Discussion
A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an elusive giant Rata (fwiw my #1 native tree species) deep in the Akatarawa rainforest, & considered to be Aotearoa New Zealand's largest.
We had found her sister prior, but not this giant.
Today we had the privilege, & I'm still feeling it. Estimated by botanists to be between 1000 and 1500 years old, we measured her girth with paracord to be ~16m.
To stand at her base was to be at the foot of a living cliff face.
Difficult to communicate the scale, so here's a photo to help do that, of a happy-tired me at her base.
The hike-in was sketchy as expected, a good mind/body workout with some edgy cliff fun and slippery river climbs. (def will bring the carabinier next time, ugh)
The Northern Rātā (with accents this time!) is a very special epiphyte. It begins life as a vine that grows down from a seed dropped in the canopy by a bird that ate its fruit. With gravity its guide, the vine eventually makes contact with the forest floor, and takes root.
Then, over an enormous amount of time, it grows to surround the host tree (by then often already aged-out) in a final embrace, taking its place in the canopy.
The tiny vine in this clip could one day become such an ancient
Rātā, esp great mother trees like this, are keystone species, essential to the health of whole forest biomes.
And now for the bummer finish. Australian Brushtail Possums, introduced by settlers to est. a fur trade, can kill a 1k yr old Northern Rātā in < 5 yrs by gorging on new shoots
The grim reality is this Ancient is kept from death by volunteer conservationist possum trappers maintaining traps in the Akatarawa forest. Without them, she would not stand a chance
(I say that as a herbivore)
@JulianOliver Woah. That’s an epic old rātā.
@JulianOliver Wow. What an incredible tree! The closest I came to a tree that size was the redwoods in Muir Woods north of San Francisco.
Hi @JulianOliver,
and imagine about as much as one can see above ground is below. What a beautiful connection between earth and sky.
@mro 100% And what a beautiful way of putting it!
@JulianOliver i've hiked akatarawa a bit and never seen anything like this tree! i assume a fair amount of bush bashing was involved?
@airshipper Oh nice! Not bush-bashing so much as trying to avoid getting lost! Quite open. Some kind soul helped out with this marker at a crucial juncture, hehe.
Soon after you can follow a trapper's ribbon markers.
But it's the river hopping beforehand that can get a bit hairy, not too grim but def don't go post rain (as, errm, we did). There's a also a small cliff with knotted rope kindly left by someone - best to lower pack first.
Can share a track file (DM)
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