Karangahake Gorge:
It's time I finish my winter theme because it's spring here! Longer daylight hours, warmer days, birds singing, lambs growing...you get the picture.
Laura, myself and our French friend Nicolas headed over to the Karangahake gorge to explore the old mining boom town.
The mountains surrounding the Gorge were riddled with mines.
As you can see from the pictures, we saw some amazing scenery.
As we walked up through the gorge, it was hard for me to imagine the valley during the boom period. Somehow the hustle and bustle couldn't fit into the peaceful silence. Oh what a time it must've been. The cracking concrete slabs and the half buried rusted gears, shafts and pans told the story of the long ago gold rush. The vegetation would've been stripped away exposing the sheer rock faces striped with track and dotted with the mouths of hundreds of mining tunnels. When the mine was operating at capacity, there were more than 10 different levels of horizontal shafts, from three stories below the riverbed up to the lofty heights above us.
We treked up a trail called 'windows walk'. Much of the walk was actually inside a mining tunnel and the windows were shafts cut out to the gorge. The sunlight poured into the damp darkness.
A few miles up through the gorge led us to a good climb up to the level 7 trail that skirted the other side of the gorge on elevation with all the level 7 mine shafts. Occasional breaks in the radiata pine and temperate scrub showed us some panoramic scenery of the surrounding countryside. Breathtaking.
We finished back at our car by late afternoon and ate some lunch, and delicious french cheese that Nicolas shared, then back home.
