Cradle Mountain to the right, before the clouds moved in.
The chain is cool beneath my fingers, rock damp beneath my feet, and my body is moving, if not powerfully, then at least competently up a rock face so steep I have to pull myself hand-over-hand up a dangling chain. “This is just going to be hard until it’s not,” filters up into the back of my brain, a refrain from the earliest days of this trip. Back when every hike felt brutally difficult and the only reason I finished some of them was because I refused to quit, no matter how slow or how long it required. It felt like my fitness was forever in the making, each hike so infinitesimally faster than the last I hardly sensed any progress at all. It seems a surprise miracle then that things have grown easier. Not easy; because hiking is never easy, you just go faster or further or steeper. But at least easier, and within my body I feel a sense of competence both familiar and elusive.
I pause, allowing Keith to scale the next pitch of rock while I take in the scenery around me. We are hiking a loop around Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, a peak nestled in the interior of the state. Rising up from dirt roads, farms, and vast stretches of eucalyptus trees comes the brief ripple of foothills before the jagged summit fin juts into the sky. At its base and below me lays Dove lake, its waters dyed nearly black with tannins from the surrounding vegetation. Above me the sudden rock walls of Cradle Mountain are swaddled in an encapsulating batting of grey clouds. It means there will be no summit bid for us today, just a long and pleasantly challenging loop around its base.
Though rain threatens all day it never arrives. A mercy given the steep bare-rock nature of the trail that on more than one occasion forces me to sit on my butt and scooch myself down off a drop of some feet. The hike is fun challenging, not brutal challenging and I’m extremely grateful for it. It feels like finally there might be a way forward into a body that feels more like my own.
The country outside my window jumbles and bumps along in a way that is distinctly the Tasmanian bush while simultaneously reminding me of a dozen other landscapes. Hard packed umber dirt sprouts bone white trees which reach their branchless arms skyward. A thousand, thousand cheerleaders waving faded green pom poms of leaves into the flat, blue sky. It’s captivating. Foreign and unique the landscape draws the eye to rest upon the details: a jaunty cropping of rocks, a haggard yet epic ridgeline, stepped flats above muddy waters. I want to stare, to understand and know the lands of this southern little island. I want to mash my face into the dirt and let it tell me its stories. I want to spend not just time, but intimacy with this new place. Which, is just as well seeing as Keith and I are making the four hour drive from Hobart to Queenstown Tasmanian via a stop-over at the long-defunct Waddamana Power Station—because that’s just the kind of engineering nerd Keith is.
Forced to slow down on the dirt roads of the bush, I have my time to sit and watch while a half-listened-to book plays in the background. It’s just enough input for my hummingbird mind to slow and allow me to observe my own thoughts. Fall, I love fall, I think. And I think, I might just be falling in love with this strange little island with its cool, crisp mornings and the feeling of being away from almost everything else. The unpaved, barely inhabited interior of the island is away from civilization, yes, but on a global scale the very location of Tasmanian feels isolated in a way that has called to me. We’re closer to the south pole than we are to Seattle and that sense of vastness, of geographic loneliness breeds a curiosity that verges on longing.
These thoughts, but others as well. I think about sitting on my couch in my tiny apartment, about riding my skateboard and joining a gym. About building a routine for myself—something I both resent and know I do better beneath. Part of me, perhaps a larger part, is ready for this trip to be over. And I sort of hate that. In my vision of myself I am the endless traveler who never tires of the road, whose curiosity is never quieted. But honesty, I’ve found, is so often battering when it forces us to confront the actual that we wish and the actual that we are. When I set out on this trip, I thought three and a half months would never be enough. The great New Zealand circus to which I was running away would never grow tiresome. And in so many of the ways that it matters, it hasn’t grown old. The wonder is still there, nestled in its home inside my heart. But I feel that I have grown weary, and in that found myself wanting, not to stop but to rest, at least for a little while.
Queenstown, interior Tasmanian. Because I absolutely forgot to take pictures today.
The Giant Sand Dunes south of Cape Reinga are a monumental wonder. Blown high by roaring winds whipping off the Tasman Sea they march inland like the shoulders of so many hulking soldiers in formation. As I watch Keith scurry towards the top of the tallest dune all I can think is: I really don’t give a fuck. To which I then immediately feel guilty because shouldn’t I like, give a fuck? To be here, in this moment, near this geographic anomaly. Isn’t this worthy of fuck giving? But the guilt fails to overpower my detached boredom and so I turn my back on the dunes and return to the car. Forgoing a sandy scramble for a snack and a nap.
