Nancy and Anne Saunders in the Red Dog Saloon, an original old section of their lodge.
Gerry a former director of the Forest and Bird Society spearheaded the creation of the South West New Zealand Te Wahi Pounamu World Heritage Site.
There are organized hikes scheduled several times a day and soon after our arrival, Gerry led us and a group of backroads.com trekkers, who were staying at the lodge, to the closeby Moreaki River to see longfin eels.
Longfin eels can be found throughout New Zealand. They live mainly in rivers and inland lakes but can be found in almost all types of waters, usually well inland from the coast. The longfin eel is one of the largest eels in the world and it is found only in the rivers and lakes of New Zealand. Longfin eels are considered at risk and are declining. They breed only once, at the end of their life. When they are ready, they leave New Zealand and swim 3000 miles up into the tropical Pacific to spawn, probably in deep ocean trenches somewhere near Tonga.
Eels take many years to grow and it takes decades before an individual is ready to undertake the long migration back to the tropics to breed. Males grow to 3 or 4 feet, females up to ten feet. The average age at which a longfin eel migrates is 23 years for a male and 34 for a female. The adults never return as they die after spawning.
According to Gerry, NZ fisherman get about $200 for a large eel, and “could easily make NZ $10,000 for a day’s catch.” Gerry has managed to keep the fisherman off the river, however. he told us that he once got into a fistfight over the eels with fisherman who came up the Moreaki to catch them. He said he won the fistfight “because my mates (fellow conservationists) were young and brawny.” The fisherman's co-op then agreed to not fish the river.
One of the many factoids we learned from Gerry was that prior to the arrival of the Maori in 1300 AD, there were no mammals in New Zealand. With the exception of two species of bat, no mammals are native to New Zealand. Mammals (including pets like cats and dogs) were introduced and are considered pests due to their profound negative effect on the native wildlife, particularly flightless birds. The native birds, insects, and flora have developed no natural defense mechanisms against animals like rabbits, possums and deer introduced by the Maori and the Brits. These ecological pests and their presence has had a disastrous effect on the populations of many NZ species, including the national symbol, the kiwi bird. There are estimated to be around 30 million possums in New Zealand,
We stayed 2 nights here. Gerry and Anne are passionate about conservation, nature and New Zealand native animals and plants. Gerry is an enthusiastic guide and his knowledge of all the birds, animals, plants, trees and geology is awesome.
Their sense of humor was refreshing and they have an ability to talk to anyone about any subject. Gerry seemed to have boundless energy. After high winds and torrential rains, he was up most all night of our first night securing the lodge and hydro-electric power station from the flooding river. Yet, the next morning he was with us at 7 am to take us on a tour of the power station he built because there is no commercial power in the area.
The first photo is a view from our lodge window when we arrived at 4pm yesterday afternoon. The second is the same view at 8am this morning.
Our first outing of the day was an early morning visit to the hydro station only about 5 minutes away by minibus. Before departing Gerry wanted us to understand the principal behind its operation.
All the electricity for the Lodge is produced with this 40kw hydro-electric power station.
It does so by taking water (3 cubic meters per second) from the Moeraki River down a short canal just across from our room at the Lodge. It then drops six feet through a Francis Turbine (same as the Hoover Dam just smaller) then runs down the canal and back into the Moreaki River. The power produced is 50 cycles per second, 240 volts AC current.
Because of the heavy rains, Gerry had gotten up at 3am to switch the power over to diesel generators and shut down the hydro station. He had to get under the station in chest high flooding river water to manually lower the gates at the base of the building to keep the equipment from flooding.
We returned to the lodge at 7:15am for breakfast and at 8:15 Gerry, with his boundless energy, approached us to determine what kind of a hike we could do today.
Several of the hiking areas were unreachable because of the flooding rivers and high seas but he fashioned a little bit of each and within an hour the three of us were off trekking to the rainforest.
We bid our farewells to the backroads trekkers who were leaving the lodge and continuing south to Wanaka, all Americans except for one Australian couple, and set out on our hike.
On the way out of the lodge gate Gerry hung the mail bag that contained the post cards we had written to Garrett and Kendrick from the glacier Helihike station.
We hiked for a total of about three hours along the river, traversing parts of the rain forest and walking the beaches during high tide. The storm had been so strong the night before that all rivers and Lake Moeraki, where the lodge sits, were over flowing their banks. The seas were raging and at times during our walk, the rains continued to pour.
Looking across the swollen river at the lodge.
A view of the ocean during extremely high tides.
We were considering passing this rock on the ocean side but Gerry took a glance around and found the water to be racing in at higher levels than normal. While walking on the beach, Gerry explained that the foam seen on the beach and rocks was protein resulting from the mixture of salt and plankton which lathers in the surf and becomes the foam.
We turned around and hiked up to get a good view from the top.
After that we headed to the rain forest. It was, in the true sense of the word, a rain forest.
It was flooded and swampy and contained ancient specimens of giant trees whose lineage dates back more than 70 million years.
Beneath the canopy of the trees were a myriad of perching and climbing plants, dense carpets of mosses and ferns, and bellbirds, tui and fantails.
One of the truly memorable events of the trip so far occurred on this hike when Gerry exhibited another of his remarkable nature skills. He had spotted a small fantail bird as we walked along the path. He started whistling. To our amazement, the bird answered then flew to a nearby branch within arm’s length and the two of them carried on a chirping conversation. Gerry acted as if this was a natural, everyday occurrence. Maybe it was for him, but we were astounded.
The trail is beautifully marked and in the low lying swampy areas, wooden walk ways area provided. Twenty years ago, Gerry was responsible for selecting the route and designing the walkways.
It was truly worth the tramp in the rain and after the swamp we hiked up to another lookout for a cup of tea.
When we returned from our hike we found the Backroads group huddled up all long-faced and unhappy. It turns out that during last night's storm the road south was flooded in one place and had suffered a "slip" (what NZers call landslides) in another.
Unfortunately, the Backroads group had also had the bad luck of getting caught in the Hari Hari Bridge closure on Route 6. In order to get to the Wilderness Lodge two days earlier, 14 of the 16 members of the group were flown in to the nearby Fox Glacier airport on small planes and bussed to the lodge and two who didn't want to fly made the 15-hour drive with the backroads van. They were not happy about this new road closure.
Unfortunately, we could face the same problem tomorrow as we are going the same place. We'll keep you posted. Hopefully we'll all get out.
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