Opanuku Pipeline Track

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Even if Alice doesn't, I always welcome the freshness of a young rimu beside the track. Even after a trip to the barber she still comes home with her coat crisp with dead rimu leaves.

The New Zealand flora has one of the richest collections of divaricate plants and shrubs in the world, and a good many of them are small-leaved coprosmas, with a dense network of intertwining twigs and branchlets. Opinion is still divided on the evolutionary advantage to be obtained from such a growth habit.

If you want to learn more about these, there is an excellent book, Small-Leaved Shrubs of New Zealand by Hugh Wilson and Tim Galloway, pub Manuka Press, 1993, which deserves much wider circulation than it has. You need to know about it and then order it through your regular bookseller as it's odds on he won't have it in stock. I bought mine only this year so it's still around. As with most, you'll need to refer to somewhere like www.nzpcn.org.nz for the most up-to-date scientific naming.

You wouldn't think there was much worth rolling in on a civilised track like this, but it's always worth checking out.

Rewarewa haven't been common from the road in but from here on there are lots.

Now, there aren't any visible kauri for quite a distance, and I'm never quite sure whether these little fellows are self-sown or part of some long term planting program.

One day I'll get my head around all the variations and species in the Tree Daisy family. With their hard leathery leaves and a habit not totally dissimilar to some eucalypts they are a regular feature where the bush is drier and more sunbaked.

Not many parent rimus around either. Another planting?

And here's a feature seldom encountered along our Waitakere tracks. Off to the side is a small throne-room decorated by some graffitist blind to at least some of the implications of his actions?

His actions? That's an assumption, isn't it. Are there such things as graffitistes.

The campground is just a few yards away, down hill. Boil all water indeed.

There's a bunch of smaller tracks leading off in several directions from the campground. Right in front is the bridge.

I pause in the middle for a look downstream. The pipeline crosses right beside the bridge and there's an emergency discharge valve of some kind.

Up the other side, nothing as wide as the bridge has passed this way for years.