The Name on the Wall
Apr 13–14 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C
The wind was still pushing at the walls of Comyns Hut when we left, the high country flexing its muscles in the early morning cold. What lay ahead, according to the trail app, was rough and unformed. Past hikers had noted between sixty and seventy creek crossings on this section. We started counting. We lost count.
The trail, if it could be called that, followed the North Branch of the Ashburton River upstream toward Round Hill Creek, and from the very first steps the day declared its intentions. The route was confined to the streambed, crossing and recrossing the water in an endless sequence of fords that blurred into one continuous act of wading. There were no formed paths between the crossings, no respite of dry ground that lasted long enough to forget the cold water that had just filled our boots and was about to fill them again. Each crossing was straightforward individually, shin-deep and manageable, but multiplied by sixty or seventy they became something else entirely, a war of attrition waged by the river against our feet and our patience, each ford a small withdrawal from reserves that were not being replenished.
And then came the tussock.
As the trail left the streambed and began its ascent toward Clent Hills Saddle, the terrain transformed into what can only be described as tussock hell. The path was not defined. The orange trail markers were spaced far enough apart that finding the next one required stopping, scanning, and hoping, and between them lay a landscape of dense, waist-high tussock that concealed everything beneath it with the quiet malice of a trap that has been set and is waiting. The headwaters of the streams we had been crossing ran beneath the tussock, invisible channels of cold water threading through the root systems under a canopy of grass that looked solid enough to walk on. It was not. Both of us plunged through the tussock and into these hidden creeks, the ground giving way without warning, legs disappearing to the knee or thigh into freezing water that had been flowing silently beneath what we had trusted as solid earth. Each fall was a shock, the sudden cold and the jarring impact and the scramble to haul yourself out of a hole you had not known existed, pack pulling you backward, hands grabbing at tussock that offered no reliable grip.
And the speargrass. The spaniard plants grew among the tussock in dense, vicious clusters, their leaves rigid and sharp as needles, radiating outward from the base like green explosions frozen in time. When we fell into the hidden creeks, the speargrass was there to catch us, its spines piercing through clothing and into skin with a precision that felt personal. Our legs were soon bloody, scored with thin red lines from the repeated encounters with plants that seemed to have evolved specifically to punish anyone foolish enough to walk through their territory. The combination was relentless, tussock that hid water, water that dropped you into speargrass, speargrass that drew blood, and then more tussock stretching ahead in every direction with no indication of which clump was solid ground and which was a trapdoor.
The climb to Clent Hills Saddle was earned through sheer stubbornness. At 1,480 metres, it was the highest point of the section, and on a clear day it afforded views across the Longman Range and down into the wider Lake Heron Basin, a vast, open landscape of tussock and river and distant mountains that stretched south toward the next chapter of the trail. We sat on the saddle, legs bloody and boots full of water, and looked out across a view that the morning's punishment had somehow made more beautiful for the suffering it had cost to reach.
The descent from the saddle brought scree fields, those loose, sliding slopes of broken rock that require an entirely different kind of walking, weight back, steps short, feet skating across the surface as the stones shift and clatter beneath each footfall. After the tussock and the hidden creeks, the scree felt almost honest in its difficulty, the danger visible and the surface at least predictable in its unpredictability. We picked our way across and down, the trail eventually finding firmer ground as the ridge descended toward the valley below.
And then we saw them. Rain clouds. Closing in over the mountains from the west, a dark, heavy front that was moving with the steady, unhurried inevitability of weather that knows it has nowhere else to be. We stopped and assessed. The distance remaining to Double Hut. The speed of the clouds. The mathematics of whether we could outrun what was coming. The numbers did not look good. We donned our rain gear and pack covers while the sky was still dry above us, preparing for what seemed inevitable rather than waiting to be caught unprepared.
With about forty-five minutes of walking still between us and the hut, the rain arrived. It came down hard and fast, driven by the wind that had been building all day, soaking everything that the rain gear could not cover and finding its way through every gap and seam into the spaces beneath. The trail became a stream, the visibility dropped, and the final stretch to Double Hut became a head-down, grinding push through conditions that stripped the day back to its most fundamental elements. Walk. Breathe. Keep moving.
