Our Trip to the Glentui Falls

Weekend trip to Glentui Falls

The weekend trip to the Glentui Falls were magical. In Primal Blueprint, Mark Sisson writes about getting out of the city and spend walking tramping trail running for a few hours every week (he of course writes about a lot of other things too, :-), but living in Christchurch, we are really spoilt for choices). This weekend we left for the magical deep forests near Oxford township looking for the Glentui Falls. Have to say that the NZ Department of Conservation does a great job in maintaining the tracks, signposting them, and so on. There are occassional minor glitches, for instance on this track, if you took the long route you would not see which track leads to the waterfall.

You access the road to Glentui Falls from the Ashley Gorge (another beautiful scenic getaway) and drive on a gravel road to a picnic area and start your journey from there. We took the slightly longer walk through a beech forest. We walked for about an hour and then came to a point where three tracks pointed to three different directions. Which way would the waterfall be? Not sure. One could go up a track signposted with an orange triangle mark, but that would lead to a very long loop. One could go all the way back, or one could walk down to a small stream, cross a bridge and continue for another good twenty minutes before coming to a viewpoint from where one can see the magical tranquil waterfall cascading down. We did not know how we could reach the base of the waterfall, something that we'd like to do some day.

Forest Walk