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An old walking diary
Apr. 3rd, 2022 04:36 pmWhile sorting my thoroughly chaotic Dropbox folder (why does the folder 'Jack' contain the folder 'JackActual'? Why are all my school documents nested within both of those while my university documents are in neither? Where has the wizard gone?) I came upon the unfinished writeup of my tramping trip last January. Here it is, for the sake of memory.
The Department of Conservation maintains a number of Great Walks, keeping the trails clear and staffing the huts with rangers. A few months after New Zealand's borders closed last year, my aunt booked places on the Kepler and the Routeburn.
I love the unfolding stages of each day's walk, as you come round a bend and get a view of your next hour and a half, and the interesting question of what's going to be round the next crag after that.
Our first hut ranger told us about the local kea – how she once had a group trapping them to put identification bands on the legs, and has personally named two newly-identified kea, one after herself, the other, Aragorn. She also took a dark glee in narrating to us exactly what she and her trainee have to do to the sewerage system every time a tramper flushes wet wipes into it, thus making sure we'd all be on our best behavior in the huts to come. And she had us all singing a song she'd written about a rare duck being hunted by a stoat, inviting us all to join in as its racing heart for the chorus: 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.' Some people at the next table over who'd had a few beers were still repeating 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom' some time after the song had finished. She's working on another song about the last two stoats in New Zealand facing the ranger who intends to execute them. My aunt told us we shouldn't expect all hut talks to be so charismatically delivered – or all huts to offer such privacy of bunk nooks, come to that.
Next day we walked the alpine part of the track, on boardwalks over sensitive bits of wetland, up onto scree slopes, where I felt acutely that my heavy tramping pack and I could become a sausage rolling helplessly downhill if I took two steps to the right. The lake which I'd thought quite small extended a whole new arm beside us, and we got a view of the mountains beyond mountains which make up Fiordland: not all of them visited, many still not named but only numbered. The path went around a U-shaped ridgeline, dropped interminably (it was the end of a long day) through trees to the next hut, in the Iris Burn valley, amid Jurassic quantities of ferns and a couple of vampires' worth of biting sandflies.* The branches of beech trees showed pale in the dark foliage. There was an exhilaratingly freezing stream to swim in, fresh from midsummer snowmelt, and a waterfall to walk to in the evening, with the sun angled to set all the greens of the undergrowth burning. The ranger that night got everyone up and doing stretches, which I was tired enough to resent but was grateful for afterwards; her demeanor was, “This is the last day of my shift and I am so done with this,” but in a pleasant sort of way.
The next day was a comparatively gentle walk out along the river to the last hut; I spent it feeling completely drained, and it was almost a relief to discover that it wasn't because I'd burned through all my walking fitness, but because I'd caught a cold. (Not a relief for the several members of my family who then caught it too). The last hut was by Lake Manapouri, and its ranger said at the start that he'd give his hut talk to anyone who wanted to hear it, but it was about an hour long, so he wanted a show of hands to see if anyone was interested, and we were all free to leave at any time – before getting out a map of the region and telling a long, discursive, riveting story about the building of the hydroelectric plant and the campaign to prevent the lake being raised twenty meters – which would have increased the lake's effectiveness as a battery, while also drowning all the trees we'd spent that day walking under. He'd been in the area for a long time, and had an amateur historian's enthusiasm: he scarcely mentioned a location without adding, “which my son and I visited a few years back,” and scarcely mentioned a local character without saying, “who I chatted with about it one time.”
That last night, unlike the other equally crowded nights, I couldn't sleep, getting very slowly up from my top bunk in the dark, creak by creak, and out into the unlit dining hall, where I read The Body Keeps the Score for two hours by torchlight.
--
Two days later we were driven up a glacial valley on a bus, the steep bushy arms of old avalanches occasionally spilling out across across the thin soil of the dead flat grassy base, and we walked the Routeburn, a track which suffers in the wintertime, and which was being repaired as we walked it by a crew who occasionally, we were warned, used explosives. Once we heard them boom, far in the distance behind us. We hurried rapidly by most of the best views of the mountains, on the first day, because they were all signposted with 'danger: slip zone, do not stop.' Our hut that day was on a green lake edged with mist, a lake that rises and falls to encompass and release all the jumble of boulders which, during our stay, lay between it and the foot of the hut. That ranger told us the very-familiar story of invasive mammals in New Zealand – do any New Zealand children not get raised on this? – but he told it with love, and worked up to asking us all for donations to his trapping efforts in perhaps the most endearing way possible: by simply telling us that every bit of birdsong we'd heard during the day's walk was a result of the initiative he began, when DoC wouldn't give him funding and he bootstrapped his way from six local stoat traps all the way up to thousands.
The next day we tacked up over the ridge, looking back down on the green lake, up onto the top of the ridge and then around the point of it to look down on the next valley over and walk back against the heights.
*The Goddess Hine-nui-te-po created the sandfly in response to another god's too-perfect craftsmanship of Milford Sound, to make sure people wouldn't settle down there. The versions I find on a rapid google describe this as a spiteful act – Hine-nui-te-po is the goddess of death – but in our hut ranger's version, it was helpful: no one who sat down in front of that view would ever have wanted to stand up again otherwise.