Torrin, seeing Anth struggling against the rain and the wind with the weight of his pack dragging at every step, did what he had done so many times on this trail. He turned back. Ran fifty metres down the trail, took Anth's pack, shouldered it and together they pushed on through the rain toward the hut. It was not a grand gesture. Torrin would not have described it as one. It was simply what you do when your father is tired and the weather is closing in and the hut is not far and the weight can be shared. But Anth felt it, the sudden lightness on his back, the ease of forward motion without the pack's relentless pull, and he understood it for what it was. Love, expressed in the language of the trail, which is the language of action rather than words.
Double Hut appeared through the rain, six bunks and a roof and walls that the wind tested but could not breach. We pushed through the door and into the shelter with the gasping relief of hikers who have been racing weather and losing, and stood dripping on the floor while the storm raged outside.
As we dried off and settled in, the walls of Double Hut revealed their treasure. Names. Dates. Messages. Scrawled in pencil and pen and marker across the door and the interior walls, a layered chronicle of every person who had sheltered here and felt compelled to leave their mark. Some were recent, TA thru-hikers from seasons just past. Others were decades old, faded but legible, the handwriting of musterers and hunters and high country wanderers from an era when these huts served a working landscape rather than a recreational one. And there, among them, a name that stopped us both. Sir Edmund Hillary. 1951. Two years before he stood on the summit of Everest, the most famous New Zealander who ever lived had sheltered in this same hut, sat within these same walls, and written his name where we were now reading it. The weight of that connection, the thread of shared experience that linked our small, wet, exhausted arrival to the presence of a man who had redefined what humans believed possible, was extraordinary. We touched the wall near his name and felt the decades collapse.
The night was cold and windy, the storm that had chased us in continuing its work on the hut and the mountains around it. The walls creaked and the roof hummed and the darkness outside was absolute, the kind of dark that only exists in places where the nearest electric light is a valley and a mountain range away. We burrowed into our sleeping bags and let the cold press against the windows while the warmth of the hut, modest as it was, held firm around us.
We awoke to a world transformed. Snow. Every mountain top that surrounded the basin was white, dusted overnight by the same storm that had soaked us on the trail and battered the hut through the dark hours. The peaks stood sharp and brilliant against a sky that had cleared to a deep, post-storm blue, the snow catching the morning sun and blazing with a light that made us squint and reach for sunglasses. It was stunning, the kind of morning that the mountains produce as an apology for the violence of the night before, and we stood in the doorway of Double Hut and took it in, two small figures in a vast white and gold landscape, Hillary's name on the wall behind us, the trail stretching south toward whatever came next.Read more
The Frozen and the Fearless
Apr 14–15 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 11 °C
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
Unfinished Lines
Apr 15–16 in New Zealand ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C
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
The Trail is Not a Straight Line
Apr 16–17 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 17 °C
We walked up the road from Taylor's Motel and put our thumbs out one more time. Within thirty minutes, a car pulled over. The driver was an Ethiopian dairy farmer who had been working in New Zealand for eleven years, another thread in the extraordinary tapestry of people who have made this country their home and who stop for hitchhikers on quiet Canterbury roads because generosity transcends every border. He told us about his life in Canterbury, his son and life as a single Dad, the journey from the highlands of East Africa to the green, flat dairy country of the Canterbury Plains, and we told him about the trail and the mountains and the snow that had turned us around. He took us all the way to Christchurch, the plains unrolling flat and green outside the windows, the mountains we had been walking through now a distant line on the western horizon, more memory than geography.
Christchurch was a shock. Not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was everything the backcountry was not. After weeks of huts where the only sounds were wind and river and rain on tin roofs, the city arrived in a wall of noise and movement and sheer human density that felt almost physical. Traffic. Crowds. Intersections controlled by lights instead of instinct. Buildings that rose higher than any ridgeline we had climbed. The simple act of walking down a footpath felt strange when the body had calibrated itself to riverbed and tussock and muddy trail, and the constant presence of other people, strangers who were not hikers, who were not heading north or south on the TA, who had no packs and no blisters and no stories about frozen tents or feral pigs, was disorienting in a way that was difficult to explain to anyone who had not just spent weeks in the backcountry. The world had not changed. We had. The trail had stripped our daily existence back to its most fundamental elements, walk, eat, sleep, shelter, and the city, with its thousand choices and its thousand distractions, felt like a language we had once spoken fluently but now had to consciously translate.
