We went for a walk in the Rimutaka Forest Park today. Mid-week it's nice & quiet.
It only takes a couple of hours to go from the carpark to the Orongorongo River Valley.
Well, it would take most people that long, but I tend to indulge in a bit of botanizing as we walk & it can slow things down quite a bit.
There is the obligatory Tmesipteris spotting. It's kinda special 'cos it's the most primitive of the ferns (first entry in H.H.Alan "Flora of New Zealand") and you can usually find it on tree fern trunks, so I like too be able to "notch it up" on each trip.
This time, however, the exciting find was a clump of Dawsonia moss. This is the *biggest* moss in the world, and, yup, it's a native of N.Z. The clump I found is right in the side of the path so it's liable to fall victim to the scrub cutters of the track maintenance team. In this clump, each stem is 30cm tall (the matchbox is the universal scale indicator).

Dawsonia superba	Raukawa Lodge

I've aways been impressed by the canny locations that are chosen for tramping huts, just out of trouble, but still in the middle of things. It seems that the placement of this one wasn't quite so well thought through, and it is going to have to be re-locationed (soon).