Colls Dam Hochstetter, South Island, New Zealand
By DOCGreymouth on 01-Oct-15. Waypoint GC64P2F

The gorse has grown, well worth a few scratches. Good hide

Enjoyed our walk in the area. Lots to explore. Logbook pretty wet. Tftc

Enjoying this easy walk. The coordinates are about 12 m off - the stump is behind the memorial seat, so you have to find a way around the gorse to get to it.

TFTC! Ended up going the complete wrong way so had to back track, oops! Anyways, found the correct track in the end and the cache easily

Found on a walk with my wife.

This is our first trip away in our campervan since mid April. Greymouth and the surrounding area has the best forecast. So once again we headed for 3 nights in Greymouth.I have never explored this area before and I am pleased I have now. Luckily the rain ?????? showers held off during this walk.I wonder ?? if the gorse is being used to protect the native plants underneath. Luckily it wasn't too prickly retrieving the hide.

#22976. When I got to GZ I thought the hint object would be easy to spot, but it wasn't. Looked around a bit, including going a bit further a field. Hmm. Read some logs, which mentioned heading into gorse, so it was time to take the plunge. The gorse wasn't to thick, and after a bit of searching I found the hint object. I think the log book was damp. TFTC.

A bit of a prickly find near a good view point of the dam. StreetWalkerNZ did the honours here. Always good to find a decent sized container too. TFTC.

Reasonably quick find. Log damp.TFTC

Found - Mrs McMike2012 & I now live full-time in our caravan & travel the country visiting places we want to visit … we are currently parked up at the Nelson Creek Recreation Reserve Campsite … we decided to go for a walk after we arrived to see if we could find some local caches … this cache easily found, completed & replaced … pleased to add another 'smiley face' to the tally … TFTC ... TN:LN:SL ... #4,015 for us.

Doing the loop walk. I wonder where the hint item is. Behind that wall of gorse I presume. Wrapped my jacket around my arm and pushed through to thankfully find an open space. Did the admin and returned to civilisation.
TFTC

Took a bit to spot due to the gorse.

Nice walk through the native bush nice easy find thanks for this cache DOCGreymouth

Nice easy find once I found a way past the gorse. Thanks DOCGreymouth

#13061

Yay thanks found out for a stroll with Polly birthday walking xx

Found it

Found it

Found it with Cympull. Wasps nearby. TFC

Thanks for your amazing cache. I really appreciate the time you took to set up and maintain your caches.
Found with Fisha1288
Shows at 15m
Cheers, Cympull.

Found after a short walk TFTC

Nice short walk quick find. TFTC

Found with the family (LMA&J + their Mum, Ray and Isabelle) while here to do the new Adventure Lab.
We decided to do the whole loop which we hadnt done since 2019.
The kids dropped our pen somewhere on the way here so we couldnt sign the cache for them.
We will be back another time.

Creekdalefarm

Spending the winter woofing, tramping and exploring the west coast caching along the way ..of course..

Back in greymouth for a while working at the Noah's ark backpackers...so a good base to tick off a few more..

Set myself a mission to hit 8000 finds by the end of the year...that's an average of 6 a day ..
Back in the area for a second time to finish of the hold em series...great place to park and walk the rest...tackling the ones in the reserve first...hopefully by the end of today will have beaten my monthly find total...
Bit of a bush bash at gz, for this after taking the wrong path (like many before me). Cache is secure but damp..

I found that the co ords were not that sharp and the gorse makes it a tad challenging maybe DoC could do a tad of maintenance ..also an unbelievable amount of wasps around ..thanks

We followed the wrong path to start with as I misinterpreted the signposts. Just as well macwatt navigation skills were better. The gorse is taking over around the cache making it uncomfortable to get in to find. Thanks for the placement DOCGreymouth.

Yep coordinates were a bit out, but found the likely spot - log slightly damp - TFTC

Coordinates were out a few metres but narrowed it down to a likely spot. Unfortunately the log was sodden. Enjoyed taking a stroll around the area. TFTC.

