EXPLORATION FLIGHT

Stratford Evening Post, Volume II, Issue 227, 24 April 1933, Page 3

EXPLORATION FLIGHT

Back Country Landing

DUCKS AND SANDFLIES

| Several hundred miles of back e.oun--1 try in South Westlaud were 1 ravers : ed by Mr. J. C. Mercer, instructor to tile Canterbury Aero Club, in the second aerial prospecting flight which he has completed in the course of a month. One of his landings avus at a site where no other aeroplane had ever been —15 miles up the Arawhata River, close to the foot of Mount Aspiring. In company with his brother, Mr. 0. B. Mercer, a mining engineer. Mr. Mercer left the Wigram aerodrome last Monday afternoon and spent the night at Hokitika, flying on the next day to Okuru, the tiny settlement furthest south along the coast, where mails and supplies have to be packed in over many miles of bush tracks, or landed from, an occasional visiting vessel. Okuru had previously been Mr. Mercer's furthest south landing ground, but on the photographs he took on his last trip he had seen places that looked promising, and this time he investigated one of-them. It was a flat, grassy field beside the Arawhata River, many miles away from any settlements or farms. Mr. Mercer stated, on his return to Cliristchurch, that anyone who did not. fly to this place can reach it only hv riding horses up the river. On shingle spits in the river are paradise ducks in hundreds. "We chased some of them in the Moth," Mr. Mercer said, "but on the ground we couldn't get near them." Almost from the beaches on the south <>f Okuru the hills rise up, and only a few miles inland they reach 4000 5000 and 8000 ft. On their sides, through the bush, the aerial tourist sees streams and waterfalls, and, as the hills become mountains there are glaciers. On this trip Mr. Mercer saw the head of Andy's glacier. At the new Arawhata landing ground, besides paradise ducks, the visitors found another, and less pleasing form of life. Sandflies gathered in clouds. "There is a mountain down there called Sandfly Hill," Mr. Mercer said. "There *g a big gap in the bush there and the Okuru people say the sandflies ate it out." But the scenery, he says, more than compensates for the insects. From the Arawhata ground Mr. Merer flow back over the 120 miles to the Franz Josef Glacier, where he. called. |