Kauaeranga Valley short walks

From State Highway 25 at the southern entrance to Thames, turn right into Banks Street beside the BP service station. Banks Street veers right into Parawai Road, which then becomes Kauaeranga Valley Road. The road changes from sealed to gravel after 10 km.

Kauaeranga Visitor Centre, 13 km up the Kauaeranga Valley, is the main point of contact for track, hut and camping information, with 24-hr information panels under the covered veranda. The Visitor Centre has seasonal opening days and hours. Hut tickets, hut bookings and retail items such as maps, books and other conservation-related material are available, as well as displays and an audio visual of the area’s kauri logging days.

Public conservation land within the valley is managed by the Department of Conservation (DOC), with facilities provided for your enjoyment.

It is 9 km  from the Visitor Centre to the end of the road, following alongside the Kauaeranga River. There are fords across a number of streams along the way (these can sometimes be impassable after heavy rain). The bush-clad hills, rock outcrops, pinnacles, bluffs and gorges all add to some spectacular scenery—a testimony to the area’s volcanic origin. The Kauaeranga Valley was once filled with magnificent kauri trees but from the 1870s to the 1920s this area was extensively logged. Today only a few giant kauri remain—the Cookson kauri featured on the front cover is one—although young kauri saplings are spread throughout the forest. Tall trees such as rātā, rimu and tawa now emerge above the canopy of native vegetation, home to forest birds such as tūī, bellbird, tomtit, grey warbler, shining cuckoo, kererū and morepork. North Island brown kiwi and kākā are occasionally present.

During the heyday of kauri logging, bushmen, using axes, saws and timber jacks, felled thousands of kauri in the valley. The logs were trimmed, cut to length and transported to streams and rivers via log chutes, skidded roads and bush tramways, and stockpiled until they could be moved via driving dams. During the 1920s alone, more than 40 dams were built in the valley using kauri timber that was pit-sawn on site. Dams were often tripped in sequence, sending logs down the river in huge quantities. (For further information on kauri dams see page 17). Tramlines were used extensively in the 1920s for hauling timber by horse or steam locomotive, the most spectacular example being the Billygoat tramline. The kauri logs were eventually towed by steam tug across the Firth of Thames to sawmills on the Auckland waterfront. A lot of kauri was exported but it was also used for furniture, railway carriages, and house and boat building.