News and media
Red Hills Hut to open
 small.jpg)
The new Red Hills hut will open March 5.
It’s the southernmost hut in Te Araroa’s seven or eight day tramp across the Richmond Range, and is named for the red hills that lie immediately north of the hut - bare hills, strange hills and – wait for it – hills that are red.
They’re part of a ophiolitic belt – a rare example of heavy seabed plate rich in magnesium, iron, gabbro, serpentine, and copper, that’s popped to the surface.
Seabed rock is usually subject to finger-nail-slow spreading from mid-ocean ridges to equally slow subduction at the edge of the continental plates. This seabed not only escaped subduction and buried itself into the kilometres-thick continental crust, but it was then uplifted further and unroofed into the rain and sunlight by the twisting of the alpine fault. Thus what was apparently submarine, becomes in the blink of an eye – and here that greatest of magicians, nature, takes a sweeping bow – subaerial.
We should further define “blink of an eye” as something over 80 million years.
The Richmond Range’s dominant beech forest can’t grow on hills that are – to a tree at least – like trying to colonise Mars. The result is hills that are strangely bare. Hills that are red from oxidation. Hills that shed from their slopes a tannin-free, but mineral-rich and strangely bitter water.
The Department of Conservation built the new hut, to replace a dilapidated old shelter, and has invited Te Araroa's Geoff Chapple to be one of the speakers at the opening.