The Department of Conservation maintains a number of Great Walks, keeping the trails clear and staffing the huts with rangers. A few months after New Zealand's borders closed last year, my aunt booked places on the Kepler and the Routeburn.
I love the unfolding stages of each day's walk, as you come round a bend and get a view of your next hour and a half, and the interesting question of what's going to be round the next crag after that.
Our first hut ranger told us about the local kea – how she once had a group trapping them to put identification bands on the legs, and has personally named two newly-identified kea, one after herself, the other, Aragorn. She also took a dark glee in narrating to us exactly what she and her trainee have to do to the sewerage system every time a tramper flushes wet wipes into it, thus making sure we'd all be on our best behavior in the huts to come. And she had us all singing a song she'd written about a rare duck being hunted by a stoat, inviting us all to join in as its racing heart for the chorus: 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.' Some people at the next table over who'd had a few beers were still repeating 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom' some time after the song had finished. She's working on another song about the last two stoats in New Zealand facing the ranger who intends to execute them. My aunt told us we shouldn't expect all hut talks to be so charismatically delivered – or all huts to offer such privacy of bunk nooks, come to that.
Next day we walked the alpine part of the track, on boardwalks over sensitive bits of wetland, up onto scree slopes, where I felt acutely that my heavy tramping pack and I could become a sausage rolling helplessly downhill if I took two steps to the right. The lake which I'd thought quite small extended a whole new arm beside us, and we got a view of the mountains beyond mountains which make up Fiordland: not all of them visited, many still not named but only numbered. The path went around a U-shaped ridgeline, dropped interminably (it was the end of a long day) through trees to the next hut, in the Iris Burn valley, amid Jurassic quantities of ferns and a couple of vampires' worth of biting sandflies.* The branches of beech trees showed pale in the dark foliage. There was an exhilaratingly freezing stream to swim in, fresh from midsummer snowmelt, and a waterfall to walk to in the evening, with the sun angled to set all the greens of the undergrowth burning. The ranger that night got everyone up and doing stretches, which I was tired enough to resent but was grateful for afterwards; her demeanor was, “This is the last day of my shift and I am so done with this,” but in a pleasant sort of way.
The next day was a comparatively gentle walk out along the river to the last hut; I spent it feeling completely drained, and it was almost a relief to discover that it wasn't because I'd burned through all my walking fitness, but because I'd caught a cold. (Not a relief for the several members of my family who then caught it too). The last hut was by Lake Manapouri, and its ranger said at the start that he'd give his hut talk to anyone who wanted to hear it, but it was about an hour long, so he wanted a show of hands to see if anyone was interested, and we were all free to leave at any time – before getting out a map of the region and telling a long, discursive, riveting story about the building of the hydroelectric plant and the campaign to prevent the lake being raised twenty meters – which would have increased the lake's effectiveness as a battery, while also drowning all the trees we'd spent that day walking under. He'd been in the area for a long time, and had an amateur historian's enthusiasm: he scarcely mentioned a location without adding, “which my son and I visited a few years back,” and scarcely mentioned a local character without saying, “who I chatted with about it one time.”
That last night, unlike the other equally crowded nights, I couldn't sleep, getting very slowly up from my top bunk in the dark, creak by creak, and out into the unlit dining hall, where I read The Body Keeps the Score for two hours by torchlight.
--
Two days later we were driven up a glacial valley on a bus, the steep bushy arms of old avalanches occasionally spilling out across across the thin soil of the dead flat grassy base, and we walked the Routeburn, a track which suffers in the wintertime, and which was being repaired as we walked it by a crew who occasionally, we were warned, used explosives. Once we heard them boom, far in the distance behind us. We hurried rapidly by most of the best views of the mountains, on the first day, because they were all signposted with 'danger: slip zone, do not stop.' Our hut that day was on a green lake edged with mist, a lake that rises and falls to encompass and release all the jumble of boulders which, during our stay, lay between it and the foot of the hut. That ranger told us the very-familiar story of invasive mammals in New Zealand – do any New Zealand children not get raised on this? – but he told it with love, and worked up to asking us all for donations to his trapping efforts in perhaps the most endearing way possible: by simply telling us that every bit of birdsong we'd heard during the day's walk was a result of the initiative he began, when DoC wouldn't give him funding and he bootstrapped his way from six local stoat traps all the way up to thousands.
The next day we tacked up over the ridge, looking back down on the green lake, up onto the top of the ridge and then around the point of it to look down on the next valley over and walk back against the heights.
*The Goddess Hine-nui-te-po created the sandfly in response to another god's too-perfect craftsmanship of Milford Sound, to make sure people wouldn't settle down there. The versions I find on a rapid google describe this as a spiteful act – Hine-nui-te-po is the goddess of death – but in our hut ranger's version, it was helpful: no one who sat down in front of that view would ever have wanted to stand up again otherwise.
