The Frozen and the Fearless

The morning's snow on the mountain tops made for a spectacular departure from Double Hut, but it also sent a cold wind down into the basin that had no intention of letting us forget it was autumn in the high country. We packed up, took one last look at the white-capped peaks and the name on the wall, and headed south.

After the tussock hell and hidden creeks of the previous day, the trail offered something that felt almost like an apology. A flat, open 4WD two-track that stretched ahead across the grassy and gravel flats of the Hakatere basin, the kind of walking surface that asks nothing of the mind and lets the legs simply work. The track was clear, the ground was firm, and for the first time in days there were no creek crossings, no blowdowns, no speargrass waiting in ambush. Just open country and a path through it, and we took the gift for what it was and walked fast.

Twenty-two kilometres. The cold wind at our backs pushed us along as much as our legs did, sweeping down from the snow-covered mountains that surrounded the basin and cutting across the exposed flats with a bite that kept us moving at a pace that left no room for lingering. The landscape was vast and open, the basin spreading wide in every direction, the lakes appearing one after another along the route like blue punctuation marks in a sentence of brown tussock and pale gravel. Seagull Lake came first, then Manuka Lake, their surfaces ruffled by the same wind that was driving us south, the water dark against the surrounding grasslands. We passed the junction where a side trail led five hundred metres off the main track to Manuka Hut, but with the pace we were carrying and the flat ground eating up the kilometres, stopping felt unnecessary. We noted it and walked on.

Lake Emily appeared further along, the trail leaving the Hakatere Conservation Park and joining a marked paper road that divided through Castle Ridge Station. The markers guided us through the farmland, the transition from conservation land to private property marked by gates and fences and the subtle shift in landscape that managed grazing produces. The mountains still ringed the horizon in every direction, still carrying their overnight snow, but down here on the flats the world was grass and gravel and wind and the long, straight track disappearing south toward the road.

We arrived at Clearwater Track carpark near Buicks Bridge in the afternoon, the day's twenty-two kilometres covered in a time that would have been unthinkable in the first week of the trail. The fast, flat walking had been kind to us, and we still had enough energy to set up the tent beside the river. The last time we had tented was that night at Angelus Lake that now felt like a lifetime ago. The tent went up with the practised efficiency of hands that knew the routine, the fly pulled taut against the poles, the stakes driven into the riverbank gravel, and for the first time in days we had a home that was ours rather than shared with the ghosts and registers of DOC huts.

We had phone reception. The first reliable signal in days, those precious bars appearing on the screen like a reconnection to the world we had temporarily left behind. Anth called Sal, and the sound of her voice carried across whatever distance separated them with the particular warmth that phone calls from the backcountry always carry, the compression of love and reassurance and news into a conversation that both parties know might be brief because the signal could drop at any moment. He told her about the snow and the creek crossings and the speargrass and the name on the wall at Double Hut, and she told him whatever news from home the trail had kept from him, and for a few minutes the high country felt a little less remote.

The temperature dropped as the sun went down, the cold that the wind had been carrying all day settling into the valley with an intensity that the thin walls of the tent could acknowledge but not prevent. We crawled into our sleeping bags and listened to the river running beside us in the darkness, the sound of it a constant, low murmur beneath the occasional gust of wind that pressed the fly against the poles.

During the night, the tent froze. Not just the outside, where the fly stiffened and crackled with ice as the moisture in the air crystallised against the fabric, but the inside as well. Our breath, trapped beneath the low ceiling of the tent, condensed on the inner walls and froze there, coating the interior with a thin layer of ice that glittered in the beam of a head torch when we stirred during the coldest hours. It was a stark reminder that autumn in the Canterbury high country is not a gentle season, and that the distance between a cold night and a dangerous one is measured in degrees that the calendar is steadily removing.

We awoke to a frozen world and began the stiff, reluctant process of packing up a tent whose fabric had the flexibility of cardboard. And then we had a visitor. An adolescent feral pig emerged from the scrub and made directly for the tent and our food with a confidence that suggested it had encountered hikers before and found them to be a reliable source of easy calories. It showed no fear whatsoever, approaching with the bold, unhesitating stride of an animal that had never been given a reason to be afraid of humans. We shouted. It ignored us. We waved our arms. It continued its approach. In the end, it took throwing rocks close to it, not at it but near enough to make the stones crack against the ground beside its feet, to convince it to retreat, and even then it would not go far, hovering at a distance that suggested patience rather than defeat, waiting for us to turn our backs or make a mistake. It was the first pig encounter since the Abel Tasman, where we had seen others in the bush, and a reminder that the introduced species that New Zealand's conservation efforts battle against are not abstract ecological problems but actual animals with actual appetites and an actual willingness to eat your breakfast if you let them.

We packed up quickly with one eye on the pig and the other on our food bags, and prepared for the day ahead.Read more