on the sign, at the Dunstan Trail junction. Talk about being picky- the owners of the land around the jail must have had issues to be so pedantic. But it didn’t matter because when I got to the bottom of the track I found I couldn’t get to the jail anyway due to having to cross the river.

There was no way I was taking my socks & boots off and crossing through the ice cold water and it was actually about knee deep even though it doesn’t look it here. The stables were visible and another building which was possibly the old hotel but I couldn’t see the jail even through the bare trees. I was a bit disappointed not to actually see the jail but  that'll be another reason we’ll have to come back this way in the summer.

As I was getting back into the ute, we heard a whole lot of revving and laughter coming from the Dunstan Trail ahead of us, and high up on the range we spotted three 4WDs weaving their way down the trail. They disappeared into a gully for awhile; we could still hear the revving and yahoos, before they popped over the rise in front of us. They skidded and spun their way out onto the road and were gone, as fast as they appeared.

We turn around and followed their wheelie tracks back up the valley before we turn off and head across the head of the valley to the west side. We stop at another old stone woolshed, this one I think is on Linnburn Station.

A little further on we pass the another entrance to the Dunstan Trail, not too far over the range is the Poolburn Dam. The section of the trail between here and the Styx is the one we’ve just travelled and is the normal public road.

The sun comes out as we turn our nose towards home and head along the bottom of North Rough Ridge passing more sheep stations, deer farms and dairy herds along the way.

Ahead of us I spot a gang of turkeys near the roadside fence- I like gang myself, but rafter or flock, they all refer to a group of turkeys. We pull up so I can take a photo just as I spot another flock of sheep making a beeline across the paddock towards us. ‘Quick,’ I call to David ‘Let’s get out of here!’

Just around the next bend is another larger gang of turkeys spread out across the road. They dash for the fence and as we slow down peel off to the left, running fast along the fence line trying to find a break in it to escape.

I know what my family will be thinking reading this; did you lean out the window Shellie and go ‘gobble, gobble, gobble!?’ My mother did this when we were kids, whenever we’d pass turkeys while out driving around the countryside (in fact she’s been known to do it when we were adults too). I think (I bet) she got it from her father- if you get the call right, the turkeys will answer back. They didn't talk to me.

The long & undulating road home- it was a shame the cloud hung low over the snow covered mountains ahead of us otherwise this would have been a magic shot. All the same, and despite the weather and the chilling cold, we had a awesome day exploring the beautiful Maniototo Valley.

And that was us for the Maniototo too, we left Ranfurly a couple days later driving over the Pig Root (Kyeburn to Palmerston) and through to Kakanui, heading north to see our family again. We decided we'd do the last third of our Cheats Otago Rail Trail, from Kyeburn to Middlemarch, later in our travels.

We had an awesome time exploring this amazing part of the country and especially doing it during winter. I missed my hoar frost (much to the relief of the locals) but we had our fair share of snow, ice and beautiful winter sunshine along the way. Our 5th-wheeler did us proud, we were so toasty warm because it is so well insulated. We hardly needed our second diesel heater- we have two, one in the bedroom and one in the lounge. And as long as we layered up with clothing we managed very well outside in the sometimes extremely cold weather- one day we woke up to -12 degrees Celsius. An extra bonus was the lack of people, we could have been the only people on earth some days.

We'll definitely be back another day, another season.

Poolburn Dam- LOTR’s Plains of Rohan

The Rohirrim were a horse people of the land of Rohan in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, they lived in villages on the plains of Rohan. I don’t think Sir Peter Jackson could have found a better place than Maniototo’s Poolburn Dam to use for the Rohirrim villages. Before I show you my new favourite place, first we must get there.

Poolburn Dam is located in Rough Ridge at the southern end of the vast and sparsely populated Ida Valley. We take the road out past historic Ophir, past McTavish's Hut, up and over the Raggedy Range (I love that name), stopping at the top to take a photo looking out over the south end of the isolated valley.

We turn right at the old Poolburn Hotel, no longer the ‘Meeting Place of the Valley’, pass an old abandoned church and carry on for what seems like miles before turning left at the Poolburn Dam sign. Not too far along Websters Lane is an old restored stone cottage which was once the home of the Websters, early settlers in the area.

We approach the last settlement on the road, Moa Creek, which is now just a couple of rundown buildings but was once a bustling village after gold was discovered nearby in 1863.

This Moa Creek Hotel was built in 1912 and closed around 1978, it replaced an earlier hotel which was built in 1861. The general store next door was built in 1870 and closed in 1973. They’re now in the company of an assortment of ramshackle tin shacks.

A number of vehicles had passed us on the road and we now find out where they were heading. Behind the buildings is a gun club and a meet was taking place. Farmers and their shotguns were shooting up the range. We wondered why there were red flags flying on the fences as we approached the intersection.

