Huts, campsites ready for another fun season

Conservation Department staff install a picnic table at Tieke Kainga on the Whanganui River. PHOTO/SUPPLIED

Huts and campsites are spick and span and hut rangers await visitors for the summer recreation season on the Whanganui River.

The season began on Wednesday and ends on April 30, and there are hut rangers at John Coull Hut and Tieke Kainga, usual overnight stops for people canoeing from Whakahoro to Pipiriki.

Department of Conservation (DoC) manager George Taylor said about 7000 made the journey last season; 15 per cent up on the year before.

There were also 2300 cyclists counted on the Ruatiti-Mangapurua Landing section of the Mountains to Sea/Nga Ara Tuhono cycle trail. That number is expected to reach 2500 this season.

Many are only doing certain sections of the trail, but increasing numbers are biking all the way from the slopes of Mount Ruapehu to Castlecliff Beach. Mr Taylor said the newly sealed Whanganui River Rd was a highlight when he did the trip.

The busiest times for the canoe journey are long weekends, and John Coull Hut and Tieke Kainga are booked out on some nights in January for the annual Whanganui Iwi canoe journey Tira Hoe Waka.

The hut/kainga and campsites on the river are booked online, and are rarely overcrowded. People arriving without booking are accommodated if there is space, but they must pay double.

A pinch point has developed at the Mangapurua Landing, where cyclists, walkers and canoeists intersect to get to the popular Bridge to Nowhere.

"We are working through possible solutions to that congestion, because we see it as only getting more congested."

The department has no trouble getting volunteer hut rangers. They are taken in to the hut/kainga by jetboat, usually for a week at a time, and given an allowance to pay for food.

"We've got a good, solid pool of people, generally from the Wanganui community, mainly people who've had a long association with the awa," Mr Taylor said.

Rangers for the Tieke Kainga were usually tangata whenua, from Te Whanau o Tieke, and there was a solid roster there, too.

John Coull Hut got a new deck for the summer season this year, and the bunkroom at the Whakahoro campsite was moved to orient it to the sun. It was also voluntarily painted by the Taumarunui contractor known as Sideshow Bob, Bob Anderson.

During this summer the department plans to put "watercatchers", small shelters with water tanks, at a campsite in the Mangapurua Valley and another in the Kaiwhakauka Valley.