Winter’s return

We’ve had such a warm spell here in Motueka that it seemed like Mt Arthur would lose all the snow that had accumulated on it since the middle of May. But the poor weather at the start of the week saw the return of the snowy coat, and this is what it was looking like on Tuesday morning. Mount Arthur lies in the Kahurangi National Park, New Zealand’s second largest national park. Back in the 1940s, when the Abel Tasman National Park was first established, plans were afoot to add another chunk of land to it. The Evening Post of 6 November 1943 stated that the Abel Tasman National Park Board would recommend that the Minister of Lands add to the Abel Tasman 163,000 acres of mountainous country covering “Mount Arthur and the watersheds of the Cobb, Takaka, Graham, Pearse, and Leslie Rivers”. Obviously this recommendation was not taken up, as it wasn’t until 1996 that Mount Arthur was finally national-parkified when the Kahurangi National Park was established.