Cass, Craigieburn and Castle Hill

The Cass Settlement and it’s lone citizen:

Back to work. Lisa and I spent a few hours looking around the Help-X website for a few weeks of home-stay close to Craigieburn and Castlehill on the Eastern Slopes of the Southern Alps, destinations notorious for mountain biking and rock climbing respectively. We found a place offering a bed, and all the food we could eat in exchange for 3 hours of work, which included tending to his large fleet of egg laying hens, and a bit of gardening. The place was in a settlement called Cass, located about 10 km to the east of Arthurs Pass, which we learned from the internet [http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/8025081/C…] has a population of exactly one, Our future boss: Barrie. We got in touch with him, and he quickly excepted our tender for 2 weeks of work.

When we arrived he wasn’t home, so we wandered around to get our bearings. The settlement is nestled in an alpine mountain valley surrounded by farmland (Farm in the first Picture taken from Sugarloaf). Cass is on the rail line linking the east and west coasts and still has an active train station. It also has a few other cottages, a University of Canterbury research station, and a campground and putt and chip golf course, both which were built by Barrie. He either had the best retirement package ever or is the worlds most awesome and shameless squatter.

Barrie worked for KiwiRail almost his entire life. Some 30 years ago, he was transferred to the Cass station, where he was provided a house, owned by KiwiRail, to live in. At first the house and property were pretty basic, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, a small living area, situated on a small yard next to a bunk house for travelling rail workers. Over the years he kind of took ownership of it, by building the golf course, a party barn (I'll get to that), campground, extending the house to include a bar room, and annexing more of KiwiRail’s land for the purpose of raising over 400 chicken and 13 sheep. Apparently when he retired, KiwiRail offered to let him stay in the house for as long as he wanted.

Barrie is a character. He is around 70 years old, and at first came off as a grump and perfectionist. We quickly learned that this was just his sense of humour and in fact, he really enjoyed people and was almost over generous, especially when it came to food and beer. He also told it as he saw it, if he didn’t like something: “that’s fucking terrible”, and if he did: “that’s alright”. His friends came by for visits often and spoke highly of him.

The Work:

In exchange for food and a place to stay, our daily tasks focused on the chickens. We would wake up, let the chickens out, feed and water them, steal there eggs, clean the eggs and put into cartons, then put some of the cartons out at the highway in an honesty box to sell for $5 dollars each. We also had to feed his peacocks and doves, which he kept in a separate pen, as well as other odd jobs like gardening, and cleaning out his party barn. The work was generally enjoyable. Barries free range chickens are kind of awesome they are very entertaining, provide delicious eggs, put themselves to bed, and sleep standing up. I don’t think we ever worked more than 3 hours in a day, Barrie didn’t think it was healthy.

The Area:

After we put in our few hours of work we had the rest of the day to adventure around the area. 10 km to the east of Cass was the Craigieburn forest, which provided heaps of mountain biking and trail running possibilities. Or first adventure into the forest was epic, it was a mountain bike ride along the Craigieburn edge track which starts at the base of a small community ski field above treeline, and side-skirts the Craigieburn Valley into a beech forest until eventually passing over a saddle into the next valley over. The ride was kind of insane. Long stretches crossed scree runs with angles of greater than 50 degrees on a small 30 cm wide trail. You wouldn’t die if you fell off the edge, but it would probably not end up so well. The rest of the trail was narrow and very technical. Between the craziness of the trail and the views provided, it was an awesome ride.

From the saddle we headed up to the top of Helicopter hill, which provided a great view of the surrounding mountains. From the saddle downwards the trail got a bit more technical due to an increased volume of wet roots, although was much wider. I took a pretty big fall, nearly impaling myself on an exposed root. While i was able to get back on my bike and finish the ride, I had bruised my abdomen and was out of commission for the next week!

While I spent my afternoons playing music and doing some online coursework, Lisa kept adventuring. She went on a 10 km trail run in Craigieburn on a trail which she described as “runnable, in a beautiful forest”. She also scrambled up the mountain next to Cass called Sugar Loaf. She returned about 4 hours after she set off, describing how she had gotten a bit lost, how the views were epic, the climb up was interesting and overgrown, and how the decent was absolutely nuts. She pointed out her tracks down the scree face of the mountain, which appeared to be nearly vertical.

Once my stomach healed, we biked a few more times in Craigieburn, once with our new friends from Christchurch Sarah and Jenny who we had met on the Old Ghost Road. Both times the weather was great and he had spectacular bike rides. I also got to head up Sugar Loaf, which was incredible. My experience was similar to Lisa’s, I got lost, the climb and views were great, and the decent was really fun! Basically a 600m decent down a scree shoot, which was almost entirely runnable.

My friend Chelsea and her partner David were in the area so they came out and stayed at the campground for a night. We showed them around the farm then went bouldering (rock climbing without ropes) with them at Castle Hill. Castle Hill is this really cool limestone boulder field in the middle of the mountains. We had a pretty great time. And it is 100% worth stopping at whether you climb or not.

Party Barn :

Okay, so after building the campground Barrie began holding an annual get together called Cass Bash which involved a Locals vs Railmen cricket match and a whole lot of beer drinking. Eventually Barrie built a shed to house the event which featured a stage, a bar, a fancy commercial kitchen, a sweet wall mural, and some funky decorations and lights. They no longer through the Cass Bash, i guess because to many people started showing up to it, but at it's height over 300 people came, several bands played, and they easily finished off something like 25 kegs over the weekend. The building is used from time to time by Barrie's buddies who camp there on the weekend or for lawnmower storage, but otherwise just collect dust. Either way the next party held there will be a great one no doubt.Leia mais