Tributary to the Totara River, near Ross, Westland

The small township of Ross, once the scene of a lucrative gold rush, lies nestled against low, forested hills some 30 kilometres south of Hokitika. The locally popular Totara Valley extends inland from the township through large areas of luxuriant podocarp forest, with localised farming on some of the more fertile river flats.

The Totara River catchment has an extraordinarily high rainfall — over 5,000 millimetres per year. As a result the forest here is extremely lush, and tributary streams number in their hundreds — there are so many that the stream in this photograph doesn’t even have a name.

I found this particular place while taking a day trip along the Totara Valley, stopping off every now and then for a walk around to see what I could find. In a place like this, indeed in most places, it’s not so much a matter of what can be seen easily from the road; it is more about what one can find if one takes a short walk away from the road — and this humble little stream with no name was no exception. This beautiful pool was just two or three hundred metres upstream of the road, yet it was completely hidden from view until I had almost stumbled into it while scrambling up the stream bed for a look around.

It was heavily overcast and raining steadily, the wet vegetation forming a fantastic mosaic of endless tones of green. Photographing it, however, was difficult because of the conditions. Getting a correct exposure took a whole minute on account of the low light, and the need for a relatively large depth of field to ensure that all the forest vegetation was in sharp focus.