We grabbed lunch and sat eating in the busy hum of a Christchurch afternoon, watching people move past who had no idea that two hikers were sitting among them quietly recalibrating to the speed and scale of urban life. Then Torrin went to the barber. His hair and beard had not been touched since he had set foot on the trail months ago, and the cumulative effect of all those weeks and all those kilometres had transformed him into something that looked more bushman than human. The wild, tangled hair. The beard that had grown past any definition of intentional and into the territory of pure neglect. He walked into the barber's chair looking like he had been living in the mountains for the better part of a year, which was not far from the truth, and walked out looking like an acceptable member of society again. The transformation was remarkable. Underneath all that trail-grown hair was the young man who had started this journey, still there, just temporarily buried beneath the physical evidence of every kilometre he had walked since Cape Reinga. Anth barely recognised him.
The evening was given over to the practical work of transition. We went out for dinner and then stocked up on supplies at the Pak'n Save, filling our food bags for the Queen Charlotte Track with the improved wisdom of hikers who now knew exactly what they needed and exactly what was dead weight. The supermarket aisles felt absurd after weeks of hut pantries and trail mix, the sheer abundance of choice almost paralysing after a world that had been simplified to whatever could be carried on a back.
Back at the hostel, we repacked. And as we sorted gear and weighed food bags and checked the trail notes for the Queen Charlotte Track, the reality of what we were doing settled around us like a change in the weather. We were heading north. Not south. Not toward Bluff, that distant southern point that every TA hiker carries in their mind like a compass bearing, the endpoint that gives the trail its direction and its meaning. We were turning around, retracing latitude, walking away from the finish line rather than toward it.
It was the right decision. The mountains had made that clear with their snow and their forecasts and their absolute indifference to our schedule. But right decisions and easy decisions are not the same thing, and this one sat in the chest like a stone that would take time to dissolve. Every southbound kilometre we had walked, from St Arnaud through the Waiau Pass to the frozen tent at Buicks Bridge, had been a kilometre toward something. A goal. An endpoint. A line on the map that stretched from Cape Reinga to Bluff. Now that line was broken, and the break would remain until we could come back, in a year or two or three, and stitch it closed again.
But there was another way to look at it, and gradually, over the course of that evening in Christchurch, it was this other perspective that began to take hold. The Queen Charlotte Track, the Pelorus Bridge, the Richmond Ranges. These were not consolation prizes. They were sections of the Te Araroa that Torrin had walked and loved and spoken about, sections that Anth had yet to see, and walking them together would fill gaps in Anth's own journey through this country that would otherwise remain empty. The trail was not a straight line. It never had been. It was a collection of sections, each with its own character and its own beauty, and the order in which you walked them mattered less than the fact that you walked them at all.
Early the next morning, we shouldered our packs and headed for the bus north.Read more
Last Boat to the Sounds
Apr 17–18 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌬 16 °C
The alarm went off early and we were out the door of Urbanz before the hostel had properly woken up, packs on our backs and the city still quiet around us as we made our way to the InterCity bus stop. Five hours to Picton. Five hours of watching the South Island scroll past the windows, the flat Canterbury farmland giving way to the rolling hills of Marlborough, the landscape shifting from the broad, open plains we had been walking through to the greener, more intimate country of the northern South Island. We stopped a couple of times, the brief, functional pauses of a long-distance bus where passengers stretch their legs and buy coffee and stare at nothing in particular before climbing back on board. Neither of us slept. There was too much to watch, too much country passing by, and the quiet anticipation of what lay ahead kept the mind turning over even as the body sat still.
Picton arrived in the early afternoon, the small port town sitting at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, its marina crowded with ferries and water taxis and the various craft that serve a community whose roads are as much water as tarmac. We had less than twenty minutes. The InterCity bus had delivered us with the kind of tight margin that turns a walk to the marina into something closer to a controlled jog, two hikers with full packs weaving through the streets of Picton with the focused urgency of people who knew that missing the last water taxi of the day meant a night in town rather than a night on the trail.
We made it. Just. The water taxi was still at the marina and we managed to book our passage to Ship Cove, the traditional starting point of the Queen Charlotte Track, where Captain Cook had anchored in 1770 and where most hikers begin their journey south through the Marlborough Sounds. But the weather had other ideas. The sound was rough, the wind pushing whitecaps across the water and making the boat pitch and roll as it headed out from the shelter of the marina into the open channel. The skipper assessed the conditions and made the call. Too rough to make it all the way to Ship Cove. He could take us as far as Schoolhouse Bay at Resolution Bay, five kilometres south of the official trailhead, and that would have to do.
