Unfinished Lines

The pig followed us for a time as we left the campsite, trotting along at a distance that suggested it had not entirely given up hope of a meal, its snout low and its small eyes fixed on our packs with an intensity that bordered on optimism. But eventually the distance between us and whatever territory it claimed grew too great, and it turned back, trotting into the scrub with the unhurried air of an animal that knew there would be other hikers and other breakfasts.

Another big day lay ahead. Twenty three kilometres to push through to the end of this section and, with any luck, a hitch out to town. The trail picked up where it had left off the previous day, a 4WD two-track stretching south across the open high country of the Hakatere Conservation Park, the landscape wide and brown and treeless, the mountains standing at the edges of the basin with their overnight snow still bright against the morning sky. The walking was fast again, the flat, firm surface allowing a rhythm that the body fell into gratefully after the punishment of the tussock and the creek crossings from two days before.

The track crossed fence lines and joined old farm tracks as it wound through country that had once been part of the vast Hakatere Station before its return to the conservation estate. The scale of the landscape was extraordinary, the kind of open, uninterrupted space that shrinks a person to a speck and makes the pack on their back feel like the most insignificant thing in the world. There was nothing out here but grass and gravel and wind and the distant geometry of mountains, and the trail was a thin line drawn across an enormous page.

We climbed toward the saddle at the western end of Mt Guy, and when we crested the top, the view that opened before us stopped our feet. Lake Clearwater sat below in its basin, a long, dark body of water cradled by the tussock flats, and beyond it, further south, the Rangitata River wound through its wide, braided bed toward the coast, a silver ribbon laid across the Canterbury Plains. The Harper Range rose to the west, and Mt Potts stood to the south, and the whole panorama had the quality of a painting that no one would believe was real if they had not stood where we were standing and seen it with their own eyes. We took it in, let it settle, and began the descent.

The current TA route takes a longer, switchbacking path down from the saddle, but the old trail was still visible, a more direct line straight down the slope that previous generations of hikers had worn into the hillside before the route was changed. We took it. The descent was steeper and more demanding on the knees than the switchbacks would have been, but it was faster, and with twenty three kilometres to cover and daylight to consider, faster mattered.

The wind, which had been at our backs or across our flanks for most of the morning, now swung around and hit us head-on. It blew straight up the valley, cold and steady and strong, the kind of persistent headwind that does not gust or relent but simply pushes against every forward step with a force that turns easy walking into work. We leaned into it and kept moving, the tussock around us flattened and streaming, our jackets pressed against our chests, each step a small negotiation between our momentum and the wind's resistance.

The trail led us south toward the Potts River and what should have been a straightforward crossing to the carpark on the far side. But as we approached the riverbank and looked down at the water, the crossing we had been counting on was not there. The Potts River was running fast, swollen and discoloured, the water a milky brown that spoke clearly of sediment carried down from the mountains by rainfall that had fallen days ago but was still working its way through the system. A discoloured river is a river that cannot be read. The depth cannot be judged, the current cannot be trusted, and the stones beneath the surface are invisible. The trail notes were explicit. If the Potts River is discoloured and cannot be crossed, do not attempt it.

We stood on the bank and accepted what the river was telling us. The rain that had closed Deception Gorge to us days ago was still reaching forward through time and water, blocking our path even here, even now, even after we had rerouted and pushed through and done everything the trail had asked. There was nothing to do but turn around.

We backtracked and followed the fence line on the true left bank of the river, picking our way along the boundary until it delivered us to the road. It was getting late. The afternoon was well advanced, the light beginning to soften toward evening, and our hopes for a hitch were fading with it. This was a quiet road in a remote corner of Canterbury, the kind of place where the gap between cars could be measured in fractions of hours rather than minutes, and the prospect of standing on the roadside until dark was becoming increasingly real.

Torrin jumped the fence first. As Anth was climbing over behind him, a car appeared, coming up the hill from the direction we needed to go. Torrin reacted instantly, thumb out before his feet were properly set, the reflexes of a seasoned hitcher overriding any concern about dignity or timing. The car pulled over. An Australian, a fellow countryman on holiday, who listened to where we needed to go and said he was heading that way. Ashburton. An hour's drive south through the Canterbury Plains, the farmland rolling past the windows as the daylight completed its retreat and the mountains we had been walking through for days receded in the rear-view mirror until they were just a dark line on the northern horizon.

Ashburton. A service town on the plains, sitting astride the river that shares its name, the kind of quiet, practical New Zealand town that exists to serve the farming community around it and offers thru-hikers exactly what they need without pretending to be anything it is not. We checked into Taylor's Motel, and the room had a spa bath. An actual spa bath, sitting in the bathroom like a promise. Anth lowered himself into the hot water with the slow, groaning reverence of a man whose legs and feet and bruised body had been asking for exactly this since Comyns Hut, and the heat seeped into every ache and every cut and every stiff joint and did what days of walking could not, it let everything stop hurting, even if only for an hour.

We checked the weather. And there it was, the news we had been half expecting but wholly dreading. Snow. Not just on the peaks but at lower elevations, the kind of sustained cold snap that closes the mountain passes and turns the high country trails from challenging to genuinely dangerous. This late in the season, with autumn deepening toward winter, the window for safe southbound travel through the Southern Alps was closing, and the forecast suggested it had already closed.

We discussed our options in the quiet of the motel room, the spa still warm, the trail map spread between us. The conversation was difficult. The realisation that our southbound journey on the TA was over, not because we chose to stop but because the mountains had decided for us, carried an emotional weight that neither of us had been fully prepared for. There were still sections to walk, still huts to reach, still passes to cross, and the unfinished line on the map would follow us home like an incomplete sentence. We would come back. Sometime in a few years, we would return to pick up where the snow had forced us to leave off. But that was the future, and the present was a motel room in Ashburton and the quiet disappointment of a journey interrupted.

But the trip was not over. After the disappointment had settled and been accepted, a new plan took shape. There were sections of the TA further north, at the top of the South Island, that Torrin had walked during his thru-hike but Anth had not. The Queen Charlotte Track through the Marlborough Sounds. The Pelorus Bridge section. The Richmond Ranges, those formidable mountains that TA hikers speak of with a mixture of respect and wariness. If we headed north and walked those sections, it would fill in the gaps for Anth, bringing his tally of completed trail closer to the unbroken line that every thru-hiker dreams of. It was not the direction we had planned to walk, but the trail had been teaching us for weeks now that plans are suggestions and flexibility is survival, and heading north to walk trail we had not yet shared felt infinitely better than heading home with time still on our hands and legs still willing to carry us.

The decision was made. North. To the Sounds, to the river, to the ranges. The southbound chapter was closed, but the story was not finished. We would keep walking.Read more