My last Tuesday off before the holidays and I need to make the most of it. I've had a frustrating few days, hunting and finding trigs on the LINZ website but mostly on private farmland. An email to LINZ offering to be a volunteer collecting beacon information is politely declined, although they did say that they found my email "very entertaining". I can just imagine the smoko room conversation "Did you see the email from the nutter chick who wants us to give her farm access so she can run to the trigs???" :)
Anyway, Tuesday dawns with some imperfect options (too far, too much petrol, dodgy on my own, etc etc) and no real plans. A co-incidental Facebook post recommends running at Te Puna Quarry park - and I know I saw a trig on farmland near there!
I head straight from the car park on to the wilder Southernmost tracks, into native bush and not part of the sculptured park tracks. My first 1km warm up and I have to run back to the car to get my phone - I'll need it for a photo if I make it through to the trig. My general idea is to head to the uppermost boundary of the park and see if I'm brave enough to head through the farm to Minden Road, head along to the trig and sneak up through the paddocks if I can stay out of sight of farm houses. I guess I could just go and ask for permission, but how do I know which is the farm house? And anyway, I'm shy.
My first track heads straight up some nasty steps cut into a steep bank, and when I get to the top and a barb wire fence it's all looking fairly remote so I jump it, head through a couple of paddocks and end up on a farm driveway heading past some flash houses. Trying to look like I belong, I make it out onto Minden Road and can see the trig not far away. I can already see that if I cut along the farm road before the next house, I'll be able to pop up through the little valley and bag the trig without any farmers all uptight about Health and Safety chasing me away. Absolutely gutted as I run, to suddenly see a spray truck head right through the paddock I've got pegged. ##$@. Never mind, instead I run right past, and I'm within 70 m on the back of the hill. In full view of a house, but out of sight of the farm workers on the other side, so I scramble up a bank and run hunched over, take my photos from a distance and scarper. Sure I looked really dodgy the whole time. Must find a way to contact farmers ahead of time and actually get permission.
What follows is a couple of hours of running around Te Puna Quarry Park, trying to map the whole area on my Garmin, and investigating all the different areas for a family trip. Lots of photos stops - it's a cool place! I think I was beyond the park boundaries in places, on some fairly rough tracks, time consuming but good fun.
That's a lot of running in circles..... :)
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