Field Trip

Antarctic Centre

May 9, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

In early March, we had the chance to go to the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch with the homeschool group we used to be part of. One of the moms from the group organized special rates for us. Gayle and I took the youngest five children and had a fun tour.

We started with a Hagglund ride. Miss Joy is too young to go on this ride, so Gayle took care of her while I went with the other children. About ten years ago when we went the other time, I stayed back from the Hagglund with the current baby, so this time I enjoyed getting to experience it.

Here are two of the other Hagglunds. They are used for exploration in Antarctica, and can go over incredibly rough terrain. They are watertight and very strong!

This was one of the obstacles we went over on the 15-minute ride. It was a very steep hill.

This is the other Hagglund that took part of our group.

We drove over these logs. They are intended to represent broken-up sea ice.

This was another very steep hill, with large boulders in the water at the bottom.

The other Hagglund going through the water.

Just before we went into the 4D theater, Gayle had the children pose here.

This was the highlight of the day for some of the children—the cold room! It is kept below freezing, and then they started a storm. The wind whipped up, and the temperature stopped dropping. It got down to about 0°F for a few minutes.

Field Trip! Echo Coal Mine

October 26, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We rarely take a field trip, but a local woman who recently began homeschooling her son organized a trip to the Echo Coal Mine, just north of Reefton, this month. The mine manager (her brother) gave us a fascinating peek into the running of an open-cast coal mine. We all very much enjoyed it, and learned a lot!

Because there were so many in our group, we were divided into two tours. Our family waited in Reefton with some friends while the first tour happened. We spent some time in the museum part of the local I-site (information center), and then walked out of town a little way to the swing bridge over the Inangahua River before eating our lunch. You can see from these photos that we had a beautiful, sunny day.

After we ate lunch, we drove up to the road that goes into the mine. We found this shed, and parked beside it to wait for the first tour to return. A truck went past, hauling coal down from the mine to the railroad, and someone who was near the shed heard the driver inform the manager, via radio, that there were people at the red shed. He replied that he knew about it; they were waiting for a tour.

Soon, the first group came back down, and it was our turn. We reorganized a bit so we didn’t have to take so many vehicles up; two of our boys rode with the manager in his ute, and we followed him up the road into the mine.

We noticed these signs along the way, along with several others:

Soon, we reached the top of the road and saw evidence of mining.

When we came to a stop in front of the office, we looked out over the processing area. The coal is brought in here. After it is dumped out of the trucks, it goes through the sorter. The large pieces are used for heating buildings, mainly, or processing milk powder. The dust, which, if I remember right, comprises about 80% of the end product, mainly goes to Japan, where it is made into such items as silicon chips for cell phones and computers, or turned into carbon fibre for bicycles and dialysis machines, among many other uses. He rattled off so many things I couldn’t remember them all!

We went into the office next, for a slideshow of the history of the mine, and photos of scenes from the past 12 years or so. The rock layers they have uncovered are amazing! So is the view from his office…rough life, to have to work in a place with a view like this, isn’t it!

Our next stop was to see what the mine is doing to rehabilitate the area after mining it. All the tailings are dumped in mountains, and reshaped similarly to the natural mountains. Then, the mine has a local helicopter company seed the slopes with lotus grass (actually a legume) that grows in the rocks and fixes nitrogen in what little soil there is. A year later, they plant native trees among the grass. Our guide also pointed out the smoke from a mine that caught fire in the 1960s and has been burning ever since. DOC (the Department of Conservation) now owns it, but won’t do anything about putting out the fire. It burns 20-30,000 tons of coal a year, if we understood correctly.

The area just below Mr. Imagination was seeded this year; the very green area next back was seeded a year ago, and we saw people, just around the hill from there, planting trees.

If you look very closely at this next photo, just below the left of the center, you can make out an orange digger and a yellow bulldozer. We visited those several minutes later, as you’ll see below.