It would do. Torrin had already walked the entire Queen Charlotte Track during his North Island and top-of-the-South thru-hike, and Anth was not concerned about missing the first five kilometres. After the sections they had skipped further south, after Deception Gorge and the snow-closed passes and the pivot from southbound to northbound, five kilometres of coastal track was not the kind of gap that troubled the conscience. The water taxi dropped us at the bay and pulled away into the chop, and we stood on the shore with our packs and looked at the bush rising steeply from the water's edge and the track disappearing into it, and felt the familiar, welcome sensation of being back on trail.
Schoolhouse Bay campsite was empty. Just us, the trees, and the sound of the wind in the canopy and the water on the shore. We pitched the tent on the flat ground above the beach, the fly pulled taut against the gusts that found their way through the bush from the open sound beyond. The Marlborough Sounds. A landscape utterly unlike anything we had walked through in the Canterbury high country, the drowned river valleys filled with sea, the ridgelines plunging steeply to the water on both sides, the bush dense and green and lush with the moisture that the sound carried in every breeze. After the tussock and scree and frozen tents of the last week, it felt like arriving in a different country entirely.
And then the wekas appeared. Those bold, brown, flightless birds that patrol New Zealand's backcountry campsites like small, feathered opportunists, utterly without fear and possessed of a curiosity that borders on criminal intent. We had encountered them before, earlier on the trail, and knew what they were capable of. But knowing and preventing are different things. One of them made a direct and purposeful run at Torrin's Birkenstock slides, the camp shoes he wore around the tent when his hiking boots were off, and before he could react the bird had seized one in its beak and was dragging it away across the campsite with the determined waddle of a thief who has committed to the act and sees no reason to hurry. Torrin gave chase, retrieved his footwear from the indignant weka, and placed both slides inside the tent where they could not be stolen by wildlife. The bird watched from a distance, unrepentant, already calculating its next move.
The weather was wet and windy, the rain coming in squalls that swept across the sound and rattled the fly and turned the bush into a dripping, streaming world of green. But standing in the rain at sea level in the Marlborough Sounds, with the tent up and the food hung and the trail stretching south through some of the most beautiful coastal bush in New Zealand, the weather felt like nothing more than weather. We could walk in this. We could camp in this. Unlike the snow that had closed the mountains to the south and ended our southbound journey, this was rain that would make the trail muddy and the views misty and the sleeping bags a little harder to keep dry, but it would not stop us. The Queen Charlotte Track was waiting, and tomorrow we would walk it.Read more
Sandflies and Sleepless Nights
Apr 18–19 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌧 14 °C
We left Schoolhouse Bay in light rain, the kind of soft, persistent drizzle that the Marlborough Sounds seem to produce as a default setting, the bush dripping steadily from every leaf and branch, the trail already wet beneath our feet. The Queen Charlotte Track was a different beast to anything we had walked in the Canterbury high country. Where the tussock and scree of the previous weeks had been open and exposed, this was enclosed, intimate, the trail winding through dense coastal bush along ridgelines that dropped steeply to the sound on both sides, the water visible in glimpses through the canopy, grey-green and restless beneath the low cloud.
The track was well formed and well maintained, a marked contrast to the rough, unformed routes we had been picking through south of Arthur's Pass. There were no hidden creeks beneath the tussock here, no scree fields, no sixty river crossings. Just a clear, graded path through beautiful bush, the kind of walking that lets the mind relax and the eyes wander and the legs remember what it feels like to move without constantly scanning for the next obstacle. It was, after the punishment of the high country, something close to a gift.
We decided to stop in at Furneaux Lodge for lunch. The historic lodge sits at the head of Endeavour Inlet, one of the long, narrow arms of Queen Charlotte Sound, and it offered something that DOC campsites and backcountry huts do not. A restaurant. A bar. Food that someone else had cooked and would serve on an actual plate. We sat down and ate with the quiet pleasure of hikers who had earned every calorie through weeks of trail food and supermarket resupply, and watched the rain through the windows while the warmth of the lodge settled around us like a blanket.