I’m burning out. And the speed at which we’ve been moving across the North Island has become unsustainable.
We’ve been staying in more places for less time and packing in more social engagements so we can be sure to visit with everybody we want to see. And while it has been amazing, it’s hard to maintain the #stoke when you’re not getting enough rest. The small things, once easy to laugh off become an annoyance. It’s no longer cute finding a stranger’s hair in your underwear after using yet another poorly-maintained hostel dryer. Or having to carry around one muddy sock because it somehow didn’t make it into the wash. Or being confusingly misgendered for the thousandth time by a stranger with a lilting accent. As a result, the things that I really would like to give a fuck about lose some of their sparkle when viewed through tired eyes. Not only am I tried, I worry that I’m failing to travel the at the impeccable standard of constant engagement I feel I owe myself.
And here is where another lesson from my thru hike of the Pacific Crest Trail comes in. When you’re burning out on something, especially long-term travel, you have to acknowledge your desires even if they feel lame or embarrassing. And then you have to change what you’re doing in the sake of self and trip preservation. On the PCT that meant changing when we started hiking each morning, taking more rest days, and spending more time hiking alone so we could really decompress. And it worked, we finished the trail by finding ways to make wading through the bullshit and exhaustion more enjoyable so that we’d have more energy to enjoy the reasons we were on that trip in the first place.
Our time in New Zealand is almost over, and as we drive south to Auckland the plan is not to finish the trip with a bang but rather a bed in a nice hotel. We’re hitting the reset and reset button to avoid burnout after so much time on the road. Because while our time in New Zealand is over, the trip isn’t yet at an end. Next up: Australia.
“You definitely won’t be the only ones out there” the ranger says for perhaps the fifth time during the 15 minutes it takes for us to fill out the information for our parking permit. I know they’re trying to be reassuring, after all, most people get nervous in the backcountry, but in all truth, I could do with a fewer people and a little more solitude.
When Keith and I planned this trip we stuck to known routes, Great Walks, and trips with backcountry huts that we could easily book online. After all, we had no idea what difficult meant when it came to New Zealand. What did phrases like “for advanced trampers only” (tramping being the New Zealand phrase for backpacking) actually mean? Advanced like scrambling and route finding? Or like difficult river crossings and bushwhacking? Or was it just a reference to distance and elevation gain? Between trip reports and Department of Conservation (DOC) sites the word advanced seemed to mean any number of different things. Compounding on that, references to deaths and injuries were prevalent as were dire warnings around weather and flooding. What we learned upon arriving in country was that advanced largely referred to mileage and fitness while most resources were written under the assumption that the reader had little to no backcountry experience and apparently was incapable or unwilling to check the weather.
Which is not to say that our trip has been anything short of delightful. Having access to the hut system has made our hikes easier and packs lighter. While shorter milage days have allowed time for socializing, writing, and sleeping in. Still, some of my fondest backpacking trips have been ones in which I was miles away from the closest person. Solo backcountry trips are what made me fall in love with this activity and sleeping in huts with five to 20 of my closest friends has been a little draining. I find myself longing for time spent sleeping in my own personal patch of dirt far away from the snoring of the next closest human.
Day 2 – Waihohonu Hut to Oturere Hut
The wind and rain explode all around us and I have dreams of thunder and lightning; running from ridge tops as the sky ignites and fear boils in my gut with the certainty of doom. When the door blows open for the third time I finally awake in the dark hut surrounded by the gentle snores and rustling of strangers. I acquiesce to my body’s base needs and meander to the outdoor hut toilets, facing the lashing wind in service of a pee.
Outside the New Zealand rain billows in vertical waves, like a stage curtain tousseled by hands and bodies unseen. I have come to recognize this behavior as endemic of the rain here. Like a great jellyfish undulating its way across the sky with tentacles dripping down towards the ground. Even in my blurry sleepiness I pause to watch the wind and rain put on their mesmerizing dance knowing that tomorrow the skies will have cleared and the only evidence of this effervescence will be the puddles on the ground.
