Blue River Gorge Whitewater Kayaking.

It's not often you get to experience something somewhere new, but that's just what Zack Stones got up to for his first paddle adventure of 2026! 

Paddling the Blue River Gorge.  

Date: 02/01/2026

After New Year's, a few friends and I travelled down to the Haast Pass to explore some lesser paddled rivers.

The Blue Gorge wasn’t on my list going down, but with some recommendations, we found ourselves gearing up in a cold southerly, eyeing up the valley.

The nature of getting to the put-in of The Blue is special. We paddled down the Makarora to the Blue Pools (a well-known tourist destination) before starting the grunt up and over a steep hill. 

The team consisted of my mate Phil, a professional outdoor educator from Hokitika and one of the most impressive river ninjas I know. Safety Sam, an old-school paddler that has paddled The Blue many times and is a very familiar operator in the class 5 environment. And myself. Zack, a kayak guide based on the Waimakariri, that froths boating.

The river started off with a bang, a few rapids down, with an epic cave rapid, paddling under a huge rock.

From there, the river felt nonstop with technical portages, requiring some intimidating seal launches and some gnarly siphons. I really appreciated Sam’s knowledge of the section, often making portages quicker as some weren’t obvious. 

The paddling to portage ratio was probably 50/50.

A couple of highlights were the epic seal launch off a huge rock in the middle of the river and the awesome 3-metre Boof, which was so good, we did a second lap on. (A seal launch is kayaking slang for entering the river by sliding off a rock and into the river... not an actual Seal 🦭).

The run continued to throw challenging portages and questionable rapids at us. The section culminated in a narrow gorge with a must run 2-metre drop with boxed-in walls. Some friends of ours had opened up the gorge for the summer last week and had said to paddle it on the hard left side to avoid a rock. We were able to paddle just close enough to the lip to glance over and confirm the line.

Once past, we floated out into the Blue Pools with tourists taking photos of us, a pretty surreal difference from the inhospitable canyon we had just come down.

From there, we had a cruisey float down a class 2 section of the Makarora River to the car. I vividly remember us silently floating, listening to the birdsong on the side of the river. We jumped out of the river at the end, and Rata had cooked up some delicious wraps for dinner.

Feeling full and tired, I went to sleep satisfied with a special day on the river, having explored a section new to me.

-Zack Stones

If you liked Zack's paddle adventure blog, here's one he wrote on Whitewater Safety (Safety Sam will be proud!): 5 Whitewater Safety Tips For On The River.