Home Creek Walkway
Manapouri · Southland
This walk was suggested by the community and checked against the authority quoted above before it was published. The route line comes from official track data. The Waiau Trust’s own wording: “Do not allow your dog to wander; better kept in your car until you are at the destination”. Evidence: the rule-setter’s own published wording. How we check dog rules.
Good to know
Dogs are allowed here. Keep them on the lead, watch for ground-nesting birds and stock, and read the signs at the gate.
About Home Creek Walkway
Home Creek Walkway is a short walk of 1.5 km, near Manapouri in Southland.
An easy 1.5 km loop around a wetland about a kilometre east of Manapouri, on a sign posted public road off the Manapouri-Hillside Road. The road ends at a car park and the track starts there, running a flat ring through boardwalk and rank riparian growth with a footbridge over the creek. Home Creek itself is a slow meandering stream out of the Kepler Mire that drains to the Waiau Arm of Lake Manapouri, and it holds long finned eel, non migratory galaxiids, upland bully and brown trout. Half an hour at a dog's pace, and nothing about it is hard going. There is no dog sign at the trailhead, which is what sent this walk to us in the first place, and the reason is that nobody official sets the rule here. Home Creek is private land. The Waiau Fisheries and Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Trust fenced and protected 14 hectares of the stream and its margins in 1997, took the grazing animals off, poisoned the crack willow and built this circular track, which it calls 1.6 km and we measure at 1.5 km on the line, and it is the Trust you are a guest of when you walk it. So the Trust is the one who decides about dogs, and it has published what it asks. Its Access projects page, which lists Home Creek by name, says not to let your dog wander and that it is better kept in the car until you are at the destination. Read plainly that is dogs welcome, under close control, and we have set the walk to on lead on that basis. The same page asks two other things worth honouring: leave gates as you found them, and keep the place tidy. It is worth doing properly rather than grudgingly. This is a restoration site with young native plantings coming away, waterfowl in small numbers, and bush birds moving in from Fiordland National Park next door. A dog on a lead costs you nothing here and it is the whole reason the Trust can keep the gate open to the rest of us.
Expect easy going, with around 13 m of climb, and takes about 19 min to walk.
Dogs are allowed here, on the lead. This walk is on the map because Daniel & Zola suggested it, and we checked it against the source above.
