#RUSTY LAKE HOTEL MUSHROOMS SKIN#
#RUSTY LAKE HOTEL MUSHROOMS WINDOWS#

Within half an hour, it leads into dim, enchanting forest, the scrunch of our boots on the stony, undulating track disturbing the stillness. The whitish-brown trail cuts a line across the tan landscape of low vegetation.

#RUSTY LAKE HOTEL MUSHROOMS WINDOWS#

Inside, the fire warms windows gives views over a forested, undulating world, the deep-blue Tasman and a sheer escarpment with white, horizontal lines running across its green face. The red Moonlight Tops Hut is a welcome sight, 20km and six and a half hours after setting out. Further on scattered lumps of it look like blobs of ice left at winterвЂ™s end. Rocks crunch underfoot and I pass a seam of white quartz sandwiched between grey rock.

#RUSTY LAKE HOTEL MUSHROOMS SKIN#

Sage, reptile-looking skin coating a rock turns out to be a cushion of, strangely-named, vegetable sheep. A deep-blue pond to the right lies in a valley of tan and tawny grass spiky greyish-green leaves sprout between rocks, a broader, bright green leaved plant is perhaps a mountain daisy. To our left, beyond the ridge, green-blanketed hills drop into valleys revealing splashes of white where a placid-looking blue Tasman, flashing like tinfoil, meets the west coast.

ItвЂ™s only 2.45pm but we cast long shadows under a cloudless sky. I pull my polar fleece sleeves over my hands, my three layers feeling like one and trudge on. Turning a corner gives shelter, turning another gets us blasted. Orange-ish tussock grass on the open ridge is swept like windblown hair. IвЂ™m soon chilly and itвЂ™s good to get going 45 minutes later.Д«ut the wind is howling. Three and a half hours after starting out, the worst of trackвЂ™s ascent over, we lunch in Ces Clark Hut and read of mines and gold discovery. ItвЂ™s spartan вЂ“ a one-legged, wooden table built into a corner, three sacking bunks and a brick and corrugated iron fireplace.ДЇrom Ces Clark Hut to Moonlight Tops Hut, the West Coast in the background. We peer into Croesus Top Hut, a 1930s, corrugated iron, minersвЂ™ hut. Stark, white trunks show possum damage in bush below. On a ridge top, the world opens up to a blue sky, a hazy range and distant, forested rolling hills with a peek of grass-covered lowland. Two lilac mushrooms look unreal amongst brown and gold leaf litter. It spotlights on trunks and speckles the moss carpet. Low sun blinds when it beams through gaps in the foliage. Gnarled branches coated in moss, some hanging like thick, tangled spiderwebs, look sinister in shadowy, dense forest. A sawmill and huts were located nearby but only a few rusted items remain. Thirty minutes on, a grassy spot warmed by the sun with a view of bush-carpeted ranges, was another hotel site. Across the river a Minerva Mine crushing battery thudded in the late 1800s. We emerge from dim bush into an open area where in 1868, a hotel stood. * A great Great Walk on Stewart Island/Rakiura * Bewitched by the mystical beauty of the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk * The most stunning lookouts and views on New Zealand's cycle trails Amongst green foliage, snaking branches wrapped lei-like in yellowish moss stand out. A myriad of ferns grow beneath, sunlight turning one with Venus fly trap-like leaves almost translucent.Д¬rossing suspension bridges over Blackball Creek, I look down on boulders turning its water white then we splash through rivulets cascading from banks over a now, rocky track. The damp trail takes us alongside moss-covered banks in hues of green, where tall, straight trees reach for light, punga fanning out below. Photos taken, we hike on and discover, over three days, that Mother Nature frequently flaunts her stuff on the Paparoa Track.

ItвЂ™s tiny, but in a forest of greens, browns and black, quite spectacular. Only 15 minutesвЂ™ walk in from Smoke-ho carpark, tucked in the damp, black root ball of a toppled tree, we spot a vivid blue mushroom. Alongside the Pororari River near the end of the Paparoa Track.

Rusty lake hotel mushrooms