Day 3 Oturere Hut to roads end
The climb to the high point of the Tongariro Northern Circuit is a comically Sisyphean effort. Each upward step met with a sliding backwards as the dark, volcanic soil gives way under foot, like trodding across a vertical garden bed full of marbles. Distantly my mind tries to conjure up fear of a hypothetical fall, a slide with impotent fingers slicing without purchase, a body, my body, tumbling without recourse into the still-steaming volcanic crater and all the while a thousand million tourists in bright Nike trainers watch on. I keep staring at my feet, keep plodding upwards into the fog while below me the violently green chemical lakes of the volcano glow in the cloudy half-light. The ranger’s words from the start of this trip roll across my consciousness: “you definitely won’t be the only ones out there,” drawing a half-mad laugh from my lips as I swim up an unrelenting stream of other hikers. Amazing, how amid the otherworldly, barren scene that is the Tongariro crossing we are still hiking in a crowd. Suddenly the idea of life on Mars doesn’t feel so unlikely.
“You’ll want to move your foot off that first hold as quickly as possible,” I say down to Keith from my perch atop the muddy chimney, “it’s going to want to collapse from underneath you.”
“Gotcha,” comes his ever-stoic response as he begins to climb the near-vertical mud wall. Hauling himself up hand over hand, moving from root to rock before each perilous hold can slide from beneath him. I scoot aside so we can both share the small rocky bench above the first 10 foot pitch. With more than 700 feet left to climb to our hut I feel suddenly overwhelmed at how long this is going to take. The rest of the day had been on well groomed and even better maintained trail, courtesy of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. The first 2000 feet of climbing passing in, if not easy, at least manageable grades. But this, a slippery, muddy, barely consolidated mess that could only be approached in a bear crawl of sorts, fingers reaching for every sturdy rock or well-planted rock, this too felt like something DOC would call a trail. In fact, over the course of this trip Keith and I had spent several days on designated trails that were only slightly less ridiculous than this.
I turn my face to the next pitch, huck my trekking poles up and into a bush so they won’t get in the way and begin to climb. Another 15 feet up on hands and feet gets me to another flat spot to rest, Keith coming up shortly behind me. This new perch reveals something else, another hiker walking, no, strolling along in jeans and a cheap school backpack. At first my brain has trouble comprehending what I am seeing. But Keith gets it, letting out a low “I am so sorry” before I bark a cackling laugh of absurdity and amusement. Our mud-covered micro expedition has been on the old trail, on the barely-there trail, on the this is a muddy disaster so let’s reroute trail. Our casual fellow hikers glance confusedly at us as I retrieve my poles from the bush. I might feel like an idiot were I not so relieved that we wouldn’t be scrambling up a vertical mud wall the rest of the way to the hut. Bemused and a little abashed we make our way the last mile, tired legs forgotten and grateful for the trail beneath our feet.
It’s a damp, greying kind of day, all low clouds and drizzle. It’s a bickering over nothing, irritated at everything kinda day. It’s the kind of day, in truth, that I am always tempted to omit from travelogs and stories told. Filled not so much with painful sweeping truths as grimy little realities of life on the road.
The first hours of the morning are full of Fine. Sure. Whatever you want. Fine.
And then we’re on the road, driving north from little Franz Josef, not so much a town as a dot on the map serving one thing: helicopter tours of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. When we stopped there the night before not even the two restaurants in town were open. This morning the streets are empty, as an impending rain storm has shuttered any chance of a helicopter ride. The same storm has also forced us to cancel two additional backpacking trips because of the danger of flooding and becoming trapped in the backcountry; grinding our trip to a halt and leaving both of us frustrated.
But when you’re on the road things don’t stop, they only change direction. So we putter our tiny car into the oncoming rain and begin our drive up the coast. The forecast calls for near-biblical amounts of rain along the West Coast but the storm is late in its arrival and we drive through a landscape ever-changing. One minute windshield wipers flailing against the torrent the next minute the roads are nearly dry and one could be forgiven for describing the sky as just the littlest bit blue. A familiar refrain presses against my lips against the obvious unreality: “what a beautiful day.” But it is, it is a remarkably beautiful day even with the mountains hidden by clouds, the sea blockaded by shrubby green-brown trees. Because bad days happen wherever you are and I’d rather be in a small car on the road than in my small apartment back in Seattle. The joy of being somewhere new, even on the bad days, so entirely eclipses the mundanity of the familiar that I cannot help but say it: “what a beautiful day.”