Finally, we got to see the mine itself! These photos don’t come anywhere near showing the magnitude of this pit. It is huge! Can you pick out the digger and dump truck just left of center? The red dot over the middle of the pond at the bottom is a ute (pickup truck), and down a little from that, right of it, is a smaller, blue digger sitting on a coal seam. And look at those layers! We discussed later how they must have formed during the Flood, as sediment washed in on tidal waves, covering mats of trees and other plant material, followed by more layers… and then, while it was still soft and wet, seismic activity folded the layers. So amazing!

Our guide told us why the water in the pond has such a beautiful color. It has a pH of about 3.2. Iron sulfites leach into the water from the mine, creating sulferic acid. They have to neutralize that before letting the water go back into the environment. At first, they treated it with lime, but then discovered that mussel shells work even better, for much less cost! In fact, when Esther took the video below, she caught part of that discussion!We went from the mine to the dumping spot, to watch a load of dirt and rocks be dumped. Little Miss found this quartz rock and wanted me to take a picture of it. In the video you can see the truck being loaded, and then the same truck dumping. The bulldozer is there all day, smoothing off the area, building the “wall” around the edge to keep trucks from going over, and being there in case a truck would back up too far, to pull it out. It didn’t sound like that has happened much, if at all, though.

Here are a few of the big machines we saw around the mine area:

This machine is used for drilling holes to place explosives.

Our last stop was down at the bottom of the area they are rehabilitating right now. This is a close-up of some of the lotus grass. This area has been growing for a number of years, and there are several inches of rich-looking soil there now on top of what used to be bare rocks.

The run-off from the mine is piped into this pond, through a filter of mussel shells. That cleans it so it can go down the river.

A view from the bottom of some of the areas they have replanted.

The middle level in the left part of the picture is where we saw the load of dirt being dumped.

Here, the children got to climb on a digger and a bulldozer. They enjoyed that opportunity! This is a 75-ton dozer; we didn’t catch the size of the digger. It’s enormous, though!After we followed our guide out of the mine, we asked about these fords we noticed beside the bridges. They are for the heaviest machinery to go through—anything over 40 tons or so.

Brunner Mine

December 28, 2018 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Every time we go to town, we pass the Brunner Mine memorial. We’ve been wanting to stop there ever since we moved in February, but never took the time until a few weeks ago. We read a book titled The Mine’s Afire a few months ago in preparation; it tells the story of the explosion that claimed the lives of 65 miners in the Brunner Mine in 1896. Reading that story made our tour of the mine site much more meaningful.

First, we saw the shaft of the Tyneside Mine, on our side of the river.

This is where the mine actually went down.

A nice walking track has been formed from the carpark at the Tyneside Mine down to the footbridge over the Grey River.

I don’t know what this structure was, but it was interesting!

The return airway of the Brunner Mine. They had to have a very good ventilation system for the mine, but even that wasn’t enough to prevent the tragedy.

This was ruins of the brickworks that was part of the mine complex.

This wheel was used for crushing the fire clay that was used to make fire bricks.

The clay came out of this mine.

A huge roof covers the remains of the beehive coke ovens. These ovens were packed full of coal, which was then burned for a couple of days with no or minimal air to remove impurities. Then, it was quickly cooled with water and pulled out to be sold as coke.

There are piles of bricks on both sides of the shed. I’m guessing these are the bricks that were used to close the doors of the ovens when they were making coke.

Looking across the river from the Brunner site. It’s hard to believe now that this was the biggest town on the Coast at one time!

We saw this dragonfly resting on the ground.

The entire Brunner site from the Tyneside side.

From the mine, we went up the road a couple of mile to the cemetery at Stillwater. This is where a large percentage of the miners who died in the 1896 explosion were buried. We were fascinated with the old graves.

The white fence surrounds the mass grave where 33 miners were buried together, many burned so badly as to be unrecognizable. It was very sobering to visit this place where so many people mourned at once on that day. Having read the book we did, we could understand better what it was like for them; the book was narrated by the fictitious son of a survivor, whose best friends had lost fathers or brothers.