And then the rain set in properly. Not the light drizzle of the morning but heavy, sustained rain that hammered the roof of the lodge and turned the world outside the windows into a streaming, grey curtain of water. We sat and waited, nursing drinks and watching the downpour, hoping it would ease before we had to shoulder our packs and walk back into it. The timing, for once, was kind. Just as we left the lodge, the rain backed off, dropping from heavy to moderate to something manageable, the kind of wet that soaks you slowly rather than all at once.
But the delay had cost us daylight. The long lunch and the wait for the rain to ease had eaten into the afternoon, and the kilometres still remaining to Camp Bay now had to be covered in a shrinking window of light. We pushed on through bush that was streaming with water, every surface running, every gully a small torrent. The streams along the track were raging, the small, polite waterways that in normal conditions trickle across the trail now running fast and brown and swollen with the rainfall that the bush above was funnelling down every drainage line into the sound below. Water ran across the track itself in sheets, turning sections of the well-formed path into shallow streams that we waded through with the resigned familiarity of hikers for whom wet feet had long since ceased to be an event worth noting.
We arrived at Camp Bay campsite right on dark, the last of the daylight draining from the sky as we walked into the clearing, the head torches coming out of our packs for the first time only once we had arrived and needed to set up. Another few minutes on the trail and we would have been walking blind. The campsite had a cooking shelter, a basic roofed structure with open sides that offered protection from the rain if not much else, and we made a decision born of tiredness and the desire to avoid pitching a wet tent in the dark. We would cowboy camp in the shelter, rolling out our sleeping mats and bags on the hard floor beneath the roof and sleeping without the tent's thin walls between us and the night.
It was a decision that the sandflies and mosquitoes of the Marlborough Sounds celebrated with enthusiasm. Torrin barely slept. The open sides of the shelter that kept the rain off did nothing to keep the insects out, and the warm, wet conditions of the Sounds are precisely the climate in which sandflies and mosquitoes thrive. They came in clouds, invisible in the dark but audible in that high, thin whine that is among the most maddening sounds the natural world produces, finding every inch of exposed skin and making sleep an exercise in futility. Torrin lay in his sleeping bag and fought them for hours, the kind of night where consciousness never fully releases its grip because the body is under constant, low-level assault from creatures too small to see and too numerous to defeat.
We checked the forecast in the morning. Rain. For the entire remaining duration of our hike through the Sounds. Every day, more rain, the weather system that had settled over the top of the South Island showing no inclination to move on. The Queen Charlotte Track would be walked in the wet. It was not what we had hoped for, but hope and weather operate on entirely separate systems, and we had learned by now which one to trust.Read more
When the Tent Says Enough
Apr 19–20 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C
Torrin was exhausted. The sandflies and mosquitoes of Camp Bay had stolen his night, and the tiredness sat behind his eyes and in his movements with the unmistakable weight of sleep deprivation. We looked at the trail notes and made the call. Rather than push on through a longer day, we would add an extra day to the Queen Charlotte and walk just eight kilometres to the next DOC campsite at Bay of Many Coves. A short day. A kind day. The trail would still be there tomorrow, and a rested Torrin was worth more than a few extra kilometres ticked off the map.
The rain, as if sensing that a gesture of goodwill was overdue, eased for the first time since we had arrived in the Sounds. No sun. The sky remained a low, grey ceiling that sat on the ridgelines and refused to lift. But no rain either, the simple absence of water falling on us from above felt like a luxury. The track wound along the ridgeline through bush that was still dripping from the previous days' downpours, every fern frond carrying its load of water, every branch releasing a small shower when the wind moved through the canopy. But we walked dry, or as close to dry as the Marlborough Sounds would allow, and the shorter distance let us move at a pace that felt almost leisurely after weeks of pushing for big kilometres.
Bay of Many Coves campsite sat up on the ridge rather than at sea level, a location that offered views out through the bush toward the sound below but came with the trade-off of exposure. We set up the tent, cooked dinner in the shelter, and headed to bed as the rain started up again, the familiar percussion of water on the fly resuming as though it had merely been pausing for breath.
What came during the night was not rain. It was a storm. The wind built through the dark hours with a steady, escalating fury that went from gusts to sustained assault, the weather reports later confirming speeds up to seventy kilometres per hour. The tent shuddered and flexed, the fly snapping and cracking like a sail in a gale, the poles flexing under loads they were never designed to endure in an exposed ridgeline campsite. We lay inside and listened to the fabric strain and the guy ropes hum and felt the particular helplessness of people whose shelter is a few millimetres of nylon between them and a force of nature that could dismantle it in seconds.
