Wilderness September 2018

YOU CAN LEARN A LOT IN A BACKCOUNTRY HUT. That’s what I thought while sitting around the dining table of Crosbies Hut, high up in the Coromandel Range. The candle-lit room was warmed by a glowing fire, and around the table sat five Kiwis, an Irish couple and my Dutch partner – a classic hut night was in the making. Brought together by chance, buoyed by the energy of a night with strangers in a hut in the forest, the conversation flowed like the rainwater which drummed on the roof. “I don’t think we have any native species,” one of the Irish trampers mentioned, while reflecting on the verdant forest that lined the tracks to the hut. And the mouths of the Kiwis dropped. “We don’t have any virgin forest…

Pigs the problem WHAT BOTHERS me about the kauri dieback problem facing our ‘Alps of the North’ (August 2018), is the huge elephant in the room: the presence of wild pigs in our kauri forests. While it would be acceptable, if not entirely useless, to exclude trampers from these forests, leaving wild pigs to root and rut wherever they want, spreading disease as they go, bears little or no comparison to the effects trampers may have. Why is it that we do not wish to address this problem and how is it that so few people are willing to discuss it? Surely this has to be the greatest vector of disease in these forests. Let’s ring fence these wonders of nature before they become an artifact of the past. -…

I WAS IN a group of three which happened to be at Blue Lake Hut the weekend when the incident with the boys from Christchurch occured (‘Bunks for all – but her’, July 2018). I don’t want to stir the pot too much, but I’d be a little wary of posting just one side of the story. This was Easter Weekend at one of the busiest huts in Nelson Lakes National Park, and the woman who was confronted by the boys mentioned she had no plan B. She threw her toys in the hut, and gave these guys no choice but to move outside, making sure they felt belittled in the process. We came over Waiau Pass on the same day as these guys in miserable weather. One of our…

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in pest control mean possums could be eradicated from New Zealand by 2030, but ecologist Dr James Russell says it might not be a good idea just yet. Russell, who is associate professor of biological sciences at University of Auckland, said developments in the use of 1080 means possums can effectively be eradicated from large areas of forest, while remote monitoring of traditional traps could eradicate possums from other areas. The number of possums had already halved since the 1980s, from about 70 million to 30 million, due to concerted pest control programmes. But Russell said new 1080 techniques are now making eradication possible. “Previously, the mentality was that we can’t eradicate possums from an area because they would just come back,” Russell said. “So we were trying…

A NEW $1.8M HUT will be built on the Milford Track to replace the aging Mintaro Hut. Fiordland operations manager Greg Lind said the hut, the second that trampers reach on the track, will be built in 2020 to open for the 2020/21 season. It will be about two kilometres further up the Clinton Valley from the existing hut, just past the the start of the climb to the Mackinnon Pass. Lind said the site of Mintaro Hut was prone to rockfall and the hut was at the end of its life. “I first walked the track in 1987 and it had just been built then,” Lind recalled. “It’s taken a hammering in the alpine environment over the years and it’s past its use-by date.” The new hut would be…