Old Hut, Old Wind

Pies for breakfast. The proper start to a trail day in New Zealand, where the humble meat pie occupies a place in the national food hierarchy somewhere between staple and sacred. We checked out of the Blue Pub and ducked into the grocery store, grabbing pies and drinks with the efficiency of hikers who knew their ride was coming and the trail was waiting. Torrin bought a new belt and a pair of sunglasses, both previous versions having succumbed to the rigours of the trail. The belt had given up somewhere in the backcountry, the sunglasses at some point after that, the small attritions of daily use and rough handling that slowly dismantle equipment not built for the sustained punishment of thru-hiking. Replaced now, the kit was whole again, and we stepped outside to meet our ride.

Dave was there, ready to drive us the hour out to the trailhead on a road so quiet and remote that we realised almost immediately how impossible hitching out this way would have been. The sealed road gave way to gravel, the gravel narrowed, the farms grew larger and the fences further apart, and the traffic, already sparse, dwindled to nothing. This was deep Canterbury high country, station land that stretched to the mountains in every direction, and the road existed to serve the people who worked it and almost no one else. The decision to book a shuttle rather than rely on the goodwill of passing drivers had been the right one, and we were quietly grateful for it as Dave's vehicle bounced along the empty road toward Glenrock Stream.

It was just after half past ten by the time we hit the trail, later than we would normally start but unavoidable given the distance from town. The trailhead sat on the banks of Glenrock Stream, and it was this stream we followed uphill through private farmland, the trail marked with poles and the occasional orange triangle, the land around us open and grassy and divided by electric fences that kept hikers constantly alert. The stream ran beside us, shallow and clear over its stony bed, the sound of it a steady companion as we climbed through the pastoral landscape toward the conservation land above.

The farmland gave way to conservation land at a boundary that felt more significant than the simple sign that marked it. The managed grass and fencing of the station yielded to tussock and native scrub, the hand of agriculture withdrawing as the altitude increased, and the landscape took on the wilder, less groomed character of country that belonged to no one and everyone. The trail zigzagged up an old 4WD track toward Turtons Saddle, the gradient steady and the switchbacks long, each turn revealing a little more of the view behind us as the Canterbury Plains began to appear in the distance below, a vast, flat expanse stretching east toward a horizon so far away it seemed to belong to a different country than the mountains we were climbing into.

We passed over the top and began the descent on the far side, the track continuing south across open slopes still well above the treeline where the tussock rippled in the wind and the sky felt enormous and close.

Coming toward us, a lone figure. A female nobo hiker climbing up from the valley below, her pack and her stride marking her as a thru-hiker before we were close enough to see her face. As the distance closed, there was a moment of recognition. Torrin and the hiker saw each other at the same time, and the expressions that crossed their faces were the particular delight of trail friends reuniting unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere. Courtney. She and Torrin had hiked sections of the TA together on the North Island, sharing trail and conversation before their paths had diverged, Courtney skipping ahead and Torrin continuing at his own pace. Now she was heading north, filling in the section she had missed, and was only a few days out from finishing the entire trail. The encounter was brief but warm, the kind of trail reunion that carries an outsized emotional weight because the odds of it happening at all, two hikers moving in opposite directions crossing paths on a remote saddle in the Canterbury high country, are so small that it feels less like coincidence and more like the trail arranging things for its own amusement. They exchanged news and the quick, essential information about what lay ahead in each direction, and then they parted, Courtney north toward her finish and us south toward whatever was next.

We continued the descent, stopping at the small A-frame hut tucked into the valley for a snack break. It was a tidy three-bunk shelter, more waypoint than destination, and we used it as exactly that, sitting on the narrow bunks and eating with the mechanical efficiency of bodies that needed fuel more than comfort.

From the A-frame, the trail followed the stream through a series of river crossings before delivering us to Comyns Hut. Eight bunks. Built in 1957, the hut was basic but solid, restored following work in 2008, and it carried the worn, weathered character of a shelter that has been doing its job in the high country for the better part of seventy years. We settled in for the night, just the two of us again in a hut that felt as though it had been waiting patiently for someone to arrive.

Outside, the high country settled into its evening quiet, the tussock fading from gold to grey as the light withdrew, the stream murmuring in the gathering dark. But as the night deepened, the wind came up. It arrived first as a low moan through the gaps in the timber, then built steadily until it was pressing against the walls with a force that made the old hut creak and shudder around us. The gusts found every crack and seam, whistling through joints that seventy years of high country weather had slowly loosened, and the roof above us hummed and rattled as though the mountains were reminding us that shelter out here is borrowed, not guaranteed. We lay in our sleeping bags and listened to the wind work at the hut and trusted that a building that had survived nearly seven decades of Canterbury storms could handle one more night.Read more