Scenery Nook is a wee inlet on the far side of Banks Peninsula. It’s accessible by boat or across private land – as the CTC unfortunately doesn’t own a yacht just yet, we chose to approach on foot.
There were 42 of us, or perhaps even more, nobody knows anymore. First we went up to Lucas Peak from where we could see the beautiful blue ocean and grassy sides of the local hills. We got down to the ocean front via Rocky Gully which was steep in places and – wait for it – quite rocky. A decent break followed by the inlet. Alan took the opportunity to show us what was in his backpack (I think he just wanted to show off his shiny polypro long johns really), everybody took about ten gigabytes of photos and off we went to climb a steep hillside of the inlet cliffs.
We reached the cars about 4 hours after we left them. The trade off seems to be a bit extreme (4 hours drive, 4 hours walk) but this part of the peninsula is extremely beautiful and I’m sure that everybody agreed that it was worth it.
Rough stats: 8 km, 400m up
Tramped on 16th January 2020
Participants: Mike Newlove (leader), Michal Klajban (scribe, photos), Jenny Harris, Tina Guan, Sheryle Wootton, Elena San Claudio, Penny Coffey, Evie Anderson, Roxanne Brassington, Manpreet (Mani) Singh, Belinda Hamlin, Trudi Cameron, Nathan Curtis, Harpreet Kaur, Geoff Titmuss, Erik Norder, Ben Dodson, Caleb Murdoch, Grant Scull, Murray Gifford, Harish Mandalika, Vahid Loghman, Anthony Clark, Alan Ross, Alla Joutovsky, Warwick Dowling, Joanne Thompson, Nathan Bown, Braidie Bown, Josh Pearson, Barry Watson, Adrian Harvey, Byron Harvery, Hayley Dauben, Helene Styles, Alison Cairns, Olivia Lin, Tina Morrell, Hsieh shu-chuan, Kaveh Mazloomi, Tomyu Hu, Zivanah Keen
Max elevation: 372 m
Min elevation: 11 m
Hi – I’m interested in trying this route. Are there any access issues given it requires crossing of private land? Thanks
Hi Graeme. You need a permission from a local farmer to cross his land. Even the access road is private. I’ve heard that the owners decided not to give permissions unfortunately as there were some access issuess, perhaps people crossing the land without permissions…