Giveaways
MY favourite tramping-track hot pools are at Welcome Flat on the Copland River (pronounced cope-land).
The Copland is a tributary of the Karangarua, River which runs from the Southern Alps down to the Tasman Sea at a location south of Fox Glacier. Welcome Flat is on the lower part of the Copland River, at an altitude of about 430 metres, with a very flash hut.
Adding to the magnificence and strangeness of this section of the West Coast is the fact that it's in an area called the 'beech gap', which extends from Paringa to the Taramakau River, south of Greymouth. The beech gap, which is thus quite sizable, is an area where all the native beech trees were killed by the glaciers of the ice ages, after which, in a curious irony, only the more tropical-looking podocarps regenerated.
No doubt you've read about 'primitive conifers' in books about the dinosaurs. Well, podocarps make up a good proportion of those. Podocarps are an ancient lineage of conifers that protrude upward, shaggily and irregularly, out of ferny forests that often seem to be wreathed in steam even when they are underneath snowy mountains. According to the New Zealand Department of Conservation,
In its natural state, a podocarp forest can be lush with a dense undergrowth of shrubs, ferns and tree-ferns. The few precious remnants of forest which survive often contain the highest diversity of plants and animals in the region. They are a left-over from an ancient forested time.
Podocarp forests are mostly rain forests; which is another reason why they thrive on the sodden West Coast. But that's not so unusual. What is unique about podocarps, today, is that birds eat their cones. Say what?
Podocarps like all plants in the conifer family reproduce using cones, but podocarp cones are extremely modified and look more like berries. These are attractive to birds which help to spread the seeds.
In the northern hemisphere such fruit-bearing conifers eventually died out in favour of true fruit trees and berry bushes of the kind that have blossoms. But podocarps clung on in New Zealand and a few other out-of-the-way places in the Southern Hemisphere, along with their understories of giant tree ferns. So in this area of New Zealand you really are in a sort of botanical Jurassic Park or Isla Nublar, even if the dinosaurs themselves have died out, and that's another reason why it's a World Heritage area.
I have more to say about podocarps in my post on Codfish Island, or Whenua Hou. However, by the time you get to Douglas Rock Hut these giants and their ferny associates are making their last stand against the cold. By now the rainforest is giving way to rocks and tussock. Douglas Rock Hut gives people a taste of being in the Southern Alps without having to do serious climbing. But the track is serious thereafter, if you keep going. It terminates at an altitude of 2,150 metres at the Copland Pass, by which stage you are halfway up Aoraki/Mount Cook.
If you liked the post above, check out my new book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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