the tracks if you care for the exercise there is rock-climbing in plenty and there are scrambles under the low-growing trees and along steep faces hanging on to the flax clumps and the tough-branched
koromiko
. And at about this level on the Hills side there are aspects of crag scenery, and crag and woodland combined, that are altogether missed by the stroller who keeps to the beaten track. Our Christchurch artists need not go further away than the inner dip of the range, the battered rim of the ancient fire cauldron, for impressions of bold rock faces straightly grand and honeycombed with curious caves, and witchy-looking weathered old trees; pictures that approach grandeur when the storm clouds swirl about the tussock-topped tors of Kahukura, the Rainbow God, giving the dark cores of the olden volcanoes an added height and mystery, or when they drift softly and mistily from the deep gullies between the ridges like steam masses from some hidden geyser.
The Mitchell Track that winds along northward between the tumbled rocks and among the hill flax gives the explorer a start on his traverse from Dyer’s Pass. It begins just opposite the picturesque stone-built tea-house with its swinging signboard and its quaint inscriptions in the saddle of the Pass, and it splendidly opens up the seaward face of the Sugarloaf whose rounded summit lifts directly over us yonder more than 1,600 feet above the harbour level. Immediately below us, in the gully that long ago was a channel for lava flow, the rocky depths are softened by the foliage of a fragment of the olden bush, a green covering for the valley floor. The valley is more attractive outside, for almost every vestige of the moss and ferns and underbrush has disappeared before grazing stock and the
The Sign of the “Kiwi,” with Marley’s Hill in the background.
C. Beken, photo
sudden torrents that have poured down from the ridge to make the little storm-creek flowing into the harbour beside the grassy mound of Pa-rakiraki. The lava-builded, notched and caverned walls of the Sugarloaf shoot up above us just here like a parapet, in regularly marked layers; tufts of flax and tussock and wiry veronica beard the face of the old fire-cliffs. Looking back at the Pass, just before we round the first bend in the rocky traverse, the cliff makes a terraced halt in its descent, and here on this tussock-grown tiny level, broidered with flax bushes and their honey-sweet
korari
blossoms, there is an eye-taking prospect of the Dyer’s Pass dip to the soft-blue sunlit harbour and of the black rock-faces and strong folds of the Port Hills southward.