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Updated: May 22, 2025
I have crossed and recrossed the Waimakiriri so often in my late trip that I have ceased to be much afraid of it unless it is high, and then I assure you that I am far too nervous to attempt it. When I crossed it first I was assured that it was not high, but only a little full. The Waimakiriri flows from the back country out into the plains through a very beautiful narrow gorge.
L drove, F sat on the box, and inside were the ladies, children, and a nurse. Our first stage was to Kaiapoi, a little town on the river Waimakiriri, where we had a good luncheon of whitebait, and rested and fed the horses.
I had to cross the Waimakiriri just after a fresh, when the water was thick, and I assure you I did not like it. I crossed it first on the plains, where it flows between two very high terraces, which are from half a mile to a mile apart, and of which the most northern must be, I should think, 300 feet high.
In the river-bed, near the gorge, there is a good deal of lignite, and, near the Kowai, a little tributary which comes in a few miles below the gorge, there is an extensive bed of true and valuable coal. The back country of the Waimakiriri is inaccessible by dray, so that all the stores and all the wool have to be packed in and packed out on horseback.
This river has a very good reputation, and is very rarely dangerous to cross; whereas the Rakaia and the Rangitata towards the south, and the Waimakiriri towards the north, of Christchurch, are most difficult, and always liable to sudden freshes.
Before us was the steep bank of the river Waimakiriri, and a few yards from its edge stood a picturesque gable-ended little cottage surrounded by a rustic fence, which enclosed a strip of garden gay with common English spring flowers, besides more useful things, potatoes, etc.
This time I went up the Waimakiriri by myself, and found that we had been fully right in our supposition that the Rakaia saddles would only lead on to that river. The main features were precisely similar to those on the Rakaia, save that the valley was broader, the river longer, and the mountains very much higher.
The Waimakiriri is the next river to the northward of the Rakaia. That night we camped as before, only I was more knowing, and slept with my clothes on, and found a hollow for my hip-bone, by which contrivances I slept like a top. Next morning, at early dawn, the scene was most magnificent. The mountains were pale as ghosts, and almost sickening from their death-like whiteness.
They are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the Waimakiriri, which then flowed into Lake Ellesmere, ten or a dozen miles south of Christ Church, and which now enters the sea at Kaiapoi, twelve miles north of it; besides this old channel, it has others which it has discarded with fickle caprice for the one in which it happens to be flowing at present, and which there appears some reason for thinking it is soon going to tire of.
This might be shown also by a consideration of the volume of water which supplies the main streams of the Rakaia and the Waimakiriri, and comparing it with the insignificant amount which finds its way down the Harpur. The glaciers that feed the two larger streams must be very extensive, thus showing that the highest range lies still farther to the northward and westward.
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