The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
The Dun Mountain Railway was officially opened amidst great fanfare on Monday 3 February, 1862. From the port, across the city, the horse-drawn tramway then climbed from Brook Street to a height of 2870 feet where it terminated at the chromite mines situated east of Nelson.
Early Māori quarried argillite for adzes (toki) and tools from Nelson's Mineral Belt (a strip of serpentine- rich ground running from D'Urville Island to Lake Rotoiti). European interest in the mineral deposits dated back to 1852 when copper ore was found. Mining engineer, Thomas Hacket, eventually pronounced the copper lodes to be worthless; however he did recommend mining the chromite deposits on Wooded Peak- a summit nearly two miles northwest of Dun Mountain.
The chromite had been discovered by German geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter. In 1859 he climbed Dun Mountain as part of the Austrian Novara Expedition and named the olivine rock he found here dunite. Dunite is a silicate rich in magnesium and iron and weathers to a rusty reddish or dun colour. Dun is the old English word for the colour brown. The flecks of black within rock samples are chromite. Dunite, serpentine and other ultramafic rocks are part of the Nelson Mineral Belt. Hochstetter stayed three nights in the Dun Mountain Company mine house, sited beyond Coppermine Saddle, during his Dun Mountain expedition (29th August - 1st September 1859), which was sited just below the current bike trail as it leaves Coppermine Saddle and enters the bush (825m). He was found of Nelson stating, “On account of its beautiful site and its delightful climate, Nelson is justly considered one of the most pleasant places of sojourn in New Zealand. The impression made by the snug little cottages, surrounded by beautiful gardens, is an extremely cheerful one.” The endemic, threatened Hochstetter frog carries his name.
Initially constructed to carry this chrome ore from the mines to Nelson's Port, the railway also provided a well-used passenger service between the Port and Nelson city for nearly four decades. When the Dun Mountain Railway Company applied for permission to cross Nelson's city streets with its railway lines, the Provincial Council and Government required the Company to run at least one public passenger train per day - New Zealand's first public transport. A new Railway Act required that the locomotives travel through Nelson at a maximum of four miles per hour.
This can be a busy place, please be aware of muggles.