Flood Gauge

Every time we went south from Nelson (where I lived as a teenager), we had to stop so Mum could look at this rock in the Buller river just south of Murchison. It had special meaning for her, and for that reason it's come to have meanings for me too.

One of those meanings is as a flood gauge. If this much is showing then the river is at a pretty comfortable level. I hate to think how deep the river actually is here or how big the rock actually is, but it withstands a fair froce of water even in the driest of times so it's got to have pretty massive roots. Throughout summer more and more of it will show, but when the river's in flood, you can judge how bad the flood is by how little of the rock is above water.