Double-Digit Hut Slut

"It sounded like thunder when that house-sized chunk of glacier came crashing down that 1,000 meter drop into the river."

"Hey, we were on top of a mountain this morning! Wait, was that real?"

"Yeah, the grassy river gorge valleys surrounded with snowy mountains is my favorite tramping terrain, too"

We recalled giddy, but exhausted flopping around on the couch reminiscing over a bottle of red wine after Renee and I completed the 5 day, nearly 100 km Rees-Dart + Cascade Saddle track. Renee is an REI alumna friend from back in my Seattle days, and she awesomely and spontaneously bought a plane ticket to New Zealand to come tramping and adventuring with me for a couple of weeks (my friends are pretty rad)!



Decidedly, we concluded that we had just completed the best tramp in all of New Zealand. Everyone we've talked to agrees: even the guy we met who walked the entire 3000 km length of New Zealand over four months on the Te Araroa track. Even the rowdy group of seven Kiwi farmer hut mates who have been tramping New Zealand for decades. I too agree that this is the best tramp in New Zealand and I am now deeming myself to be qualified to make this proclamation having tramped roughly 300 km in the past 6 weeks, having bagged my tenth hut.



Oh, let me explain hut bagging: its a Thing here. Books and magazine articles have been written about it (and often these magazines are distributed to the huts themselves). 

(Excerpt from "Shelter From The Storm" book)

There are an estimated 1,000-1,300 back country wilderness huts in New Zealand (most of which are on the South Island, causing jealousy in the North). They each have a unique history, usually with beginnings as a mining camp, hunters retreat, or cattle trail stop. Most huts are maintained by the Department of Conservation (DOC), the rest are run by tramping clubs and community groups. Like the Mount Brown hut which came to fruition by a community group who wrangled the resources to relocate a defunct hut and build a track to it after years of mishaps along the way (And yes, I've bagged it and P.S. it's on the cover of the coffee table book, Shelter from The Storm: The Story Of New Zealand's Backcountry Huts).



Many huts were built decades ago, some in more recent years. Typically, they are built in a warehouse and then transported by helicopter to be assembled by a ground team on the site. The flashier huts are staffed by full time hut wardens who maintain the nearby sections of trail, give nightly hut talks to trampers (and certain hut wardens gain notoriety among trampers), their particular aura generally contributing to the character of the hut. Smaller, lesser traveled huts are more or less user-maintained with a "take something, leave something" culture whereby patrons gain access to useful items such as toilet paper, frying pans and sometimes even stale, boxed wine if you are lucky.



One of my favorite hut rituals is reading and writing in the intentions book. Theoretically, this is where people write their itineraries and check-in for search and rescue aid purposes should worse come to worse. In reality, they are elaborately doodled-upon guestbooks filled with cheeky commentary from trampers passing the time sans electricity or phone service.



Twice now, I've bagged a hut in which I was the only guest. I loved this. I made those little four bunk huts my home for those nights, going about my business bringing in water from the rooftop rain entrapment tank, chopping wood and gathering kindling for my toasty little fire in the pot bellied stove, making cup after cup of tea and hot chocolate, re-hydrating my food with boiling water, configuring my clothing to reach an optimal amount of the stuff on my body verses in my stuff sack-turned pillow and of course reading the intentions book by headlamp.



Usually, though the huts are packed with other people and their stinky boots, dripping jackets, and air drying socks hanging on every sticky-outy-surface available. Hut mates range from 45 year old women who are former hair dressers on the American base on Antarctica to hungry and cold 18 year old German tourists with cotton sweatshirts, retired 70 year old kiwi couples who've quit mainstream life to live in a camper van and tour around, grisly, lone hunter/fisherman mountain men, the occasional family, and even a solo female "babymoon" tramper in her first trimester. Among this motley crew, there is much mingling (albeit smelly mingling) over the day's challenges from the track which leads into the swapping of personal stories, subtle bragging about other tramps one has completed, and a shared longing for a cold beer at the end of the day.



