No Laughing on Waihāhā
 

Words & Photos: Cati Pearson

With free weekends few and far between we decided to double whammy an overnight mtb mission with a mate’s birthday. Friday afternoon rolled around, we loaded the bikes with bikepacking gear and headed off to old faithful – the Waihāhā Hut Track, but with a twist.

This trip is a beautiful, straight forward and easy introduction for anyone interested in trying mtb bikepacking. The trailhead is just off SH32/ Western Bays Highway in Pureora State Forest, west of Lake Taupō. It shares a carpark with the Great Lake Trails. The 10km of track to the hut has cool swing bridges, open rock sections that are just slightly exposed, beautiful old native bush and enough uphill to earn you a beer. The sun set on us as we cracked into the clearing by the hut and whipped up a celebratory steak dinner.

Drizzle greeted us in the morning, but we decided to stick with our intended plan and make a loop of it. We would ride out via the Waihora Lagoon - described by DOC as "a shallow ephemeral wetland surrounded by swamp forest". It was supposed to be only 12km to the lagoon, "so shouldn’t take us too long"… oh how wrong we were. There is a reason no one rides this.

Immediately out of the hut we enjoyed a fun benched section on the Hauhungaroa Track. This was part of the original Te Araroa - the walking equivalent of Tour Aotearoa - but rerouted since the arrival of the Timber Trail. Because it was only recently retired from the Te Araroa I assumed Hauhungaroa would be pretty straight forward. My reading of Topomap didn’t show much elevation - surely the 2km section would take us no time.

There were some fun little woops and rideable descents, with a wee bit of hiking in the mix. But then it got steeper and steeper, rideable until it wasn’t. While trying to clamber down a root bowl I lost my footing and dropped my bike 4-5m onto the benched section below. Some would say I threw it in anger, but I maintain it was a fall.

Trailside maintenance took place to realign my derailleur before we could push on into the bush. We rode and walked along the valley and crossed a few rivers. After a very slow 1km we found ourselves 6km deep, contemplating a turnaround. "But surely we are half way, so there’s no point going back."

We trudged on towards the next 'road block'. A section of track so steep that we had to make a human chain to shuttle the bikes upwards onto a plateau. Over, under and through fallen trees (we had overlooked the aftermath of the recent Cyclone Gabrielle in our planning). Constantly checking Topomap in the hope it had glitched and in reality we were closer to the end than we thought… nope.

12km went by, and somehow it still looked like we had 12km to go. Starving - we hadn’t anticipated a whole day affair - we rationed our few remaining snacks. Eventually, 6.5 hours later, we made it to the Waihora Track intersection and a taste of freedom. After the longest 3km ever, we were finally at the gravel road that took us to the highway and back to the cars… exhausted, starving and missing another event we were supposed to attend that day. 25km, 8:45 elapsed time, 6:30 moving time, definitely not what we expected.

Would I recommend the Waihāhā-Waihora loop? Not to anyone with a bike or on a time limit. But exploring new tracks and sections of bush is always fun. Dragging your mates along to suffer with you is a great idea too. Share the love and the pain, and if you bribe them with a post-ride curry they may be inclined to do more dumb-adventuring with you  again in the future.

More about riding the Waihāhā Hut Track at DOC and Love Taupo