Wet az! So glad I bought waterproof paper to carry with me. Tftc

A nice quick find thanks. The log book was very wet, and unwriteable so we put in a slip of waterproof paper. Cheers.

Ms_KR and I are off on a wee jaunt to the West Coast, to "climb another mountain". Today we went home. Very moody on the west coast, a bit drizzly, a bit sunny. Good to get home though.

Thanks to all CO's for publishing and maintaining their caches. Cheers.

Log and container saturated, sorry have no replacement logs with me. TFTC

Took a while to spot the hint item. Good sized container too. Many thanks. #6610

To wet to sign. Nice walk

nice quick find, TFTC

Nice quick find on a very interesting short walk thanks for getting me out and about. Cheers

I enjoyed this walk and exploring the area. A bonus there were a couple of caches along the way! This one took me longer than it should have!! Thanks for the hide.

Container wet. Tried to dry it out. Lovely spot

Cool!

No worries here, quite a few ducks down there enjoying themselves. Cheers

Had a great drive around the block today Greymouth, Reefton, Westport plus a few side roads, a bit of rain, many thanks to all the cache placer's. Thanks Bitsprayer

What a lovely area and a nice walk along the track thanks fir the hint made it a very quick find tftc and bringing me yuk st area I probably would of never thought of going to or existed. Tftc

Nice hot fine day. Tftc

10.50: Nice and interesting walk to Colls Dam, but not as accessible as promised! No cache to spot, we only found an empty mount where it could have been hidden[?] But as there was a find meanwhile, maybe we were just wrong and did not search thoroughly enough...[|)]

Anyway, thank you for bringing us here!
Oliver+Gabi

End of the day leg stretch with SJT_NZ, there were a few people on the trail and cache waz an easy find but with muggles coming I was in a rush to get it back, failed dismally. Muffled by an 8 year old out walking with family. His parents had heard of caching, left him sitting on the cache.

In the area with Tregearp for the nearby power trail and so grabbed this one too.

All in good order - signed log and replaced as found.

Thanks DOC Greymouth for the cache .

Spent a very cold night in the tent here. Did the walk to allow the tent to defrost

Nice Bush and neat mining works. Tftc

Beautiful setting. Great find. Thank you

Out doing the power with Tufty. He did all the driving and I did all the real work.[^] Thanks for the cache gracie7 +Mum. Sorry for all the cut & pastes.

I was out with my big brother, BaldEd, today picking quite a few caches in the "Know When to Hold'em series plus a couple of extras.

This was another of the extras. I enjoyed the walk to the dam and was amazed at the narrowness of the water race ditches, who were the skinny men who dug these?

Cheers for the cache.

Excellent, lots of bees or wasps humming about

A fantastic spot, glad to see that DOC has placed a cache here to entice more visitors. This gets a FP from me for the location. TFTC

Out fungi hunting great track

We approached via the swingbridge. What an awesome place! Thanks for bringing us here .

Lovely walk in the cool of the day. A very interesting place and walk. TFTC

Found this one while on a holiday from our home in Whangamata. TFTC

Well worth the side trip for an interesting walk and to hear the bird song. Thanks DOC for the cache.

Found quickly after a lovely little walk. What a beautiful area. TFTC.

We have never been in here before although we have Camped at Nelson Creek years ago..Nice spot to sit for awhile.TFTH

We've been planning a five day camping trip to Nelson Creek for a while now. We haven't been brave enough to try the full on family camping until now, with a 5 year old and 2 year old it was a busy few days, but lots of fun too.

I was surprised to see so few caches in the area, but while we were here we wanted to stop by and grab this cache - it just turned out to be our 1000th find as well!

It was a drizzly morning when we set out, and it didn't take long to get near to GZ, but along the way still 30m from the co-ordinates we saw the container in plain sight from the track just at the junction down to view the dam or further on to see the dam from the lookout. Because it was so easy to see it only took seconds to grab, but it was clear from the co-ordinates and the hint that this way way off where it should've been. The last log had some rather distasteful comments written in it by a muggle, who we figured must've relocated the cache as well. After signing the log we returned the cache to the indicated GZ on our Garmin Oregon 450 GPSr.