Typically, there is one tramper in the bunch who doesn't seem to get "hut etiquette", committing such egregious crimes against the unwritten rules as rustling plastic bags in the bunk room at 6 am, failing to move ones mattress to the kitchen if one is a snorer, using a gas cooker without opening the window, drying stinky boots next to the fire (leave them outside, there will be another 30 creek crossings tomorrow, anyways!), etc. But for the most part, anyone intrepid enough to reach the back country carrying a backpack is reasonably quirky and awesome. By the fourth night as 26 of us crammed into a sand fly infested 20 bunk hut, Renee and I imagined that we had collected a sort of Rees-Dart family with the others who had followed our same itinerary. I entertained the loud, silly, raunchy 50 year old kiwi farmer men and women by teaching them The Cup Game. Renee held down the other table playing Texas hold 'em, with high ante bets of rocks in varying sizes to denote currency denominations. We settled into our bunks looking forward to another night of listening to the family of three reading aloud from a book of stories about Mr. Rees himself (of the Rees river from which the track was named). Mr Rees wrote of his misadventures herding sheep along the river in the 1860's before there were swing bridges for the big river crossings. His stories were peppered with 1860's controversial political side notes.




So now I've bagged huts in the double-digits. As a result, I now know that as we all buzz around in our daily life worrying about whatever it is that we worry about, shuffling off to wherever it is that we shuffle off to, there is a startlingly grand amphitheater of glacial mountains just sitting there looking amazing all the time. They've been there (though not at their present height) for 45 million years. Not only this, but these mountains are surrounded by more snow-capped mountains with sheer glacier-carved striated drops plunging into river valleys with a treeline far below. In this place, the scale of everything is to a degree where one cannot fully comprehend even small portion of the view, leaving the viewer to conclude that surely this must not be real because it doesn't make any sense. "These mountains are just HERE all the time?" I kept repeating to myself. Three hours at the saddle of the pass felt like 20 minutes tops, though the progress of the sun reflecting against the white snowy mountains would say otherwise.



Lately, whenever I toss and turn at night, waking just enough to remember my dreams, I find that behind closed lids, I'm looking at orange-pink/yellow sunrises reflecting in tarns. Only the shadow of a single cairn marking out a slight footnote that there is a thing called civilization with other people in it somewhere out there.



I hope the images last. In the meantime, I want to go bag some more huts.

Maybe I'm not an impostor after all

I'll wager that 80-100% of the women reading this will immediately know what I mean when I talk about feeling like an "impostor". For the rest of you, it goes something like this:

When I first started off traveling, I'd hear some other backpacker's story about how they managed to hitch a free ride on a helicopter to the top of some random mountain where they then had to wrestle a wild boar before kayaking to a remote island where where they lived for a month, etc. and I'd think "I could never do something like that. My adventures will only ever be watered down compared to theirs. I'm not a REAL traveler (whatever that is) I'm just a fake, etc"... All this internal dialog despite the fact that I had recently bought a one way ticket to the adventure capital of the world after quitting my job and my comfortable young urban working professional lifestyle to gallivant around the world. 

Does this dialog sound familiar in the context of your own life? 

Have you ever gotten the job offer and thought, well, I didn't really deserve that (even though you did). Or wanted to ask for a promotion, but didn't because maybe your efficiency-boosting contributions weren't really that great (even though they were)? 

It seems that with traveling as with many other things I've ever done, I have figured out a way to justify why my accomplishments didn't count. But I'm beginning to suspect (in part thanks to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In which recently brought my awareness to the topic) that maybe I'm a real traveler after all. Maybe I'm a legitimately adventurous person and it wouldn't be too presumptuous to claim this about myself.

This revolutionary possibility occurred to me while sitting in the back of a mail truck where I was being illegally transported from my farm labor job (which I happened upon because I met a guy who knew a guy who made some phone calls to a friend). I was sitting on a cooler next to a pile of newspapers and I cut my finger on a saw that was sticking up (What was it doing there?). My finger began to bleed, and I reached into my pack and deftly whipped out a band-aid which I had placed in a convenient location and solved the problem in about 10 seconds without too much concern as I listened to the 19 year old dutch national sailing champion (also hitching a ride) entertain the driver with her funny travel stories: she and a guy hitched a ride with an off-duty police officer who took the beach instead of the road and who happened to have sand boards in the back of his cruiser, so she spent her day playing in the waves with the cop and his friends. I thought to myself, "Oh yeah, that's the sort of thing that might happen to me". 

