Rangituhi Farm Road to the Stock Gate

This moderate-length track follows 2.3 km as a point-to-point, near Porirua in Wellington.

A gravel farm road climbing the eastern face of Rangituhi from the signed reserve entrance on Raiha Street, just up from Camp Elsdon in Porirua, and it is the only ground in these hills where a dog is allowed at all. Porirua City Council puts it in one line: dogs are allowed on leash on the farm road to the stock gate or sign at 2.2kms, and they are not allowed anywhere else in the Rangituhi hill reserves. Read the second half of that sentence as hard as the first, because the gate is the whole walk. It is a hard turnaround, not a soft one, and it does not relax because the hill is empty or because your dog is good. A dog past the stock gate is on prohibited ground twice over. Schedule One of the Dog Control Bylaw 2021, amended October 2023, lists Te Rāhui o Rangituhi under Prohibited Areas with exactly one exception, dogs permitted on leash on the summit road up to the stock gate posts, and lists Porirua Scenic Reserve in the same prohibited list with no exception whatsoever. Past the gate the ground also runs into Rangituhi/Colonial Knob Scenic Reserve, which the Department of Conservation administers and where dogs are not allowed without a permit. So this is not one officer’s line on a map. Step over the gate and you have breached a Porirua bylaw and you are standing on DOC land your dog has no permission to be on. Turn at the gate, walk back the way you came, and call it about 4.6 km return. Two things carry on past the gate and neither of them is a dog walk. The Colonial Knob Walkway leaves the farm road about 35 metres short of the gate and climbs to the Colonial Knob summit through the scenic reserves; OpenStreetMap even carries a dog no tag on it, and the summit is not dog ground under any reading of the bylaw. The farm road itself carries on west as the Te Araroa alignment, and that is the same answer again. If you have walked either of those without a dog and are wondering whether the dog can come next time, the answer stops at the gate. Now the stock, because that gate is doing a job. The council’s reserve record for Te Rāhui o Rangituhi, 107.6 hectares of recreation reserve zoned Rural and previously named Colonial Knob Parklands, lists a Grazing Licence among its leases and licences alongside cellphone tower access agreements and a DOC pathway access agreement. Two of the outcomes the council sets for the reserve are to protect its natural heritage values including developing and ensuring effective stock-proof fencing, and to permit grazing as a means to control gorse and weeds, only in the area west of the stockproof fence built in 2013 and outside of any areas of significant vegetation. We are not going to claim that the 2013 fence and the 2.2 km stock gate are the same structure, because the council does not say so, but the direction is the same: the grazed block is west, uphill, beyond the fence line. Treat the gate as a working stock gate rather than a signpost. Leave it as you find it, keep the lead short, and if you meet stock on the road below it the lead is already the rule here. Expect vehicles too. OpenStreetMap tags this road as private to motor traffic, and the reserve carries a right of way for the utility operators who service the masts on the tops, so a farm ute or a service vehicle on the gravel is normal rather than someone breaking a rule. Elsdon is a listed Urban Area suburb in the same Schedule One, so the lead is on from the moment you shut the car door, not from the reserve gate. One name trap, and it is an easy one to walk into. Rangituhi Park in Takapūwāhia is a different reserve on the harbour side of the hill, and Schedule One lists it as a Dog Exercise Area where dogs may run off the lead. Te Rāhui o Rangituhi, the hill reserve this page covers, sits in the prohibited list. Same word, opposite rule. If someone tells you dogs run off the lead at Rangituhi, they are talking about the park down at Takapūwāhia, not this road. A note on the line drawn here, because the numbers do not agree to the metre and we are not going to pretend they do. It follows the farm road as OpenStreetMap maps it, from the reserve entrance on Raiha Street to the barrier gate node OpenStreetMap records on the road, and that gate measures 2.30 km along against the council’s stated 2.2 km. The council’s own mapped dog corridor stops about 2.17 km along, roughly 130 metres short of that gate. All three sit within a few minutes’ walk of each other and they are all describing the same place, the top of the farm road where the walkway peels off. The gate and the sign on the ground are the boundary, not the end of this line, so stop at the first stock gate you reach and do not go looking for a second one. Last thing, and it is the one most likely to send someone to the wrong hill: this entrance is on Raiha Street, not Broken Hill Road. Broken Hill Road is a separate road branching off Raiha Street further south, and no part of the council’s mapped dog corridor touches it. Park at the Raiha Street entrance where the reserve is signed.

It sits at the moderate end and gains roughly 267 m, and takes about 53 min to walk.

Dogs are allowed here, on the lead.