This is the day I almost died...twice.
Fog had rolled in to Tapotupotu Bay overnight and while it was light in the morning when I first woke, it was not too visible. I was at least refreshed from a good night's sleep, listening to the constant crash of the waves on the beach. I grabbed my camera and tried taking a few shots of the beach before packing everything up into my car, and then I drove back out and up to the parking lot at Cape Reinga, which was easier said than done because the thick fog decreased my visibility to maybe 10m in front of the car!
I figured that like the day before, the fog would lift around mid-day and the weather would clear as the day went on, so I dressed appropriately for that: sneakers, gym shorts, moisture-wicking shirt, a long-sleeved thermal, and a waist pack with two half-litre water bottles, about four granola bars, some red pepper slices, a few apples in the plastic bag from the grocery store, and some nuts. I figured that would be all I needed and even though I had rain gear with me, I decided to leave it in the car.
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| Cape Reinga Lighthouse in the blue morning fog |
I walked down and out to the Cape Reinga Lighthouse again to try and get some good morning photos through the dense blue fog. On the way, I was dive-bombed by a few seagulls who were likely protecting their nest, but I should have taken it as a sign to just go back to my car. After visiting the lighthouse once more, I took the turn off down the path to the beach and it was eerily quiet with no one else around at 8am. The path runs right along the edge of sharp cliffs dropping down hundreds of metres to the rugged ocean below. I wanted to try and get some good shots looking down the cliff, but I knew better than to go too close to the edge, especially when the rocks were slick with fog.
I got down to the beach, which was kind of split into two sections. The beach I was on was a little tiny cove pinched between the cliffs I'd just hiked down and a steep little promontory about 20 metres on the other side of the beach. The ocean was very very rough this morning and straight lines of wave-trains rolled in one after another, constantly crashing over themselves, but the tide was low so I was easily able to walk around that steep promontory. But first, I sat and watched a cormorant at the water's edge for a few minutes before it got spooked by how close I was getting and flew off.
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| Cape Reinga, shrouded in mist, and reflected onto the beach |
About an hour and a half into my walk, the sky seemed to be trying to clear up as I forded a wide, but shallow, stream and followed the trail blazes (not extremely well-marked, mind you) up another promontory stuck between the middle of the sandy dune fields and the ocean. The rock of this tall hill was mostly these very slippery pink, green, yellow, and grey clays which if you weren't careful, you would see up close as your feet slid out from under you, sending you crashing to the ground. The surrounding dunes had creeped up the side of this hill over hundreds and thousands of years, and many of the bright-orange trail signs had been partially buried, so I had to be careful to keep my bearings about me. Even in the grey light, however, the landscape was beautiful. The trailing roots of the dune grasses were often exposed and looked like a long rope that had been draped across the dunes with a shoot of grass growing out every 10 centimetres or so. These ropes of roots criss-crossed the dunes and in some places, pretty purple flowers were growing on raised tussocks of dune grass.
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| Flowers growing on grassy tussocks in the dunes on Cape Reinga Beach |
While the weather seemed to want to clear up an hour earlier, it was on this rise that I got my first look at the weather over the Tasman Sea and all I could see was a wall of tall, dark, gray clouds. The clouds were a good distance offshore, but the wind was pushing them my way, and I could already start to feel the occasional rain drop. Being stubborn, I refused to turn myself around. After all, I was right at the bottom of the last rocky rise that was the westernmost tip of New Zealand. I could see the little utilitarian lighthouse at the top of the knob and decided that I couldn't hike out this far and not get up to that point, so I briskly started my walk up the hill. It wasn't too steep but the hillside was covered in these bushy, long-leafed plants and it was difficult to tell where exactly the trail was. I had to be careful because the trail I thought I was on was no more than a metre away from a steep drop down onto a rocky platform below and I didn't want to step into a hole covered by the plants and tumble down. Soon enough, I got to the top where the bushes thinned and grass took over. The view was impressive, looking back up to Cape Reinga off in the distance, and to Motuopao Island just offshore with its own private beach and another little light station on top. I scrambled to set up my camera on my pack so I could take a timer-shot of myself on top of Cape Maria Van Diemen as proof I'd been there, and as soon as I was satisfied with one of the two photos I took, the rain came.
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| Me on top of Cape Maria Van Diemen with Matuopao Island behind |
By the time I got to the top of the sandy ramp, I was drenched - not a single bit of my clothes or person was dry or really warm for that matter. I knew I had to retrace my trail through the sand dunes behind the clayey headland, but once the ocean was out of sight, everything started to look the same. I did my best to follow the orange trail markers, but they weren't often visible, so I did my best to go back the way I thought I came, but each dune looked the same as the next and with footprints making trails in all sorts of directions, I couldn't figure out which was the way I came! I knew the ocean was generally off to my left and so I carried on.