At the next stop, we helped the mail man sort and carry the packages and I began to marvel over my own adventures of the past few days. Like the time I managed to snag a free helicopter ride to the top of a glacier after partying with the locals. 

Or like the time I crossed a river by dangling from a 100 m stretch of cable all by myself. I'd gotten up so early that I was on the tramping track just before sunrise. The glow worms were still sparkling at me across the first few creek crossings. I loaded my pack and myself onto the cable car, attached only by a small pulley and allowed gravity to pull me to the center of the cable in what felt like a free fall. From the middle of the river, I could see the sun beginning to crest over the snow-capped peaks, so I stopped to "hang out" there for 20 minutes to watch the sunrise reflect pink against the roaring river below me. Elated, I pushed on, using a small lever against the cable to pull the cart along. As I got to the high side of the cable, I was just barely able to pull my own weight. In the last 10 meters, the car grew so heavy I was pushing with my legs and all my strength. But when I got to the platform, I couldn't hold the weight of the cart with one hand in order to steady the cart to jump out before the cart rolled back to the middle of the cable. All my hard work was lost as the cart flew back down the cable with me and my pack still inside. I would have to attempt it again. But this time I had to do it with fatigued arms. I knew I'd had the strength to do it once, and maybe twice. But I also knew I didn't have the strength to pull myself up a third time. So either I was going to get up on the platform on this attempt, or I was going to sit in the middle of the river until someone found me. And it could be days before someone found me. My friends on the farm would come looking for me if I didn't make it back that night. But by the time they realized I wasn't back, they would have to wait until morning to come looking for me. I had an emergency response beacon I could have activated, yes. But a helicopter rescue could still take up to 12 hours and I didn't want to sit there for that long. I was the only one out there. I was a good 5-6 hour walk from another human being in any direction.  So I HAD to do it. And it was because I HAD to that I DID. If I'd even so much as suspected that there was another human being out there within a few hours of me, I wouldn't have been able to muster the strength to get across that wire. I went into hyper athlete-focus mode and was literally yelling out loud to myself , "DO IT! DO IT! YOU CAN DO IT!" and I just barely did it. I just made it with a foot on the solid platform and collected my pack before the cart went barreling back down the cable. I stood there shaking on the platform buzzing with adrenaline and practically jumping up and down with excitement that I made it. After that, I got to slowly come down from my high skipping down the river watching the sun rise over the next mountain peak and the next with perfect light so that every puddle reflected beauty. With music pumping in my headphones, I was perfectly happy: with no divergence between where I was and where I wanted to be and no disparity between who I was and who I wanted to be. Several hours later, I made it to the natural hot pools and soaked away the fatigue and adrenaline residue. So maybe I'm not an impostor after all.

After 12 hours of mail truck-riding and hitch hiking I arrived at my destination (a friends apartment who I'd met earlier on the gondola of the downhill mountain bike slopes) only to discover that I was locked out for the night (because I had forgotten to message about what day I was arriving) and my first reaction to this realization was, "oh well, I'll go to the pub and get a burger and beer and figure it out later". Figuring it out later meant camping in her yard (I even cooked oatmeal for breakfast out there in the morning. I had everything I needed in my pack, after all). So now I'm beginning to think, "maybe I'm not an impostor after all". 

What is it that you are discounting about your skills? Do you think you count? If I've gotten this far thinking that I was a fraud when it came to adventure, maybe you're not an impostor at whatever it is you are doing, either.

Maybe you're not an impostor.

Digital Marketer Gets New Job Grabbing Titts

"Show those bitches who's boss", Trudy instructs me as I narrowly miss getting kicked in the forearm by a testy milk cow. Trudy, the shed manager speaks to me and the cows in much the same tone of voice. This is surprisingly comforting at a time when I am completely out of my element, needing to be herded every bit as much as the cows. After all, this is a very different sort of work from the revenue forecasts, search volume analysis, and client presentations I'm used to. Outside the corporate world, there ain't no such thing as a 'shit umbrella', which is particularly notable, given my face-to-cow butt-placement as I transfer milking cups from one set of teats to the next. The good news: it is totally acceptable to fart on the job.

