You know it’s going to be an interesting day when you have to drive around eight goats sleeping on the state highway in the dark on the way to work. The older ones scampered out of the way but some of the younger ones were still rubbing sleep out of their eyes as we went past and began accelerating again.
A few hours later it was turning into a nice sunny day as we approached the Gaddum Construction forestry roading site just out of Kawhia near the Oparau Store.
The loggers around here have had quite the experience by the looks of the harvested blocks, multiple of which have been hanging over the road, stumps cut off high at two metres plus to act as rub trees to keep shovelled and skidded stems from sweeping out onto the tarseal below.
We arrive at the cyclone-damaged forest and radio in as we start through the farmland. We are told to seek out the Gaddum rock truck on site so we can follow him into the forest where we will Iron-Test the Hyundai HX145 excavator that is clearing slips.
The flood damage in here is quite surprising. What is now a nice clear Oparau River obviously took a turn for the worse during Gabrielle and has blown out the concrete slab bridge plus littered the farmland with driftwood, rocks and silt as it found old floodplain pathways to Kawhia Harbour.
The repaired bridge approaches are still settling in but are pretty tidy as we rumble over them and head up the hill after the truck. After a bit of Health & Safety work, regular operator, Steve Drower, shows us around.
“As you can see the make-up of the soil here is a bit broken, no real structure to it so it is well-suited to being planted in trees. Most of this forest has held up well compared to a lot of other forests in the cyclone,” Steve says.
“When we rocked up to this block to begin work the river was flowing around both ends of the bridge and debris was all over the road. We smoothed it off then carefully built up rock abutments around the approaches to the bridge with bigger rocks to make it more sustainable for the future. The Wedgelock thumb came in really handy for that rock placement as well as picking up driftwood and getting it off the road.”
So, what got Steve into forest roading?
“Logging, basically. I spent quite a bit of time running gear in Kaingaroa Forest from 1968 to 1987 logging for Waipa Sawmill’s own crew in the old days when we used cranes to load logs onto trucks. I was an all-rounder really, but I started out on the skids. Our logs would be trucked into Rotorua to the mill at Koutu traffic lights. It’s gone now of course but back in the day it was so quiet in Rotorua that the trucks would park on one of the lanes at the lights and the logs would get winched...
