The Train Through Our Footsteps

The TranzAlpine pulled out of Greymouth and began its climb east toward the mountains. It is one of the most celebrated rail journeys in the world, a scenic passage through the heart of the Southern Alps that draws tourists from every corner of the globe to press their faces against the glass and marvel at the gorges and river valleys and snow-capped peaks that slide past the windows. For most passengers, every vista is new, every tunnel a surprise, every bridge over a churning river a moment to reach for a camera. For us, the scenery carried a different weight entirely. We had just hiked this country. The valleys the train carved through were valleys we had walked. The rivers it crossed were rivers we had forded. The mountains framed in the carriage windows were mountains we had climbed over and cursed at and been humbled by. At one point, the train passed just metres from the spot where we had hitched out days earlier, and we stared through the glass at a stretch of highway we had stood on with our thumbs out, wet and tired and hoping for a ride. Seeing it from the warm, dry comfort of a train seat was surreal, like watching a film of your own life from a seat you never expected to occupy.

The train burrowed into the Otira Tunnel, 8.5 kilometres of darkness through the heart of the mountains, the longest tunnel in New Zealand, bored through the rock beneath Arthur's Pass to connect the West Coast to Canterbury. The carriage lights flickered on and the world outside the windows disappeared, replaced by the close, rushing blackness of stone and the rhythmic clatter of wheels on track amplified by the tunnel walls. For eight and a half kilometres, the mountains existed above and around us in every direction, an unimaginable weight of rock pressing in from all sides, and then the light returned and we emerged on the eastern side, blinking, into the township of Arthur's Pass.

It was raining. Of course it was raining. Arthur's Pass sits at the junction of two weather systems, the wet westerlies from the Tasman and the drier air from the Canterbury Plains, and rain is less an event here than a state of being. The township is small, a handful of buildings clustered along the highway beneath the mountains, and we stepped off the train into cold, wet air that immediately found its way through every layer and settled against the skin with the familiar chill of the backcountry.

We checked for accommodation. There was nothing. Not a room at the lodge, not a bunk at the hostel, nothing. The small township was full, and the options had run out before we had even begun to explore them. The trailhead at Cora Lynn car park was only a fifteen-minute drive down the road, but on foot, in the rain, in the gathering dark, that fifteen minutes became a three-hour hike along a highway with no footpath and diminishing visibility. It was not a prospect that appealed to bodies that had been sitting on a train all afternoon and were now standing in the rain contemplating their options.

We attempted to hitch, thumbs out on the roadside in the fading light, but the traffic was sparse and the cars that did pass were not stopping. The darkness was closing in, the rain was not easing, and the reality of a three-hour road walk in those conditions was beginning to feel less like a backup plan and more like an inevitability. Then Anth had an idea. He walked across to the hostel and knocked on the door, not to ask for a room they did not have, but to ask if anyone inside was free to drive two hikers down to the trailhead. It was the kind of request that requires a particular blend of desperation and optimism, the willingness to ask strangers for help and the faith that someone will say yes.

A couple of girls volunteered without hesitation, that same instinctive generosity we had encountered again and again in this country, the willingness of people to go out of their way for strangers simply because the strangers needed help and helping was the obvious thing to do. We piled into their car with our packs and set off down the road toward Cora Lynn, the headlights cutting through the rain and the dark, the kilometres that would have taken three hours on foot disappearing beneath the wheels in minutes. We arrived in no time, thanked them with the deep, genuine gratitude of people who understood exactly what they had been saved from, and watched their tail lights disappear back up the road toward Arthur's Pass.

Then we turned and headed up the path. The last of the daylight was fading fast, the sky above the canopy a deepening grey that would not hold much longer, and we moved quickly through the wet bush with the urgency of hikers who knew that the margin between reaching the hut in the light and reaching for head torches was measured in minutes rather than hours. The forest was loud with water, rain on leaves, rain on earth, the sound of streams running full and fast somewhere in the gathering gloom beyond the trail. Every step carried the quiet arithmetic of fading light and remaining distance, and the relief when the hut appeared through the trees was sharpened by the knowledge of how close it had been.

Bealey Hut. A simple affair sitting in its clearing, basic and functional and exactly what we needed. We pushed open the door and stepped inside, the sudden absence of rain on our faces feeling like a small act of grace. The hut was empty. Just us, our wet packs, and the quiet shelter of four walls and a roof on a night that offered nothing kind to anyone still outside. We unpacked what we needed with the efficient, practised movements of hikers who had done this dozens of times now, ate quickly, and crawled into our sleeping bags with the bone-deep weariness of a day that had covered more emotional distance than physical.

We fell asleep to the sound of rain on the old tin roof, that ancient, elemental percussion that has been lulling people to sleep since the first human thought to put something over their head and lie down beneath it. The rain drummed its steady rhythm above us, each drop a small announcement of the weather that would shape the days ahead, and beneath it we slept the deep, surrendered sleep of people who had made it to shelter and needed nothing more from the world until morning.Read more