Chucky's Adventures: (Not) Stoney Canyon, Mt Tuhua

We were trying to figure out what to do for our sunday on the coast, so decided to go for a bit of a recce to check out a few of the rivers that had 'the nod' from some of grant's local kayaker connections.

However on the way to go check out Wainihinihi Creek our gaze was captured by a pair of biggish looking waterfalls in the middle of a stream of the North East flank of Mt Tuhuna. We took a closer look, consulted the map then went and got permission to cross the farmland from the farmer and psyched ourselves up for a West Coast Granite first descent.. There should at least be a coupla extra falls up there right??

Though it was a little warmer than saturday morning, it was very hard indeed to get motivated to put on wet canyon gear in the morning..

The climb up the true left of the stream was generally pretty easy, save for the occaisonal wasp nest and 5 stings on various parts of me...

We entered where the gradient mellowed out and after donning the freezing cold wet canyoning gears, encountered our first drop almost straight away.

Grant enters the slot on the first drop

Rounding the corner to an impressive horizon line, we had arrived at the drops seen from the road. It looked like a rather long way down; the 3x 60m ropes that we had began to look a touch insufficient..

Toine downclimbs a delicate chute above the big drop

However, we were able to scout around and find a precariously located anchor that was right on the edge of the drop. We had to set up a hand line to get down to the anchor and enjoyed a bit of rope shuffling and management to ensure there was enough cord to reach the bottom whilst still giving Toine the saftey of a releaseable system.

Pip leaves the exposed anchor station for the big drop

Looks were decieving;
the middle tier of the 3 leap drop was only about 45m, easily within our grasp.

Downstream of the big drop, the stream was bouldery and required a bit of scrambling, but the drops came at a pretty regular pace. Toine had us scout quite a few jumpable looking pools, but only a few had the right geometry to make it work out. The granite formed some short sections of deep slot between high walled, but wider gorge sections. However, there were only a couple of places that would have been escapable.

Slippery log Slide or Jump (with a big push)

Anchors were generally not too hard to find, either trees, slung boulders or pinches. Though with a few bolts in the right places, we would have been able to descend right through the flow had we wished to for a bit more fun.