The Tuia Mātauranga - Pōkai Whenua GeoTour: Whā 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 Pokai 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.
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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.
Approximately 250-300 million years ago the Southern Alps and the area surrounding Lake Tekapo were part of a seafloor valley. Movement of two large plates of the earth’s crust has seen the once horizontal seabed, hardened to rock and pushed upwards to form the land it is today. The last ice-age, 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, saw huge glaciers of ice longer than the length of the lake, depositing large volumes of rock at its terminal, resulting in the damming of the valley and the formation of Lake Tekapo behind it. The glaciers have since retreated back to the valleys at the head of the lake, but are still clearly visible from the air and often accessible by four wheel drive vehicle. The Mackenzie Basin was free of humans until several hundred years ago with the arrival of the Maori in search of food. The moa (a large flightless bird, now extinct) and other birds were hunted, and eels fished in the area. The Māori called the area Takapō, meaning “To leave in haste at night”. The current name, Tekapo is possibly a corruption of Takapō. In 1855 James Mackenzie, a Scottish shepherd turned sheep stealer discovered the basin that now bears his name when he, with the help of his dog Friday, drove flocks of sheep inland to avoid being discovered. Authorities were finally able to capture Mackenzie, but struggled to take control of the sheep due to his highly intelligent dog. It is alleged Friday continued to drive the sheep without his master’s control until finally being disabled by the authorities. A bronze memorial to working collie dogs, such as Friday, was commissioned in 1968 by local farmers and now stands on the shores of Lake Tekapo near the Church of the Good Shepherd.
The cache is in Lake Tekapo Regional Park on the Lilybank road. This area was designated a Soil Conservation reserve in 1963, and came under Environment Canterbury stewardship in 1989. The forest was established to control active soil erosion with plantings of mainly Corsican, Lodgepole and Ponderosa pine with some European larch. There are also plantings of amenity trees including oak and silver birch. These two species, plus the larch, provide the autumn colourings of the park and the colour contrast against the surrounding landscape. The purpose of the park is to provide recreational facilities close to the township for locals, and the increasing number of visitors to the area, whilst recognising the soil conservation and environmental values within the park.
Lilybank is a large station up the road between the Godley and Macaulay rivers that has had a chequered ownership history. It was first established in 1863 and was over 28,000 hectares. At one time it was a hunting lodge. Access at the head of the lake is 4WD.
The cache is a 180ml container - Bring own pen, when placed I drove to the cache location through the picnic area, but there is a gate that may be shut at times, but it is only 40m from Liliybank road.
DON'T FORGET TO WRITE DOWN THE CODEWORD