Two figures started approaching me - they had been hiking from Cape Reinga, the direction I needed to go. I figured that since I was wet and they were wet I should at least let them know I was okay and ask if they had everything they needed, like water and food. They ended up being two girls, one from Scotland and the other from Ireland, who had met at a hostel and decided to do one of the loop trails in the area. They had indeed come from Cape Reinga but were covered in mud (apparently the mixture of rain and clay rocks had really made the ground very slippery and mucky) and after checking that we were all okay, wet but okay, we each went our own ways. I tried following their tracks and came across those clayey spots, taking my time to be careful so as not to slip and do something stupid like break my ankle. I definitely slipped and fell a few times, but other than being covered in sticky mud, I was alright.
I still couldn't really find the trail and began to wonder if I'd double-backed on myself and was heading in the opposite direction I wanted to be in. I was beginning to think I really did have hypothermia and that my brain was already starting to disorient my body. But I kept checking the time on my phone to give me a sense that I was moving forward and making progress and had a few more snacks and sips of water. There was going to be no way that the last people to see me ever was going to be two hiker-strangers. I just couldn't allow that. I thought of my family back at home, my folks who I hadn't been able to see over Christmas, my sister and her her husband who had just announced to us a week before that they were going to have a baby, and my brother and his wife who'd just been married that summer before. Thinking of them reset my resolve and I became determined to get back to my car. All I needed was to find my way back to the long beach walk. Once there, I at least knew where the trail was! I couldn't see the ocean yet, but I could see the upper reaches of the stream I'd crossed right before having to climb this hill, so I reoriented myself and after going up and down the next few rises I came to a lookout right above the stream I'd crossed before and believe me, it was a wonderful sight to see!
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| After the initial rain, I was able to take out my camera again. This is looking back to Cape Maria Van Diemen and Matuopao Island with the dark storm clouds coming in off the Tasman Sea |
The rain held off as I got nearer to the path at the bottom of the Cape Reinga cliffs, I realised I had one more obstacle in my way. As luck would have it, when I walked out from Cape Reinga the ocean was at low tide and the beach surrounding that steep little promontory was well wide enough. Not so on the way back. High tide was on its way in and the unrelenting wave trains were starting to crash over the rocky base of the promontory. I looked up into the foliage on the promontory for any sign of a trail I could take to go up and over the headland and while I found on that took me a few metres, it quickly disappeared and I carefully made my way back to the beach. It appeared I had three options: 1. Try the trail again and bushwhack my way over the promontory; 2. Wait for high tide to ebb back out away from the promontory; or 3. try my luck and passing around the rocky base before high tide got too high.
I decided to go for option number 3. The tide was still coming in but it wasn't all the way in yet, so I slung my camera over my back and carefully started finding footholds in the rock, hugging the base of the cliff as I shimmied across. The waves were breaking just a few metres away from me and the whitewater was splashing up over my feet. The going was slow, but at least there wasn't much distance to go. A few times I had to really hold fast to the rock wall and wait for a wave train to come through and then try to quickly hop across wide fractures in the rock between waves, but at least once the wave train caught up with me and bubbly water rising up well over my ankles. A few long reaches to sturdy foothold were almost missed, but after about 10 minutes, I made it around the headland to the safety of the little beach and cove on the other side. I took a few really deep breaths and looked back at where I'd just come from and was so immensely thankful to the Man Upstairs that I'd had the strength and perseverance to trust that my survival instincts would kick in and carry my across.
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| Looking back down at the rocky headland I had to skirt since there was no trail over the top. At high tide, the wave trains kept pounding the rocks and were big enough for water to rise over my feet! |
Knowing I was safe in my car, back in dry clothes, I thought back to the previous five hours and came to a few conclusions. Firstly, it was so incredibly stupid of me to not have told anyone where I was going or what my plans were. I should have left a note in my car window saying what time I'd left and which direction I'd headed. And I should have checked the weather report (though there was no mobile service way out here or store to buy a newspaper from). Other than those untaken precautions, I also flipped through some of my photos and realised that I had done a hike that is epic in good weather and seemed legendary to me that I'd done it in the adverse conditions I'd been in. I decided that when all was said and done, it was an amazing experience I would jump at the opportunity to do again (of course being a bit more smart in my planning).
I said a few more "thank yous" to God before turning the key in the ignition, blasting on the heat, and driving off down the road back toward the mainland. It was only 1:00pm and I still had so much more to do today!
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