40m Max drop (2x60m ropes)
9hrs
Public access
A long West Coast adventure canyon. Some very impressive drops and sometimes intimidating whitewater features, but at normal flows nothing is too challenging. Expect to be often downclimbing, swimming, and finding the way through logjams in addition to the 13 pitches.
“After checking out Goat Creek (v3a2*) a couple of months ago, we returned to Haupiri to do the much larger neighbouring canyon, Crane Creek. It’s a 1.5 km long river gorge style canyon, with lots of boulderbashing and logjams, but there are some great features. 10 pitches, with plenty of easy whitewater features, swims and small jumps. The highlight is a 30m pitch, where you finish by traversing behind the waterfall into a narrow channel with lots of flow and spray. It’s another West Coast canyon that makes for a long day, but this one at least has an easyish approach following a marked track. Certainly one we’ll be going back to.” – Christian Miller
First descent, Christian Miller, Amy Burney, Conor Handley, Ben Fletcher, April 2025.
Images and topo courtesy Christian Miller.
Bolting trip – all major pitches now double bolted, topo updated with the changes. This time we took a line following the water on the second 40m drop, rather than abseiling from a tree off to the side. This is now a great feature!
The Jacuzzi is as impressive as ever, but now has a log wedged in the start, which fortunately isn’t much of a hazard at the moment. Bear in mind this may move again. There’s now an option to take a dry line and avoid this feature entirely.
The flows were much lower than last time, making the canyon noticeably less pushy. Unfortunately it’s also quite slippery now, although it didn’t detract from the experience too much.
All the bolts from last year survived, and I’d expect them to be out of reach of most floods. There have definitely been some changes in the canyon though, some fresh logjams, the R7 pool is much shallower, and there are lots of slips lower in the canyon – so expect some changes between every descent.
There are definitely plenty of wasps in the forest on the approach, but we had no stings, it seems to be easy to avoid disturbing them on the track.