My Favourite Walk: The Putangirua Pinnacles - the badlands of the Wairarapa
the badlands of the
Alight autumn rain fell as my boots crunched along the gravel riverbed. Ahead of me loomed a grey and ominous moonscape filled with towering rock formations. The conglomerate columns were adorned by mushroom-shaped caps, giving them the appearance of alien sentinels. The geological namesake of these columns — hoodoos — seemed to allude to the idea that some dark sorcery had wrought them out of the earth.
In reality, these hoodoos are the lingering remnants of a receding ocean that once covered the nearby Aorangi mountains. Rain and wind have sculpted the towers over the past 125,000 years, stripping away the softer layers of rock and leaving the harder bases and distinctive caps of the hoodoos behind. The result is the Putangirua Pinnacles, the country’s most striking example of badlands.
Members of North America’s Lakota tribe were the first to give badlands their name, calling the desolate terrain of what is now southwest South Dakota “Mako Sica” — “Land Bad”. French fur trappers later referred to the region as “les mauvais terres pour traverse”, or “bad lands through which to travel”.
The most famous formations are located in the western United States and Canada, but New Zealand walkers interested in experiencing a badlands track need look no further than a couple hours southeast of Wellington.
The Pinnacles are located near the outlet of the Putangirua Stream, an easy walk inland from Palliser Bay. The track, which departs from a popular DOC campsite, wanders through tall flax along the stream bed before splitting in two.
Walkers can take the left-most fork and continue through the bush to a ridge overlooking the Pinnacles, or head right and follow the stream to the base of the formations.
I chose to keep right, picking my way along the gravel bed until it took a sharp northward bend and began to climb in elevation. Around the bend was my first true view of the Pinnacles. A towering forest of formations rose from the river corridor, with many pinnacles attaining heights of over 50 metres. They were formidable, but also fragile. The landscape was littered with rocks — from innumerable small stones to car-sized boulders — that spoke of the slow yet unremitting disintegration of the hoodoos from erosion.
As I walked up to the base of the formations, I noticed that what had at first appeared to be a solid mass of rock was a complicated labyrinth of passageways. The paths, carved mostly by rainwater and flattened by the boots of fellow Pinnacles explorers, wound upwards and inwards towards the cliff sides from which the hoodoos had been born. They grew increasingly steep and narrow, eventually becoming too thin to squeeze through. Yet I could see they kept going, pencil-thin passages that followed the path of water out of the heart of the hills.
The sun came out as I descended from the labyrinth, pick Opposite page: A tramper walks past the tall grey sandstone features, known as hoodoos.