On Monday 29th Oct 2012 Dermot & Ken went exploring in the Silverpeaks. We parked at the first locked gate on Mountain Rd. & walked Nth. to where we had seen an old forestry road heading into the bush, on the west side of the road. We actually walked past it to start with, as you can see by the Google pic. After locating the correct track, we ventured off down it towards the Waikouaiti stream,
[or a branch of it.] The track was quite difficult to walk down due to the trees growing over the track, & there were lots of dead branches sticking out. the track eventually stopped, so we decided to carry on down to the river, BIG mistake, as the forestry had thinned the trees, & the fallen ones were either lying across the way down, or lying down the slope, which was very steep in places. We estimated we had about 300 mtrs. of this to negotiate, so just taking our time, we eventually reached the bottom, after getting some good scratches along the way, as we climbed over-under-& thru all the trees.
Upon reaching the bottom, we discovered that we were in a tributary of the Waikouaiti river, & still had some distance to go to get onto the track connecting Rosella Ridge, & Possum Hut. We crossed the stream, with difficulty, & bush bashed our way down stream for about 150mtrs, till we reached the track to Possum Hut. By this time it was 11:20am, so we stopped on a nice grassy strip & had some morning tea !!
After doing a little recce northwards along the valley floor, [just to verify where we were, for my sake] [you can see this little recce on the Google pic] I came across the track we had climbed up the week before after we had come off Rosella Ridge. So having satisfied my curiosity, we travelled along the track to Possum Hut where we had lunch.
Once again, we missed the plaque on the way into the hut, but found it on the way out again, as we made our way back to the Bluegum Ridge track, [very steep] which took us up onto the Green Hut track, & back to Mountain Rd.
We would NOT recommend that anybody tries to go down the same way we did, as it’s just terribly difficult, & you could get badly hurt if you fell off a tree or something. – Ken