Hester Pinney Waterfall, East Matuki, Wanaka

Its a bit of a mission, but Hester Pinney Waterfall is a top canyon and WELL worth the effort to get there.

Straight after Ore Canyon, we drove back to Wanaka, sorted our gear and packed our bike panniers.

Pip joined our team and we cruised out to Cameron's Flat in the Matukituki valley. Fording the river, we cycled along the DoC marked easement to Glacier Burn, dumping our bikes a little further up the river.

From here it was a delightful further hour and twenty mins up the river to junction flat. With perfect weather and a warm evening, we sat stargazing and marvelling at the Glacier in the Kitchener Cirque.

Toine and Pip tramping up the East Matukituki River

Next morning, we awoke (not that early) and climbed the track on the TR of the canyon. We sidled accross through the scrub and climbed steeply down into the Canyon, arriving 1 hr after leaving the flat.

Initial downclimbs in the narrow canyon

At first the canyon was really narrow (less than arms width),

with very fun downclimbs and a jump or two.

Jumping 4m into a great big pool

The canyon next opened up a little, with lots of downclimbs and a handline or two.

Nic after a down climb

The middle section involved a series of 3 falls up to 32 m that were back to back rappels. We discovered some 'historic' single 6mm compression bolts here. Where we could, we backed up the bolt to a natural anchor further back in the canyon, and put the lightest person last to rap without a backup. Scary stuff.. These bolts are going to need replacing if the canyon see's more use. One was no good, so we placed a nut anchor on the opposite wall to rap from.

Next was a long boulder scramble, with amazing views of Mt Aspiring and the Kitchener Cirque. The rock was very grippy and the scrambling quite fun.

Nic under a flat plate boulder

The final third of the Canyon was simply brilliant. The perfect combination of geology and hydrology created a series of 10 or so back to back potholes in amazing bedrock. With human anchors, we scouted all the potholes first and to our delight found that many of these were jumps. All required good jumping technique to smallish landing zones and some had very small and not that deep landings. We had to go around a couple that we chose not to jump.

Pip leaps in the Pothole section

Nic explores one of the bigger potholes

Warm sun, beautiful bedrock and crystal clear water

Yet more pot holes (didn't jump this one, but did the next two)

Making friends with the locals

After 4 hours in the canyon, carefully scouting drops and solving for new anchors, we emerged back at junction flat. We sat around in the sun for a while, absorbing the heat before making the 2 hour return journey back to our cars.

A fair bit of effort to access, but this is a top 5 NZ canyon...