Dice, Massage and Zero Days

The next section was planned shorter, maybe less than five hours of walking, a gentler day by the standards of what the trail had already asked of us. Torrin could have double-hutted it easily, covering the distance to Blue Lake Hut and continuing on to the next shelter without breaking stride, and one of the other trampers at West Sabine did exactly that, slipping out of the hut before the sun was up and disappearing into the forest while the rest of us were still coaxing warmth back into stiff limbs. But for Anth, even a shorter day was still tough. The cumulative toll of the past week, the Cascade Track, the Travers Valley, the saddle crossing, all of it lived in muscles and joints that were operating on borrowed reserves, and every kilometre still demanded its due.

We wound through ancient beech forest, the kind that makes you feel as though you have stepped backward through centuries into a world that existed long before human feet ever marked a trail through it. The trees here were immense, their trunks thick and gnarled, their branches reaching across the path to form a canopy so dense that the light beneath was perpetual twilight, green and soft and cathedral-quiet. Every surface was draped in moss, thick, luxuriant carpets of it that covered the trunks and branches and fallen logs in layers so deep the forest seemed upholstered in emerald velvet. Ferns unfurled from every crevice, their fronds catching the filtered light and glowing with a luminosity that seemed to come from within. The air was heavy with moisture and the rich, earthy scent of decomposition and growth, the twin engines of the forest floor turning death into life in an endless, unhurried cycle.

The roar of the river was our almost constant companion, the Sabine running alongside the trail through the valley, its voice rising and falling with the terrain but never quite disappearing. In the quieter stretches, where the river widened and slowed, it murmured. Where it narrowed and dropped over ledges, it thundered. And in between, it provided that steady, white-noise backdrop that fills the forest and gives the walking mind somewhere to rest, a sound so constant it becomes almost indistinguishable from silence until the moment it stops.

We arrived at Blue Lake Hut in the early afternoon, dropping our packs on the porch with the particular relief of people who know they will not need to pick them up again today. The hut sits near the shores of Blue Lake, or Rotomairewhenua as it is known in te reo Māori, and after settling in, we walked down to see it for ourselves.

What we found stopped us both in our tracks.

Blue Lake is recognised as having the clearest natural fresh water in the world, with visibility measured at up to eighty metres, a clarity that rivals distilled water. It is a taonga, a treasure, to the local iwi of Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, and it is considered a wāhi tapu, a sacred place. We approached it with the respect it demanded, exploring both the outlet where the water spills away toward the Sabine and the source where it wells up from the ground, fed by the waters of neighbouring Lake Constance filtering through a glacial moraine over a period of years, emerging purified to an almost supernatural degree. The clearness of the water astounded us both. It was not simply transparent. It was as though the water itself had been removed and replaced with nothing, the stones on the lake bed visible in perfect detail at depths that should have rendered them invisible, the colours of the rock, grey and ochre and pale green, as vivid ten metres down as they would have been in the palm of your hand. The lake seemed to exist outside the normal rules of water, a place where the element had been distilled to its purest possible expression, and standing on its shore felt less like looking at a body of water and more like looking through a window into the earth itself.

We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying much, because some places do not ask for words. They ask only for presence, for the willingness to be still and let the beauty of what you are seeing settle into you at its own pace. Blue Lake was one of those places.

Back at the hut, Anth made the decision to take a zero day. The legs needed it. The Waiau Pass lay ahead, the second alpine crossing of this section, and by all accounts it would be every bit as demanding as Travers Saddle had been. Attempting it on legs that were already running on empty would be foolish rather than brave, and the trail had been teaching us the difference between those two things since the first day on Robert Ridge. Better to rest, to let the muscles repair and the energy reserves rebuild, and to approach the pass with something left to give rather than nothing.

The afternoon settled into the unhurried rhythm of a zero day in the backcountry. We found a set of dice in the hut and played Zilch, that addictive game of risk and reward that Annie and Simon had taught Torrin during those days of waiting in Nelson, and that Torrin had then taught Anth. The game filled the hours with laughter and the small, satisfying drama of deciding whether to bank your points or push your luck, a metaphor for trail life that was not lost on either of us. The dice clattered across the hut table, and outside the forest stood patient and still, and for a few hours the only thing that mattered was whether the next roll would deliver or betray.

Torrin, ever attentive to the practical realities of keeping Anth's body on the trail, gave his calves a good hard massage. It was not gentle. It was the kind of deep-tissue work that makes you wince and breathe through your teeth while it is happening but leaves the muscles feeling looser and more alive afterward, the knots and adhesions that days of climbing had built up slowly yielding under Torrin's firm, patient hands. It was another of those quiet acts of care that defined our journey together, the son tending to the father so that the father could continue walking beside the son.

We checked our food reserves with the careful accounting that the backcountry demands. Eight days of supplies bought at the Pak'n Save in Nelson, lighter this time than the Abel Tasman oversupply, had been steadily diminishing through each day's meals. We counted what remained, calculated what was needed, and concluded that we would have just enough to make it through to Boyle Village and the end of this section. Just enough. Not comfortably, not with surplus, but enough. It would mean disciplined portions and no waste, but we would not go hungry. The maths of food and distance, that constant background equation of long-distance hiking, had worked out in our favour, barely.

The following morning brought a new arrival. Graham walked into Blue Lake Hut with the quiet confidence of a man who had been doing this for longer than most of the other hikers on the trail had been alive. He was seventy-seven years old. Seventy-seven, and here he was, deep in the backcountry of Nelson Lakes, carrying a full pack through terrain that had pushed Anth to his limits at more than a quarter of a century less than Graham's age. He settled into the hut with the easy manner of someone entirely comfortable in the mountains, and over conversation we learned that he planned to cross the Waiau Pass on the same day as us. There was something deeply humbling about sharing a hut with a man who, at an age when society expects you to have long since traded adventure for armchairs, was still climbing alpine passes in the South Island backcountry. Graham was living proof that the mountains do not belong exclusively to the young, and his presence in the hut that evening was a quiet, powerful reminder that the only thing that truly stops you is the decision to stop.

We spent the rest of our zero day exploring Blue Lake more thoroughly, walking its margins with the reverence the place deserved, watching the light change across its surface as the afternoon deepened and the shadows of the surrounding mountains crept across the water. The clarity never ceased to amaze. Every angle offered a new perspective on that impossible transparency, a new depth revealed, a new colour emerging from the stones below. It was the kind of place that recalibrates your understanding of what nature is capable of, that makes you realise how much of the world you have seen through a filter of sediment and turbidity without ever knowing it.

As evening settled over the hut and we prepared for the next day's crossing, there was a quiet sense of readiness in the air. The rest had done its work. The legs felt better, not perfect, but better. The food would last. And tomorrow, with Graham and Torrin and whatever the mountains chose to give us, we would climb the Waiau Pass and continue south.Read more