The western half of the track was closed halfway due to a recent landslide, so we decided to do a 2-3-day round trip from the Smoke-Ho parking lot in the mountains above Blackball.
From Blackball to Smoke-Ho the road is a single winding gravel road. Originally park of the Croesus pack track it was widened in the 1940s for coal prospecting. No substantial coal was found, but plenty of low quality coal seams can be seen at the start of the track.
Well over a hundred years old, most of this excellently-benched track still survives. This is despite the meters of rain which fall every year.
Having long since washed and rotted away, the original bridges and fords have been replaced with cable suspension bridges.
Views back into the towering central ranges appear on occasion.
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We stopped for lunch at one of several long-abandoned hotel sites.
Mostly worked out by the early 20th century, the mine works were reopened during the great depression under a government work scheme. One of the depression era huts still stands, as well as the derelict Garden Gully battery.
Powered by high-pressure water from the mountains via this pelton water wheel, this beast received ore from the mountaintop via an aerial cableway.
The side track to Garden Gully involved lots of water crossings. Thankfully most were not very deep.
As we continued upward, the track began switchbacking up the mountainside. The level of effort and skill that went into carving this track into the steep hill is amazing. Dry rock walls made of hundred-pound-plus stones still stand, stream crossings made from interlocking key stones stacked 6+ feet deep. Box drains and pits to duct water under the track, and drainage channels run along the track. All of this done by hand with basic hand tools. Not a single cut stone or ounce of motor to be found. Most of it still usable despite nearly a century of neglect.
Can you see the parallel interlocking stones? Even decades of water and torrential floods have failed to dislodge them.
Eventually we cleared the treeline and arrived at Ces Clarke hut. Built in the days before the Department of Conservation, this hut is unique in construction and location.
Ces Clark hut on the left, the hut in the bottom right is a gold miner's stopover hut from the early 1900s.
Check out that view.
The view from the toilet was pretty good too.
A cheeky weka managed to get briefly stuck under the hut before figuring out it could just walk out the way it came…
The next day we hiked up to Croesus Knob. Along the way we found the remains of the aerial cableway towers, crumpled after a century in the elements. Down the hill, the remains of the Croesus mine were visible.
With persistent low clouds blocking our views, we decided to risk a walk along the Croesus track to the Moonlight Route junction, and then along the Moonlight Tops route for a while.
See the track climbing up the other side of this dip (left side)? Parts of the track were being remade by a track crew with a digging machine. The existing tramping track didn’t meet the Great Walks standard, I guess.
This is the shell of a carnivorous land snail. They roam about at night eating insects and worms, as well as any carrion.
After stopping for lunch, we decided to turn back, as the weather showed no sign of clearing. We heard a loud kee-aha, kee-aha in the distance, and were unsure of its source. A few minutes later a pair of Kea flew overhead, with one landing nearby for a short while.
The only species of alpine parrot, the kea were hunted nearly to extinction. Believed to kill sheep, the government put a bounty on them until the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1986 that public pressure forced farmers to relinquish their right to shoot kea on their property. Today, only about 5,000 pairs are believed to exist in the wild. They are a very intelligent bird, having to survive and find food in the unforgiving alpine ranges. They are known for eating the eggs and chicks of other birds when available, and for even eating carrion, and cutting into sheep carcasses for their fat (check out that beak). Despite this omnivorous nature, they disperse over half of the alpine plant species seeds.
No photos of them in flight this time, but the underside of their wings is a burnt orange and gold.
We returned to Ces Clark hut for our packs, and started back down to the van. Of course, despite the weather forecast, the sky cleared up halfway down!
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