Paths and trails
It’s a barge! It’s a boat! It’s the J Barry Ferguson
By any reasonable criteria, the J Barry Ferguson can be described as a landing barge. Clearly not in the assault-troop-landing sense, not least of all because of its diminutive size. In one very important respect, however, the J Barry Ferguson is not a typical…
Giselles and Gabrielles of their grandchildren
That, in modern meteorological history, Aotearoa has never been hit by a tropical cyclone, is no fluke. The clue, of course, is “tropical”. Not that a tropical cyclone can’t survive beyond the tropics, or even beyond the subtopics—Gabrielle was in the subtropics within a couple of…
Te Muri access dictated drop-in location
Was it not for John Darrach’s 1880s activism, Saturday’s coffee-and-croissants drop-in day, in Mahurangi West’s former school, would have been held in Sullivans Bay. John Darrach was so exercised about the danger to the 23 Māori and 14 Pākehā children living at school-less…
Te Muri Crossing coffee-and-croissants drop-in day
Te Muri Crossing high tea 2022, will be on Mother’s Day. Mothers who were treated to Sunday’ high tea at Tu Ngutu Villa clearly enjoyed the afternoon, the star-studded speakers, and the silent auction. The silent auction, after initially having nothing not on offer at the…
Te Muri Crossing high-tea silent auction online
Generous Friends of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail: The design and consenting of this 260-metre boardwalk-and-footbridge Te Muri Crossing is what your bids will help to complete. Because some of the best friends of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail were unable to be present…
Imperative for private-vehicle-free Te Muri future
Not everyone supports the proposed Te Muri crossing. Nor does everyone who supports the proposed Te Muri crossing, support every aspect of it. For example, many Mahurangi West people would have preferred that development of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail began…
Fourth Thursdays 3rd time lucky after 20 June
The clash wasn’t discovered until after 20 June was locked in for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Taking Shapely town-hall talk. Having cheerfully ceded their second-Wednesdays slot to bpw Warkworth, the town-hall talks have found that…
Seriously steeling the green network backbone
Whether the green network proposed in the Draft Warkworth Structure Plan is fit-for-purpose for this week’s climate-striking school students, for their next 30 years, must be the question. And given that streets, once surveyed, tend to endure, the…
Time for town hall to take it to city hall
Warkworth Town Hall, inescapably, is where the community should assemble to make decisions for itself. Not the Auckland Town Hall, with its region-wide responsibilities for a city of 1.7 million. In a slightly less imperfect world, Mahurangi…
One billion trees and bugger the science
In 2004, $3 million over 5 years sounded like all Mahurangi’s Christmases had come at once. But a back-of-a-seed-packet calculation strongly suggested that the $3 million the former Auckland Regional Council had budgeted would barely touch the sides, when it…
Visiting Aotearoa for all the right reasons
Neither of New Zealand’s two main industries is currently sustainable. Its once-vaunted agricultural industry, a proud part of the green revolution, is now a climate delinquent, due to the white gold-rush. Tourism, which continues to outdistance dairy as…
Riverpath puts Warkworth in league of its own
If measured in leagues, it’d be fewer than 1.3 of them. While it can take an eternity by road, particularly in holiday traffic, the six-kilometre path between Warkworth and Snells Beach, following the Mahurangi River, takes cyclists an average of about 25 minutes. Many…
Unformed-legal-road stopping stopped in its tracks
Forty-four-plus objections in four days, and it was all over. That is, all over for the Pakiri Hill paper-road stopping for the present, as the property holder may yet choose to go another round and slug it out in the Environment Court, but more about that possibility...
Stop road-stopping 1st order of business for new high-level trails trust
The first meeting was two parts fiesta and one part fiasco. Trails and trails-interested organisations from Pakiri to Pūhoi had gathered to collaborate on creating a rich network of trails, or greenways, to use a term in increasing use in the Auckland region. The...
Pro forma objection to stop road-stopping proposal
An eagle-eyed local and supporter of the plans by the Big Omaha Trail Trust for a Pakiri to Big Omaha Valley trail, spotted, on the Pakiri Hill, an Auckland Transport notice advising that an unformed paper road was to be stopped and sold, and amalgamated with the...
Te Whau Coastal Esplanade walkway close to fruition
A cloudless winter’s day in mid-July helped 20 Mahurangi locals get 750 plants in the ground on Te Whau Coastal Esplanade. The planting is the latest in a series of restoration activities achieved by volunteers in the six years since a strategic 2.7-hectare council...
Resolving outstanding practical problem
It’s nine years six weeks since it was signed. So there is every likelihood that, by the tenth anniversary of the signing of heads of agreement, what Justice Rhys Harrison described in his declaratory judgement as the outstanding practical problems…
Shweeb and/or rail-saving trail-with-rail
Aotearoa must urgently re-invent its tourism model. Currently it is heavily dependent upon air travel, which will increasingly become cripplingly expensive thanks to peaked oil and user-pays for greenhouse gases. Aside from the obvious need for more…