After we get through the first 100 or so cows, I begin to wake up enough to awe over my commute to work this morning: it was about 200 meters by motorbike from the farmhouse in the pitch black beneath radiant 4:45 am rural southern hemisphere stars, the milky way marking my route overhead. Decked out in blue zip-up coveralls, rubber gum boots, rubber, gloves, rubber sleeves, and a rubber apron, I silently give thanks for living in an age of protective rubber as my hands, arms, and various other body parts quickly get drenched in piss, shit, and milk back-splatter. I vow to never again refer to building keywords, or trafficking creatives as "manual labor" or "getting my hands dirty". Inevitably, as soon as my arms and sleeves are covered in rubbery shlopp, I get an itch on my face and my nose begins to run in the cold morning air.

An hour into the workday, I realize that I am getting through more cows per row than the day before. I wonder how quickly I'm improving as I apply the four suction cups, "one, two, three, four, and next... One, two, three, four, and next..." So in my yet-to-be-caffeinated state, I accidentally start inventing new metrics and calculating my expected rate of milking speed improvements over time. "My CPH (Cows per Hour) must have improved a full 100% WoW (week-over-week)", I silently think. I mean, if you figure that there are about 35 cows per row, and I'm now making it a full third of the way down the shed by the time my two milking teammates finish their cows, I'm up from about 5 the week before... Yes, I have doubled my WoW CPH indeed! This is exciting. Though, I should probably create a more actionable metric, because realistically if I apply the cups too quickly and they fall off before the cow is fully milked out, I've not really helped the bottom line. So perhaps I should count cups-per-hour? Or better yet, I'll create a weighted metric which takes into account speed, accuracy, and other upper-funnel contributions, such as hose-downs (to clear the shit out of the path of the cups). This new metric could also take into account things that slow down productivity like instances of getting peed on or kicked or having cups fall off. Perhaps the equation would be (Cups per hour * 10) + (Hose downs * 1) - (Getting shit on *5) - (Getting peed on *2) - (Getting kicked *1)= eCPH (effective Cups per hour.... sort of like cost per effective thousand impressions instead of just cost per thousand impressions). Thus, I would still estimate my WoW improvement in eCPH to be around 85%, which is not bad.

Still there are other things to take into account, like cow flow (herding the cows in and out of the shed and ensuring that you don't miss any cows). I wonder to myself how much we could improve performance with some good old fashioned A/B testing on our messaging. For example, does "Get up girls!" or "Go on girls" work better? And if this phrase is used in conjunction with a tap on the butt or a startling tap on the ground will the cows move more quickly? Shoot, this is going to require multivariate testing...

Yep, this is what happens when you put an analytic digital marketing geek in a cowshed. I stop myself before running an ultra dorky milk solid production forecast (which would have begun with square hectares of paddock and involved percentage of grass eaten, distance walked from paddock to cow shed, and total piss volume, etc...). Instead, I revel in the unlikeliness of my being here. Remember Kent the courier from my last blog post? He came through with a job for me in the end:  Because I talked to the guy at the youth hostel who helped me hitch a ride with the mail man who delivered me to a town where I decided to miss my next bus to another town, I stayed long enough for the mail courier to ask a friend who knew a guy who could use some help. Kent texted me one night to say, "I'll pick you up at 0800 tomorrow if you want this job". I didn't know where the job was, who it was with, or what it was I would be doing (Dairy farming, I suspected, but I didn't know for sure). So naturally, I stuffed my few items of clothing into my color coded stuff sacks in my backpack and waited for the mail man to pick me up the next morning. On the way to the farm, I jumped in and out of the passenger side, helping to deliver packages and letters to the good people of New Zealand's scenic south island west coast before being delivered myself to the farm in a place called Hari Hari where I was greeted with wonderfully nice people who I will be sad to leave.

I still, for the life of me cannot figure out a sock-gum boot configuration that does not result in 100% of the sock volume bunched up in the toes, leaving my already abused traveler feet to blister against unforgiving rubber heels. But the time has passed quickly this morning and we are almost ready to power wash the shed and pack it in for breakfast. Outside, the sun is beginning to emerge, creating a mountainous silhouette. The Wanted comes on the radio echoing through the emptying stalls telling me "I'm glad you came", and I think "I'm glad I came, too."