Wet Boots Over Harper Pass

Twenty-five kilometres lay between Hurunui Hut and Locke Stream Hut, and the urgency of the weather window demanded an early start. The forest was dark and quiet around us as we stepped into a morning that was still more shadow than light, the longest day we had attempted since the walk into Anne Hut pressing ahead of us like a promise that would take every hour of daylight to keep. Every kilometre covered today was a kilometre banked against the rain forecast for the days ahead, a kilometre closer to Deception Gorge before the water could rise and close it against us.

Not long after leaving the hut, we came to a three-wire emergency swing bridge. Three wires, one for the feet and two for the hands, strung across the river in a triangle of tension that swayed and bounced with every step. We looked at the river below it. It was not deep. We could have easily forded it, waded across with barely wet knees, and continued on without breaking stride. But the bridge looked like fun. There is something irresistible about a three-wire bridge when you are deep in the backcountry and the day is young and the part of you that is still a child refuses to walk past something that looks like a playground. We crossed it, one at a time, shuffling along the lower wire with hands gripping the upper cables, the whole structure swaying and dipping with each movement, the river sliding past below our feet. Torrin moved across with the casual confidence of someone who had crossed dozens of these on the North Island. Anth followed with considerably more concentration and considerably less grace, but he made it, and the grin on his face when he stepped off the far side was worth every wobbling step.

The track led us into the forest and kept us there for much of the day. Dense beech woodland closed around us once more, that familiar green cathedral of moss-wrapped trunks and fern-choked understory that had become the signature landscape of this section of the trail. But the forest walking was broken by stretches of riverbed, those sections where the trail simply ceases to exist and the route becomes the river itself, a braided corridor of grey stones and shallow channels that must be read and navigated in real time. There are no orange trail markers on a riverbed, no worn path to follow. There is only the water and the stones and the far bank, and the decision of where to cross is made fresh each time.

Our shoes were wet within the first hour and stayed that way. Creek crossing followed creek crossing, each one delivering another surge of cold water into boots that had barely begun to drain from the last, until the distinction between wet and dry ceased to exist and we simply accepted that our feet would be swimming for the duration. In places, the track disappeared entirely, swallowed by flood damage or overgrowth or the simple reality that in this remote country, maintenance is a battle fought against forces that always eventually win. We navigated by instinct and trail markers where they existed, by map and common sense where they did not, pushing through sections of bush where the undergrowth grabbed at our legs and the trail was more suggestion than path.

The Hurunui River valley has been a thoroughfare through these mountains for centuries. Long before European boots marked the ground, Māori travellers used this corridor as a route between Canterbury and the West Coast, carrying pounamu back from the grey, wild rivers of Westland. The trail we were walking followed in those ancient footsteps, a path worn by generations of feet moving through the same beech forest, fording the same rivers, climbing toward the same gap in the mountains that had drawn people through for hundreds of years.

We stopped at the thermal pools, a natural hot spring where geothermally heated water rises to the surface and collects in pools beside the river. We soaked our feet, lowering them into the warm water with the slow, groaning gratitude of hikers who have been walking in cold, wet boots since dawn. The heat seeped into aching arches and swollen toes and the tight, bruised muscles of the sole, and for a few blissful minutes the trail ceased to exist and there was only warmth and relief and the steam rising from the water into the cool forest air. It was a brief indulgence, not long enough to truly restore what the kilometres were taking, but enough to remind our feet that comfort still existed somewhere in the world.

We pressed on to Hurunui Hut No. 3 for a quick break, dropping our packs on the porch and stretching out the tightness that accumulates in shoulders and lower back after hours of walking. A nobo hiker joined us there, arriving from the opposite direction with trail notes and weather reports from the country ahead, and we exchanged information with the practised efficiency of people who understand that in the backcountry, shared knowledge is shared survival. A brief chat, a few mouthfuls of trail food, and we were moving again. The day was not yet done with us, and the pass was still waiting.

Harper Pass. Kura Tāwhiti. At 962 metres, it is not the highest crossing on the Te Araroa, but what it lacks in altitude it compensates for in history and reputation. This is one of the great historic passes of the Southern Alps, the primary route used by Māori for centuries to cross between Canterbury and the West Coast, the corridor along which pounamu was carried from the wild rivers of Westland to the communities of the eastern plains. Leonard Harper, for whom the pass was later named, crossed it in 1857, but the gap in the mountains had been old and well-known long before any European set foot near it. Walking through it felt like moving through a corridor of time as much as geography, the beech forest pressing close on either side, the ground rising steadily beneath our feet, the air cooling as the altitude increased.

The climb was manageable, the gradient steady rather than savage, and we crested the pass without the twenty-metre rest stops that Travers Saddle and the Waiau Pass had demanded. But the descent on the western side was a different matter entirely. The trail dropped through forest that was wet and slippery, the ground saturated from recent rain, every root and rock and patch of earth offering a surface that could not be trusted. Our already soaked boots found no purchase on the greasy terrain, and progress slowed to a careful, deliberate crawl, each step tested before weight was committed, poles planted firmly as a third and fourth point of contact on the steeper sections.

Anth went down at least once, feet sliding out from beneath on a section of muddy trail that offered no warning and no grip. The fall was fast and graceless, pack momentum carrying everything backward, and the landing was squarely on his backside with a force that sent a jolt through the spine. There would be bruises, that much was certain, the kind that appear the following morning in colours the body has no business producing and linger for days as a reminder that gravity has no favourites. There is no dignity in falling on a wet trail. There is only the cold shock of mud through clothing, the brief inventory of limbs to check nothing is broken, and the slow process of getting back up with a heavy pack and continuing as though the mountain had not just reminded you who is in charge.

The descent continued, wet and demanding, the forest dripping steadily around us, the trail a channel of mud and running water in the steeper sections. The western side of Harper Pass feeds into the headwaters of the Taramakau River system, the landscape shifting from the drier eastern valleys into the wetter, wilder country of the West Coast where rainfall is measured in metres rather than millimetres and the bush grows with a density that reflects its constant saturation.

Finally, through the trees, a roof. Locke Stream Hut. We arrived with the particular relief of hikers who have covered twenty-five kilometres through wet forest and over a mountain pass and have nothing left to give. The hut was a modest affair, functional and weathertight but small and simple, the kind of backcountry shelter that offers exactly what is needed and nothing more. We searched for firewood with the hopeful desperation of people whose every piece of clothing from the waist down was saturated, but the bush had offered up nothing dry enough to burn. There would be no fire tonight. No warmth radiating from a crackling grate, no steam rising from socks and boots hung hopefully nearby. Our wet shoes and socks would remain wet, and tomorrow we would push our feet back into them and walk on regardless.

Again it was just the two of us in the hut, that quiet solitude that had become unexpectedly precious over these past days. The empty bunks and still air created a space that belonged entirely to us, father and son in a small shelter on the western side of the mountains, the forest dripping into darkness outside, the stream that gave the hut its name singing softly somewhere beyond the trees. We cooked and ate and talked about the days ahead, about Deception Gorge and the weather and the kilometres still between us and the end of this section. And then we let the silence settle around us like another blanket, and let the long day's weariness carry us toward sleep.Read more