From the town of Waiuta, we followed one of the old mining tracks through the forest. As we descended through the trees it was hard to imagine all the work that must have gone into cutting such a well graded route through the forest.
We passed by tramway tracks, water races and even one of the old entrances to the mine.
The shaft had been almost totally reclaimed by the forest and after poking our heads inside we decided not to stop too long.
We continued down some rough steps cut into the hillside to arrive at the site of the former Snowy River Battery. Perched on a bend in the river, were the remains of a massive gold extraction plant. The plant used the steep sided valley to take advantage of gravity to help move ore through the processing plant.
The remains of several large cyanide tanks were just a small part of the complex operations here. Originally the Snowy River Battery had thirteen of these huge cyanide vats, the process of dissolving fine gold in dilute cyanide solutions had been recently discovered at the time the Snowy River Battery was constructed, helping to make it one of the most profitable mines in New Zealand. The entire mining process in this area was well documented, and one miner who was a keen photographer took many pictures of the mining operations. Many of his pictures and an explanation of the mining can be found in a great paper here.
As the facility on the banks of the Snowy River grew, in dry weather the power generated by the nearby Snowy River wasn’t sufficient and by 1923 the mine was forced to bring in water from other streams through a series of water races.
We followed one of the water races downstream to the site of the former powerhouse before climbing steadily back up to town of Waiuta. As we made our way through the forest the first spots of rain began to fall. Although the dense canopy above us sheltered us for a while, eventually the rain became too heavy and we put on our rain jackets and hurried back to the car.
We left Waiuta and as we continued on towards the West Coast we drove through heavy showers, but as we came out of the Buller Gorge the sun started to come shine and we were hopefully that we would be able to enjoy the rest of the weekend without getting too wet.