We turn onto the Old Dunstan Road at Moa Creek and head up onto Rough Ridge. The Old Dunstan Road (Road 2- there are two parts to it) is a 4WD dry weather track that crosses the ridge and comes out at Paerau/Styx near Middlemarch. The complete Old Dunstan road is 170km and was once the most direct route from Dunedin to the gold diggings at ‘the Dunstan’ – present day Clyde and Alexandra. The track beyond the dam is closed during winter. There is also a track that leaves the Old Dunstan Road and ends up at remote Lake Onslow, the 'Dismal Swamp'- you may remember we visited Lake Onslow last year driving in from Roxburgh.

The 14km track to the dam is mostly dry and easy driving, although there are a few wet patches and as we get closer patches of snow appear in the lee of the rock stacks.

David was all for heading for home when we came across a mucky entrance where we stopped to open a gate (this was the blog banner from a few days ago). A mob of cows had obviously been keen to escape this barren land too. I manage to convince David that the dam wasn’t going to be much further on….

… and I was right, just over the rise ahead of us and spread out below in a shallow basin was the spectacular Poolburn Dam.

What an incredible landscape; remote, windswept and cold (in winter) with a blue frozen lake and great swirls of white ice that matched the clouds and sky above. The ground is covered in sandy tuffs of tussock and rich rust coloured spear grass with hundreds of grey rocky tors scattered about. A bleak moonscape with colours to match. No wonder Peter Jackson chose this area as his ‘Plains of Rohan’.

Many of the tiny iron shacks that are tucked into the rocky crevices on the lake edge remain plain and unadorned, blending into and becoming part of this stunning environment.

The lake has frozen during the last snow fall and this blue ice is weak and unstable, it's sometimes called 'rotten ice'. It's unsuitable for curling or skating on. The white ice is regular frozen water.

Some of you might recognise this photo, it appeared on TV1’s weather the night we returned from the dam. We were actually having dinner in the Omakau Pub when it flashed up on the big screens around the room and there was a loud cheer from the patrons propping up the bar. You should have seen their faces when I said I took the photo.

They were cheering because it was a local scene and the hut across the cove is owned by the Omakau Fishing Club, which some of them belonged to.

Poolburn Dam is another irrigation dam built in the early 1930s during the Great Depression when workers were plentiful, it was built to supply water to the farms in the Ida Valley.

The dam is located in a natural basin on top of the ridge and anybody boating on the lake has to be careful of the drowned rocky towers, some are under hidden under the water while others form small islands.

We drove (read ‘slid’) our way a short distance around the lake, unfortunately the track was very muddy with snow melt and with deep ruts in places. The ute doesn’t have very knobbly tires and they filled up quick with mud, so we were sliding all over the show. David wasn’t happy about continuing on any further as other than one vehicle heading out as we arrived, and a guy on a quad bike, we were on our own if we got stuck.

We decided not to explore any further or to venture on around to the dam wall. We found some high (and dry) ground nearby and had a quick lunch sheltered by the ute against a howling cold wind that was blowing a gale, it was the coldest I’ve felt for a long while.

I quickly took a few more photos before my fingers froze…

…if I had time I could have done another long-drop photo shoot, similar to Lake Onslows outhouses…

…before we headed back towards the entrance.  I spotted these unusual ice swirls on the lake edge along the way, looking like a big tub of icecream which I'd call Blue Moon Swirl!

We took a short detour down towards some more fishing huts but the track was just as slippery so after a few more photos we turned around and headed out.

Poolburn Dam is my new favourite place, a photographers paradise, and we hear a fisherman’s too. We will definitely be back. In the late summer hopefully, when we can pull the fifth-wheeler up there and freedom camp for a week or two, when David can get the inflatable out and go fishing and I can explore to my hearts content. And we can drive the Old Dunstan Road to the other end and take another side track to the remotest church in New Zealand, the Serpentine. Yes, we will be back.

As we head out, the quad bike overtakes us spraying our windscreen with mud. We curse and shout at him but he’s long gone….until we reach the gate when we take some of it back and smile sweetly as he holds the gate open for us. Only for him to tear past us again a few minutes later. His shiny new red bike is no longer shiny. Or red.

We stop at the top of the ridge to take in the view up the Ida Valley, the sun is low and we can’t see much. Someone with some mechanical help has built a large rock cairn near the road, smaller replicas sit on the ground nearby. I imagine these are silent farewells to the horse people.

We take a back road from Moa Creek home, another road that runs for miles in a straight line passing the Ida Valley Station woolshed along the way, a station that was established way back in 1858. That's Old Man Range behind, the range that towered above us at Butchers Dam.

In front of us are the snow covered Hawdun & Ida Ranges at the top of the valley. Made famous by the well known NZ artist Graham Sydney.