Damn good weekend

Well, It's not often a weekend goes basically all OK, typically something goes wrong, but not this weekend.Things started looking pretty good around Tuesday when Steph bought me a new rifle, a Remington 700 SPS .308. I only went in the hunting store to look at cheap secondhand rifles as I had an offer of going deer hunting on Saturday morning, but anyway, I walked out with this near new one, very nice!Later that week I sighted in over at John's range (and got a sore shoulder). Unfortunately the deer hunting on Saturday morning at Joe's farm was called off, but I was still keen to get out, so I planned a walk in the Aorangi forest park (I was going to post the google earth kmz file, but I can't work out how to do it, if you want to see where I went, email me).I left home at 5:30am, and go to the park around 6:20, and started walking straight away. As I got onto the river bed, the first thing I saw was deer prints and poo! So I knew I was in the right area. A bit more walking up stream, and I found more prints and some sign of pigs.

I ended up fording the stream around 6 times (both up and back), and by the time I got home, my feet were very cold. I headed home, and arrived back to Littlebush around 10:30am.
The afternoon was spent weighing the sheep and pigs, and then we went out for a BBQ.
After the BBQ I went rabbit hunting with the .22 and the new lamp, and came home with 1 rabbit.

On Sunday, the weather wasn't great, but it was supposed to clear up in the afternoon, so Andy, Alex and I headed down towards Ocean beach around 12:30pm. The truck performed pretty well fording the streams and climbing the rough track around the coast.
Once we got to a nice open stream bed, we started walking up into the park

The big peak to the right is Mt Matthews, but we went up and off to the left (between the first and second ridge)

Once we got off the main river bed, the terrain went from wide to very narrow and very steep sided, here you can see Alex and I crossing the stream (again).


This is as far as we went, getting past this point looked quite tricky, and we were getting close to the time at which we had to turn around, so we had a snack, and started to head back, but not before posing for a photo.