Signed our 1000th log on 27 December 2016 08:08:00

Out in the open on the path?

A lovely early morning walk. Tftc

Lovely spot for a cache, left some trinkets behind! Thanks p.s. Selfie keyring has expired.

Cache is cleaned up and operational

Restocking prizes and doing maintenance

We are traveling around New Zealand. We are so glad that we can discover this beautiful country. We enjoy it so much. This cache was found during our travel.

Thank you. Greetings from Czech Republic

#1477 9:10

Found with no problem, very nice surroundings. What a wonderful place!

Thank you for the cache and greetings from two Czechs!

OUT: TB

Came here years ago as I was tracing the family history so it is great to be back tftc

This is what caching is all about.
A beautiful evening, a good walk in and the opportunity to enjoy the bush.
Thanks
erninz

I was fortunate enough to be able to squeeze an 11 day holiday out of two leave days!! I headed out west to find some caches, see some sights, and relax before the madness of the semester hits. The weather was unbelievably good, only a bit of a storm over Arthur's Pass on the first day, otherwise hot and sunny. I found a great variety of caches, drive by's, walks, hikes, even a power trail. Thank you to all the CO's for their great hides!!!
Today was to be a big day, and it started early, too. I was out on the road with the break of dawn, aiming to get a few, and a couple more The main plan was to attack the cards, but I managed to get in a good variety today! A total of 75/76, including some long forgotten ones also. What a lovely relaxing spot here, no one around in spite of it being a Saturday! TFTC!!!

GPS is a little bit offf - thanks for the hint. thanks for the cache. In: tb

Started the day with a warmup walk to Colls Dam, found the cache and finished the loop track back to car where we put the bikes together to do some cycle caching.

That's a really awesome one!!

Found it. Nice hint

Awesome spot

For the last 4 years Mum and I have always found a cache on the last and first day of the year, but thats getting harder to do now that we have found everything close to home and now we have to find the time to travel to find a cache. So its nice when a few like these pop up for an emergency cache day (but its hard to resist grabbing the FTF) Spurred on by the promise of some bling today we decided to combine our last cache of the year with some maintenance on the card trail. A nice easy little walk that neither of us had done before. Just as we got to GZ their was a trio of teenagers yelling across the water to someone else on the other side. We were waiting for them to move on but after they yelled their intentions to stay here for the other person to catch up we were about to introduce them to geocaching and then they moved on. We quickly found and signed the cache before they returned. Dropped in 2 small TBs and replaced the cache unseen. Thanks for the cache Goodbye 2015!!

Nice to have one of these that is located at such a lovely scenic spot

Another great find touring around the South Island while making my way to the Mega. Thanks for adding to the enjoyment of this trip.

Enjoyed the nice walk to GZ.

SL TFTC

Nice cache in great location.
We have done all the walks here a couple of times os today was cache and dash.
Several other visits yet to be logged on line.
Thanks heaps DOC Grey

FTF with Hazedarus. We had driven down to Reefton to meet family at the end of the school holidays and decided we had time to come on down here to look for this cache too. We are frequent travellers between Nelson and Lake Brunner but have never stopped here to do these walks. We will definitely be back, with other family members to encourage them to enjoy these areas as much as we do. We were pleasantly surprised to find we could drive as far as we did before starting the walk too. Thank you DOCGreymouth for bringing us here and for placing this cache.

FTF With Holymu and grandson. At both start and finish of the school holidays you can find us anywhere between Nelson and the Coast shuttling grand children. With enough time on hand Colls Dam was a welcome distraction. It's been forever on our list to investigate the Nelson Creek area but for whatever reason always went past vowing: "next time". Today we made a sizable detour for it with plenty of reward. Not only will we be back but we'll stay a night or so! Well done DOC! Thank you for placing this cache.

Published