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Murphys Law and first Tahr hunt
Hi all,
A few weeks ago I asked for some advice on planning my first tahr hunt and promised I would do a trip report.
I am not a religious man but I am superstitious and truly believe the harder the road, the more likely you are to be rewarded in the end so I don't give up too easily when planning a trip if things go wrong.
I am based in Palmerston North and the plan was to leave on the Friday for Queenstown, rent a car and travel to Mount Cook and meet my mates at 3pm for a fly in trip to Reardon Hut in the head of the Dobson valley. The day before, I was at the Fielddays in Hamilton and had booked a return flight from Auckland to ensure that I would have backup options if flights were delayed or cancelled.
Inevitably (no one at work flys the same day as me) my flight was cancelled from Auckland and rescheduled the next day to arrive after my flight down south would have left. The only other option was to get a flight to Wellington then a rental car to Palmerston North so I could get packed up in time for my flight down south the next day.
I finally arrived back home at 4:30am with 2 hours to get packed up before my next flight which was Palmy to Wellington then onto Queenstown. I had no problems with the flight to Wellington but just as I arrived I found out the flight to Queenstown was cancelled and rescheduled for the next day. Quickly I found a flight to Timaru that arrived at midday where I could picked up by one of the guys I was hunting with who I had never met. However AirNZ discovered my handloads and confiscated them as they weren't in original packaging!!
As I was mainly going south for work, when Mark arrived at the airport he saw a guy with a suitcase and laptop and almost turned around and left again thinking this Jafa was a long way from home. What he didn't know at that stage was that AirNZ had left my rifle and hunting pack in Wellington!!! So we made the decision to wait for them to arrive on the 8pm flight then fly in the next morning.
After picking up my gear which did arrive on the 8pm flight, we drove to Twizel to meet the other guys who had manage to catch a recently escaped 12lb salmon in the canals. First light the next morning we headed up to Heliworks but the airport was clagged in. One of the guys had bought me some replacement ammo so I went and sighted that in while we waited. The fog didn't clear until 3pm by which time we had demolished all the Fairlie Pies at the Hermitage.
The flight was awesome but only 8 minutes and we were disappointed not to see any tahr on the way in. We arrived at the hut to find the snowline was about 1400m and held some hope we wouldn't need the crampons we brought.
We quickly unloaded and headed up the face behind the hut to glass for tahr and plan hunts for the next day. 2 of the guys say 3 young bulls up above the hut so planned to revisit them the next day looking for a mature bull.
Grunter and I were planning to head into the basins on the true left just down the valley from the hut but decided to look over the faces on the true right before we started climbing. Fortunately we did as Grunter spotted a couple of tahr high up on the ridge so we decided to climb up after them to look for a bull.
By the time we got to the top they were gone but we saw a few more nannies on the opposite face and eventually saw a nice bull far above them. We couldn't get any closer and judged him to be about 400m away so lined up and took a shot.
Not sure who was more bewildered, us or the bull when we realised we had severely underestimated the distance. A few shots later and the bull took off along the bluffs to meet up with a group of nannies.
Feeling a bit embarassed about our pointless barrage we moved further along the ridge when I saw another group of nannies grazing a gut on the opposite face. Up above them on a small spur was a mature bull with a good mane which looked awesome with the wind. In total there were about 14 nannies below and around him that started moving along the face to the right. Suddenly from the left a huge black bull came from behind a bluff in the gut and move straight towards the other bull which had a brown mane. It looked like a standoff between a black and a grizzly bear and I assumed the Grizzly was the more mature bull. However the black one looked bigger and after a 5 minute standoff the Grizzly let the black bull follow the nannies along the bluffs.
This time it was Grunters turn to shoot first and I asked him to tell me which bull he was going for and to give me a warning before he fired. All of a sudden BOOM and hell was let loose. "Was that your warning?", I asked. "Which one are you shooting at?" "The black one" was the answer so I lined up on the Grizzly and fired. He leapt up in the air and slid down into the gully. Meanwhile the black one and all the nannies continued to the right along sheer bluffs and out of range.
Looking at where the hit bull had disappeared I suddenly saw his head pop up in some scrub. Given the small target and the shear bluffs he was on I didn't try another shot and tried to work out how I could get closer. When I realised I couldn't Grunter suggested I shoot near him to get him moving hoping that he wouldn't be able to climb and might come across into the creekbed that separated us.
It was worth a try so I fired a shot close enough to spook him without aiming directly at him. It worked and he blew his cover then I could see he was trailing a forelimb which meant he wouldn't be able to climb again.
Fortunately instead of heading right with his mates along the bluffs we couldn't get to, he headed left towards the bluffs lining the creek head. We followed opposite him on our ridge until we came to the head of a large scree slope then found him lying down above those bluffs above the creek. I ran down the scree to get into a better shooting position happier that he was now somewhere we could possible retrieve him. He was watching us all the way but was struggling to get back up. When I found a relatively level platform I fired the finishing shot and he slid over the bluff into the creekbed with a sickening thud.
Hoping he hadn't broken his horns I scrambled down into the creek to find him lying amongst massive blocks of ice with horns intact. We were running out of time before it got dark but I wanted the cape, so tried to get it skinned as quickly as possible, took the hindquarters and backsteaks. We headed down the creekbed until it got dark then our headlights disappeared into space and we realised we were at the top of a waterfall or bluff.
We had to make a decision to try and scale the walls around the dropoff or try and head straight up the side of the creekbed which was incredibly steep and the scree had frozen solid making the ascent treacherous. At this point my legs began to feel like jelly and I wondered if I was going to be able to make it up the face or not. Finally I managed to find some tussock and scrub at the side of the scree and was able to pull myself onto some safer ground but no less steep.
It had started to snow but we were kept warm by our climb out of the creek then hit the scrub belt. Man I thought leatherwood was bad in the Ruahines but right then, that scrub was almost impossible to get past as it was angled against us due to pressure from snowdrifts. Eventually we hit the main ridge and dropped over to see a faint light coming from the direction of the hut. We called the other guys on the RT and let them know where we were and that we were still about an hour away.
We slogged it out through the scrub down the gullies on the other side which was fortunately a bit easier and finally hit the main valley, crossed the river and made it back to the hut about 8:30pm absolutely buggered but stoked we had something to show for the day.
The boys in the hut already had a feed and a brew ready for us which was most welcome. They had had an eventful day up above where they saw the young bulls the day before but had not managed to shoot any mature bulls. They came across more snow than us and had to use their ice axes.
The next day I decided to go down the valley flats to look for a stag as I had twisted my knee the night before. The other guys went after the big black bull we had seen the day before but he was well out of range.
I found it hard to not still look for tahr on the bluffs and saw a few mobs but no good bulls and certainly nothing I had the knees to get to. The chopper was picking us up at 3pm so I needed to get back to pack up. At 1pm about a km downstream from the hut in the middle of the riverbed a yearling stood broadside on watching me. The hut was in my firing line so I slowly moved 20m to the right for a safer shot and knocked him over at about 150m.
As I wasn't far from the hut, I gutted and backpacked him out whole then packed up the gear and tent before the boys got back.
Mark Hayes arrived in the chopper right on time then gave us an awesome up close and personal tiki-tour around the basins in the head of the Dobson on our way out where we saw a couple more small mobs of tahr.
All in all an awesome trip that almost didn't happen and got a nice bull tahr that I almost couldn't get to.Attachment 114143Attachment 114144Attachment 114145