It did not dismantle it. But it did not leave it unscathed. We awoke to find a twenty-centimetre rip in the fly, torn open during the worst of the gusts, the fabric split along a seam where the wind had found a weakness and exploited it with the patient, relentless force that wind always applies. It was potentially repairable with tape, but the damage was done and so was our confidence in the tent's ability to withstand another night like the last one.
We checked the forecast. Worse. The next couple of days promised more of the same, heavier rain and stronger winds, the weather system doubling down on its commitment to making the Marlborough Sounds as inhospitable as possible. We sat in the shelter and made the call. We would push on to the Portage Hub Hotel, get a roof over our heads, and reassess the rest of the hike from there. The tent needed repair, our gear needed drying, and the weather needed to be taken seriously rather than endured on principle. There is a line between toughness and stubbornness, and a ripped fly in seventy-kilometre-per-hour winds is a reasonable place to draw it.Read more
The Last Day Walking
Apr 20–21 in New Zealand ⋅ 🌧 10 °C
Today was a head-down-and-go day. There was no easing into it, no gentle start through dripping bush with the promise of clearing skies. The wind hit us from the moment we left the campsite at Bay of Many Coves, gusting across the exposed ridgeline with a force that shoved us sideways on the track and made every step a negotiation between forward progress and lateral survival. The rain came down without pause, without variation, without mercy, a constant, driving downpour that turned the well-formed Queen Charlotte Track into a river. Water flowed down the trail in sheets, following the path of least resistance, which was the same path we were trying to walk on, and the surface beneath became a treacherous, slippery channel of mud and running water that offered no grip and no forgiveness.
Both of us slipped. Many times. The kind of slips where a boot finds mud instead of ground and the world tilts suddenly and the body goes down hard, pack driving you into the earth, hands grabbing at whatever is closest, the impact jarring through hips and knees and wrists that had already absorbed more punishment than they had signed up for. We picked ourselves up each time with the grim, mechanical resilience of hikers who have no option other than to keep moving, wiped the mud from our hands, adjusted our packs, and pushed on. There was no point stopping. There was no shelter between campsites, no lodge to duck into, no reason to stand still in the rain when standing still only made you wetter and colder without bringing you any closer to a roof.
We hiked fast. The pace was driven not by fitness or enthusiasm but by the simple desire to be finished, to reach the Portage Hotel and get out of the weather and behind a door that the wind could not open. The track descended from the ridge toward Torea Saddle, the bush streaming with water on both sides, the sound below invisible behind the low cloud and the rain, and we moved through it with the focused, inward determination of people who have reduced their world to a single objective. Get there.
And then, somewhere in the final kilometres, Torrin's backpack broke. The hip belt, that critical piece of engineering that transfers the weight of the pack from the shoulders to the hips and makes long-distance hiking possible, tore away from the pack body. It was not a gradual failure, not a slow degradation that could be nursed along with improvised repairs. It simply broke, the stitching or the attachment point giving way after months of continuous use on the Te Araroa, the accumulated stress of every kilometre from Cape Reinga onward finally exceeding what the materials could bear. It was unfixable on the trail, and without the hip belt the full weight of the pack transferred to the shoulders, a brutal redistribution of load that turned the remaining distance into a grinding, painful endurance test.
We arrived at the Portage Hotel wet, muddy, exhausted, and carrying a broken pack between us. We checked in, showered until the hot water had done everything it could for bodies that were bruised and aching and cold to the core, and spread our gear across every available surface to dry. The ripped fly. The soaked sleeping bags. The clothes that had not been properly dry since Christchurch. The room looked like a tramping equipment store had exploded, every chair and railing and door handle draped with something wet.
We had pizza for dinner. Proper pizza, hot and generous and excessive, eaten in the warmth of the hotel restaurant while the rain continued its assault on the windows and the wind howled across Kenepuru Sound outside. And over that pizza, over the crusts and the cold beers and the quiet that settles between two people who both know what needs to be said, we made the call.
We were done.
