February 14th 2017: Muzzle days

I'm just out the end of a couple of epic trips into Muzzle Station near Kaikoura as the book deadline approaches. It's one of those deadlines that comes around, but you don't actually want the journey to end. Like getting to the end of a good read: completion laced with that terrible realisation that the next pages are the last.

This last chapter was a lot of fun. A day of chilled out river time riding horses bareback through the station's nearest swimming hole to escape the 36°C in the shade temps, and preparation to bring 150 cattle out across the range. It sounded like the calm before the storm and it actually was. By the time we had the cattle pushed up the Heron River to the base of the range and locked in the Bluff Dump holding paddock, the clouds had amassed like centaurs over the range.

"We'll be lucky if it rains," offers O, who together with her husband Guy and parents Colin and Tina runs the station.

Rain in these parts is something to be celebrated. It has been in drought for years. But the track out is barely passable in the wet. This is the double-edged sword.

We curl up in the Bluff Dump hut and set our alarms for an early start. I hang my arm out the window to cool off from the typically warm night time temperatures.

I awake to steady rain in the middle of the night. But I can't get back to sleep because of the rockfall that tumbles off the earthquake-shattered peaks, ricocheting down the mountainsides above before crashing ominously into the river below – just a short distance from the hut and sending a fenceline of dogs into an uncomfortably nervous bark up.

It's as eerie as it is uncomfortable and the size of the rocks that lay speared into the valley floor at unimaginable  angles make you acutely aware of your vulnerability in this land.

Dawn slides around and we lift our heads from weary slumbers to tackle the new day. It's still mostly dark as we slither up the range, sliding along near Tentpoles hoping to avoid the untimely descent to the valley floor on one side. Constantly the echo of rockfall is drowned out by bellows from the approaching mob. At the saddle it is pea soup with the beautifully white faces of hereford cattle appearing through the mist.

The descent is just as slippery and somehow the Zigzag has remained intact to allow us to pass this final hurdle and deliver the cattle to the loading yards below. 

Life is always an adventure on Muzzle Station.

See you at the beach ... Derek

PS The following day Guy and O headed back to the station, only to discover a huge slip on the Zigzag. Yep, everyday is an adventure out there behind the peaks of Kaikoura.