— We shut off the car in the small town of Greymouth, a former mining town stuck somewhere in the middle of reinventing itself into a tourist town. Too bad there’s nothing to do here.
That night Keith and I lay in bed and watch as the lightning illuminates the sky, bright as a cosmic spotlight but without the accompanying thunder; the melodramatics without the danger. The storm is here but we are safe in our little rented bed for two. A nest of home within each other, not so much us against the world, more like us within the world, a center, a home from which the road doesn’t feel so chaotic.
The irony of what I am looking at is not lost on me as I watch the ink bleed across the small strip of paper. Not ten minutes before Keith and I had argued about whether we needed to keep carrying around the bulky covid test kits we’d picked up on a whim in the Christchurch airport. I was in favor of ditching them having grown irritated at their constant presence in our luggage, seemingly always in the way and taking up more space than I felt they were worth. Keith, on the other side of the issue, thought they were worth it and that my current cold warranted me performing the nasal-swab hokey-pokey.
The astute of you will have no doubt surmised by now what that little strip of paper read. Still, I let Keith look over the test for himself, standing a long moment staring down at the desk before he turned to me. “Well, you have covid.” “Again,” I agreed.
After Keith performed his own partial lobotomy his test came up negative and we sat on the bed of our hostel, all rush to pack for an early departure the next morning forgotten. The four day backpacking circuit we were supposed to leave on abandoned. I had already been toying with the idea of skipping out given my current cold, but now both of us had to come up with new plans. The reliance on backcountry huts in New Zealand made it irresponsible for either of us to attempt the track. I was disappointed for Keith but only a little upset for myself
It’s like the coin flip trick. The one where you flip a coin not so much to make the choice for you but because it forces to the front any unresolved feelings about the decision. I had been waffling about heading out on this trail and now that my little covid coin flip told me I couldn’t I actually felt relieved. Relieved that I could just be tired without letting anyone down, relieved at all the effort I wouldn’t have to expend from a well that I worried was running increasingly empty. And besides, what could I do? Be angry at the proverbial universe? No, better to rest, replan and try again, just as soon as our self-isolation ended.
A crack splits the air and everybody’s head turns, eyes scouring the face of stone and ice looming high across the valley. But there is nothing to be seen. A false stillness beneath gliding clouds. Finally and only by training my eyes on the cliffs do I see an avalanche let loose, sending a shower of car-sized ice hunks and cascading loose snow free from the glacier. By the time the sound reaches the ears of the hikers milling around the Mueller hut and heads once again turn to face the noise the sudden, violent burst of icy activity has subsided. For now.
The Mueller hut is a basic backcountry cabin offering bunk beds, a cooking space, and water that you need to boil or filter before you can drink. This cabin’s claim to fame is the view it offers of Aoraki/Mt Cook and the fact that it was founded by Sir Edmund Hilary – climbing partner of Tenzing Norgay and co-first-summiter of Chomolungma/Mount Everest. The spartan interior is all but irrelevant because what lays outside, what all of us are here for, is the chance to see Aoraki. And in this, we are extremely lucky.
In this part of New Zealand rain, clouds, and general mountain-obscuring weather is the rule, not the exception to it. Sitting at 12,218ft (3,724 meters) the peak plummets dramatically 10,000ft straight down to the valley floor. Its shoulders a parade of razor-sharp ridges bedecked in flowing glaciers which transform in detail and color as the sun and clouds play across the sky. Closer to the hut sits Maukatua/Mount Sefton, and it is this peak which continues to roll great plumes of snow off its shoulders, like thunder boiling up from the rock itself.
As the sun arcs towards the horizon and begins to tuck itself neatly behind Maukatua’s jagged ridges the day hikers filter away from the cabin until there are only 20 or so of us overnighters left. The view towards Aoraki lays obscured by clouds so I turn my full attention to the ever-cascading face of Maukatua as it rumbles its way into darkness. Stillness. Then a cascade. Stillness. Then a cascade. Finally, the cold chases me inside while my little mammalian heart beats in time with a world so much larger than myself. And Maukutua rumbles and roars alone in the darkness, a restless giant, a fracturing cacophony of one.
