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.