Te Rerepahupahu Falls
Weekend Trip
Saturday 12 July 2008 to Sunday 13 July 2008 (2 days)
The Medium Trip - Mt Damper Falls to Te Rerepahupahu Falls
It was a wild and windy morning when Bruce woke us up at 7 o’clock with the comment that if we wanted to get away by 7.30 (as planned) we had better get our act together. Our potential problem was daylight hours as we had been advised by a Taranaki person who had done the trip in 2006 that the track was overgrown, very much up and down, and would take eight hours plus to reach the Te Rerepahupahu Stream, then another hour to the falls themselves (our planned camping spot).
A quick breakfast, a brief discussion as to whether we should be doing this at all (the nearby stream was at least 1.5 metres in flood), then four of us headed for the Mt Damper Falls to find the track up on to the ridge that we would be following for most of the day. The Mt Damper Falls, the highest in the North Island, were magnificent - in flood and plunging down over a sheer bluff down to the valley floor way below. No time to go to the bottom of the falls so we found the indistinct track leading up to the ridge and continued on. A stiff climb through pine trees, bits of farm tracks, and eventually a stile leading into the Waitaanga Forest.
The track was good, easy to follow and well marked. As there was a DOC hut for hunters another hour and a half in, just before Mt Damper itself, we assumed that perhaps hunters had maintained this section. No time to linger as the wind was bitter so a brisk walk to the hut to be welcomed by hunters still in bed. ‘Not going out in this weather’ was their comment as Tina brewed up her coffee fix for the morning. A brief 15-minute stop and off again to tackle the ‘overgrown’ section of the track. Once again we were surprised as the track still continued to be easy to follow, well marked, and with only the occasional windfall.
Lunch huddled in the shelter of a tree was brief as everyone quickly lost body heat so, keeping up a faster pace than expected, we continued on along the undulating ridge and eventually dropped down to the Te Rerepahupau River at about 1.30 in the afternoon. The river was in full flood with the wire bridge just above the surface of the torrent underneath. The track up the river towards the falls was covered by the flooded river in places, requiring detours up little side streams to find crossing places.
The Te Rerepahupahu Falls were like floodgates on hydro dams - won’t have an electricity crisis if we could harness these. The planned tenting site at the falls was buffered by the spume from the falls and very uninviting (no sign of the other party - looks like they had done the sensible thing and gone to the hut a further hour or so on from the falls). A quick decision was made to join them - decided we still had another 300m-climb left in us. Not unexpectedly, as we climbed out of the valley we met the other party coming the other way to visit the falls after dropping their packs at the hut. The track eventually came out on top of the ridge and instead of dropping down to the next stream and up on to the high flats where the hut was, as shown on the topo maps, it headed instead up around the headwater of the stream. We reached the hut at 4.00pm and waited for the other group to return from the falls as daylight retreated.
Sunday was fine and less exciting than the stories of waist-deep flooding that the other group had experienced on the way in.
All in all, a good tramp.
