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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 12 (April 1, 1930)
The Wanganui's Palisades
page 26
The Wanganui's Palisades.
For this is a true canyon, that section of the Wanganui extending for some forty miles above Pipiriki. The Maoris call it Te Wahi Pari, “The Place of Cliffs.” This immense “pari” region, cut through by some ancient earthquake or volcanic convulsions in a rift that made a drain-way for the wild mountain land, is the most rugged part of the southern half of the North Island; its only rival for boldness of contour is the Urewera mountain country. Absolutely they are walls in many parts of this mid-section of the river, for they rise up to great heights as straightly as the sides of a pile of masonry in a city.
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The vertical faces of the coloured papa rock, flood-worn, mossy, kiekie-grown, go up for a hundred to two and three hundred feet, and behind them again the wooded ranges slope up into blue and mist-shrouded peaks. Here and there are slopes, formed by landslides in just such floods as this, or perhaps by earthquake, and on these slopes great forest trees grow in a dense and fragrant forest—the rimu, the rata, the beech or tawai.
“Far away from town and tower.”—Thomas Bracken.
(Govt. Publicity photo.)
A camping party on the bank of the Wanganui River, North Island, New Zealand.
In spring I had seen these cliffs and slopes a glory of flowers, when the snowy clematis starred the bushes and trailed along the lower branches of the tall timbers, and when the kowhai's gold emblazoned the banks for miles. Now the flowers had gone, but the glory of the ferns remained; ferns of all degree, from the korau and ponga, with their high slender trunks and their feathery cascades of frondage, to the lycopodium that broidered the rocks, and the bedewed filmy ferns that trembled on the cliff-sides.