Jet Boat Race

November 3, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Thursday morning, a friend called to tell us that there was a jet boat race happening on the Grey River, and the boats would finish at the bridge over the Ahaura River just down the hill from us. She gave us the times they would be taking off on each of their three trips up and down the river, and sure enough, we soon heard the first round arriving. The second round started arriving shortly before lunch, so we took off down to the river to watch. We were a couple hundred meters past the finish line, so they were slowing down, but we enjoyed watching them shoot under the bridges and stop just upstream from us.

After all the boats had arrived here, we walked down stream to wait for them to take off again. When we reached the finish/start line, we learned that it would be another 20 minutes, so we went farther and found a good spot to settle down right at the water’s edge. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the river bottom was so lovely, with bright yellow gorse and broom flowers all over. Yes, those shrubs are a terrible nuisance, but this time of year they are gorgeous!

Once the race started again, we enjoyed watching 19 boats go past. They left about a minute apart, and we could see the spray going up behind them for about 30-45 seconds, for maybe a mile around a couple of bends in the Grey River.

I tried to get a video to show the speed, and did get a few seconds—but then the batteries in my camera died.

Here are the few seconds of video I got.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFYM_GUcf28&w=560&h=315]
And there you have it–our impromptu field trip this week!

Chautona Havig’s free Kindle book this week is 31 Kisses. I enjoyed it, but didn’t write a review; it’s kind of a “fluffy” book—not a lot to it. It’s just clean, fun romance.

Waiuta

October 13, 2018 by NZ Filbruns 3 Comments

Last Sunday, because several people had colds, we didn’t go anywhere for church. Instead, we had a meeting at home (minus Gayle, because he’s in America spending a little time with his mother), and then packed a picnic lunch and headed off on an adventure that turned into a field trip! You know, that’s a disadvantage of being homeschooled. You never get a day off. Or, maybe it’s an advantage—depends on your perspective!

We decided to go explore Waiuta, where there use to be a gold mine. Gold-bearing quartz was discovered on this site in 1905, and at the peak there were 500 people living in the village that grew up around the Blackwater Shaft. In 1951, however, the shaft collapsed, according to a sign at the historical site, and within three months only 20 people were left. A year later, practically all the houses were gone, dismantled to be rebuilt elsewhere. We found it quite fascinating to wander around, studying the various posters that have been put up around the area, and the ruins that are left, trying to imagine the place in its heyday.

This is the road that goes out to Waiuta. First, you travel through open farmland in a valley.

You pass the old Blackwater School, in use from 1913 to 1949, according to the sign above the door.

Then, you drive through thick bush for awhile. A lot of places, it was thicker than this photo shows, with the trees meeting overhead.

We wondered if this trough was for watering horses back in the day?

At last, you come out in the open, and you have reached Waiuta. The building here was the carpenter’s shop for the mine; the smokestack had something to do with running the mine. Possibly steam power for raising and lowering men and rocks from the shaft, which was just to the right of this picture?

There are a lot of non-native plants around, left to go wild from the gardens the miners and their families had. This flowering currant was loaded with blossoms and humming with bees. Simon wants to go back in December and see if there is any fruit on it!

We followed this trail to the old swimming pool.

The swimming pool was about 36 meters long, according to my boys who stepped it off. The other end was quite deep.

Back to the mine site. This machine was used to crush the quartz so the gold could be extracted.

Part of the foundations of the building.

The old mine shaft.

Inside the chimney. Simon noticed that the bricks are stamped Brunner. One of our next field trips will be to the Brunner Mine site, between us and Greymouth. They also had brick kilns there, besides the coal mine.

I think this was the boiler room.

These bushes were in bloom. I don’t know what they were, but the scent was amazing!

Walking back up to the mine from the area where many of the miner’s houses were. The piles of rocks are tailings from the mine. The area on top has been smoothed and planted in grass. We ate lunch at the edge of the bowling green. It is amazingly flat, with very lush grass.

I took this picture to help us find our way around.

