Wainui

Wainui
Me, Kieran and Chris
10hrs
Fine

We walked up the range from Pigeon Saddle to Awapoto Hut then down to the river (933762) which took 5 hours due to some 500m/hr travel through windfall in the bush.

Once in the river the going was good, there was an abseil near the start and lots of small jumps, a couple of potentially bigger jumps, but all pretty gnarly. A number of the small jumps were on sighted as we didn't want to spent too much time placing bolts. There was huge potential for it to turn into a grade 5+ river in flood or high water.

The canyon was intermittent with no canyon in some sections, very small walls in some and 10m high slot in others. The steeper sections were mainly on bedrock and the flatter of boulders, however there were a few steep boulder chokes that had to be negotiated.

Once we got to Wainui falls we pulled the drill out of Chris's dry bag only to find it saturated, so we portaged the water fall and went back for curry and beer.

There is good gradient above where we started and the river roars quite loudly, so it would be worth an explore further upstream, with the Wainui falls bolted it should make for a V3A4II* trip. 20km2 catchment area.