Thread: Dustoff for Willie Peters

Originally Posted by Raging Bull

Yeah, it was auctioned off at the Napier Wool Exchange in December, 1973.

The limit for the Hunterville 4x4 Tour this year was 75 vehicles, thats a lot, but at $250 per vehicle (incl two passengers) and $50 per extra adult, $25 per child (13 and under), they would of raised a fair bit of coin for R McDonald House.

When all those motor bikes and vehicles arrived up there the deer thought they were all hunters arriving and so vanished from the face of the earth for a couple of days.

I never have forgotten the Plateau. Jim Warren the resident bonus hunter showing me around the block took me up there for my first visit.
We travelled up the Mangatera almost to Lake Colenso and turned up the Waikotore Stream, we cullers had a 1/2 sized tent camp half way up this stream. We climbed out of the gorge next morning up two beech logs wired together for a ladder (shades of Cave Creek) and hit the track between Taitapu and Ohutu Ridge. When we stepped out onto Ohutu Ridge I could not believe what wonderful country lay at my feet. The rolling hills covered in the golden tussock waving in the light autumn breeze and the valleys with their little patches of alphine beech forest that still survived on the shady and wet sides of the valleys that had seen all the fires of the Moa Hunters long ago.

I could faintly make out the airstrip at Ruahine Corner and the boundary of our block the Ikawatea River System, and No Mans beyond. I could see the Otupae Range that still held mobs of 60 deer then, away in the distance. Futher out still was the Comet and the mountains of the Tongariro National Park while between in the hazy distance we had the Kaimanawa's and the Kawekas that beckoned and demanded a quick poach. Closer in we had Black Hill and Aorangi and all the local features, clearwater campsite, the Waikotore Stream and the most marvellous camp of all, in a sheltered basin in the forest on the most eastern point of Ohutu Ridge. Ohutu Ridge Tent Camp.

It is interesting, now only the iron chimney remains of the tent camp but the basin itself where the camp once stood in all its glory is now called by the locals Hind Park.

It must have had some effect on a man because I have never really left the place. Either in person or in spirit I am still at that place .