After we had explored the main area, we drove up the mountain to the Prohibition Mine. This was connected with the mine in the first area we explored, deep underground. From up here, it was 879.5 meters, or about half a mile, to the lowest level of the mine. The sign said that was below sea level! Men were lowered in a cage, and the quartz was brought back up the same way. It took four minutes to raise or lower the men, but the quartz was moved in half that time.

This was the mine office. Someone has cut a hole in the door of the strong room, and my little ones crawled in.

The view across the Grey Valley from the Prohibition Mine was incredible!

This is what is left of the building in which they extracted the gold. It was built between 1937-39, and I presume it was only in operation until 1951, when the mine closed.

This turned out to be a great way to spend an afternoon when we couldn’t be with other people! It was a beautiful day, and a very interesting site. And, I didn’t know she was doing it, but Esther published a post today about this trip, as well. You can see her pictures here.

MacKintosh Beach

May 17, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One Tuesday in April, our homeschool group went out to MacKintosh Beach, near Amberley, for a picnic and to explore after reading the stories the children wrote, which gives us our excuse for getting together. We had never been out there before, so we enjoyed the spectacular scenery. Even though it drizzled a bit, it was a fun afternoon!

Tonight’s Field Trip

December 19, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had an impromptu field trip this evening. We had just finished supper when we heard a helicopter quite close. A couple of children who were outside came in shouting that the Westpac Helicopter, the medical transport helicopter, was circling us, and then it obviously landed across the road in the rugby field. There is a thick hedge between us and the field, so everyone immediately took off running to see what they could see. I followed more slowly a little later, and found a gate to go through to where I could see. Gayle and the children stayed, beside the road, to watch until the helicopter took off; I just stayed a few minutes then came back. We don’t know what was wrong, but they said it looked like someone was injured. They were being transported to Christchurch.

A Field Trip–On Sunday?!

April 17, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I’ll try again with this one, too; it is one that vanished in the past week. Rather frustrating!

This story really starts back in January. We were on our way south and passed a big yellow railroad track fixing machine. We’ve seen those a lot of times, since we drive along the railway so much (it parallels Highway 1, which is the main highway on this island and we drive on it practically every time we go anywhere; the railway is visible from the highway probably half the distance from Christchurch to Kaikoura). That day, my 8-year-old asked me how those machines work. I told him I didn’t know, but that if we saw one sometime that was at a place we could pull off, and if there were workmen there who seemed to have time to talk, and if we had extra time, we would stop and ask. Well, one Sunday morning soon after we moved, all those things came together. As we were driving to church, we reached the coast after coming down out of the hills, and approached the first tunnel that the highway goes through. Ahead on the other side of the tunnel, we saw one of those track-fixing machines, and I told Gayle what I had told our son. As we came out of the tunnel, we saw that the machine was right at the end of a short passing lane, with a pull-off right there beside it, and there were two men standing behind it on the track, talking; one was obviously the operator of the machine! We had a rare extra 15 minutes, so Gayle pulled off and asked the man if he would tell us how it worked. Sure, he was glad to! He explained it all, and then took us up into the cab to show us the computerized controls. That machine clamped onto the rails and pulled them in or pushed them out to make them exactly the right distance apart. There were two or three other machines that traveled in a unit with that one, which did other jobs, leveling the track and I’m not sure what else, but they were ahead, through another tunnel. We thanked him and went back to the van as he started moving ahead again. When he came out of the next tunnel, we got to watch as they coupled that machine to the next one. What a great field trip! It was especially meaningful to me because a man in the church I grew up in, someone I knew all my life and who died just about six months ago, had spent a lot of his life building that type of machines. He didn’t build this one; it’s Austrian-built; but it was the same basic idea.

Field Trip

September 16, 2012 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

WARNING! If you are squeamish you may want to skip this post!

We actually took a field trip last week! We don’t often do that, but Gayle organized a tour for us of the place he works. It is a small meatworks, although the largest employer in the district. They process cattle, sheep and pigs, doing everything from slaughter to sausages, hams and bacons. We found the tour very interesting! Our children have grown up butchering and were totally fascinated.

Sheep carcasses