Three weeks early. Three weeks of planned hiking still on the itinerary, sections of trail stretching south through country we had not yet seen, the promise of the Richmond Ranges and the Pelorus Bridge and whatever lay beyond them, and beyond all of that, the unfinished line south to Bluff that had been the original dream of this trip. All of it still out there, still waiting, still marked on the maps we had been carrying since Christchurch. But the snow had closed the south. The rain and wind had savaged the Sounds. The tent fly was ripped. Torrin's pack was broken. And the weather forecast offered nothing but more of the same, day after day of rain and wind that would turn every remaining kilometre into the same grinding, slippery, head-down slog we had endured today.
There is a moment on every long trail where the decision to stop is not a failure but an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that the body has limits. That the weather has authority. That the gear, like the humans who carry it, can only take so much before something gives. We had pushed through rain on Harper Pass and snow in the Canterbury high country and tussock hell and frozen tents and sixty creek crossings and rivers too swollen to ford. We had pivoted north when the mountains said no and kept walking when the easier choice would have been to go home. But tonight, in a warm hotel with pizza on the table and a storm outside that showed no sign of relenting, the trail was telling us it was time.
We booked the water taxi from Torea Bay back to Picton for the next morning. We booked the InterCity bus from Picton to Christchurch. We changed our flights back to Australia, pulling the dates forward by three weeks, the airline's change fees a small price for the certainty of knowing the decision was made and the logistics were in motion. Each booking clicked into place with a finality that was both relieving and quietly devastating, the trip we had imagined being formally replaced by the trip we had actually had.
It was a fizzle of an ending. Neither of us pretended otherwise. You dream of finishing a trail with tired legs and full hearts, standing at a signpost that marks the end and feeling the accumulated weight of every kilometre settle into something like completion. You do not dream of finishing in a hotel room with a broken pack and a ripped fly and rain on the windows and three weeks of unwalked trail still on the map. But the trail does not care about your dreams. It gives you what it gives you. And we sat with that, in the warmth of the Portage, and listened to the rain, and let the decision settle.
Tomorrow, the water taxi back to Picton. The trip was not yet over. But the walking was.Read more
A Father, A Son, A Finished Chapter
Apr 21–22 in New Zealand ⋅ ☁️ 8 °C
The water taxi from Torea Bay was a quiet ride. The rain had eased to a fine, persistent drizzle, the kind that the Marlborough Sounds seem to issue as a baseline rather than a weather event, and the boat moved through the grey water past hillsides that we had walked along yesterday in conditions that had nearly broken us. From the comfort of the cabin, with our packs piled on the deck and our gear still half damp from the Portage, the Sounds looked beautiful in a subdued, melancholy way. The bush rising green from the water. The cloud sitting low on the ridges. The occasional bay opening into view, sheltered and still. It was the country we would have walked through, seen now from the water rather than the trail, and the change of perspective had the strange effect of making the hike feel both more real and more finished than it had felt in the hotel room the night before.
Picton arrived. The marina, the small streets, the InterCity bus stop where we had begun this northern leg of the trip what felt like months ago but had been only days. We boarded the bus to Christchurch with the resigned, quiet air of travellers in transit, packs stowed, seats found, the long drive south stretching ahead.
On the bus, we got chatting with a young woman from the UK who had been on the same water taxi as us that morning. She had also been hiking the Queen Charlotte Track, and she had also been rained out, the same weather system that had ripped our fly and broken Torrin's pack having driven her off the trail with similar finality. There was a particular kind of camaraderie in the conversation, the shared recognition between hikers who have been beaten by the same storm, and the kilometres to Christchurch passed more easily for the company. She, it turned out, was heading to the same hostel we had booked. Lylo, near the airport, the practical choice for travellers with early morning flights.
Lylo was very, very nice. After weeks of huts with dirt floors and tent sites and the cooking shelter at Camp Bay, the hostel felt like genuine luxury, modern and clean and well designed in a way that hostels in our experience rarely managed. We dropped our packs and settled in, the strangeness of the day's transition settling around us. This morning we had been on a water taxi in the Marlborough Sounds. Tonight we would sleep in a bed near Christchurch Airport. Tomorrow we would be in Australia. The compression of distance that modern travel performs is something the body never quite reconciles with, particularly when the journey it is undoing took weeks to make on foot.
We went out for our last meal in New Zealand. McDonald's. There was something fitting about it, the unceremonious end to a journey that had begun with such ambition. No celebratory dinner at a fine restaurant. No final toast over local wine and a view of the Southern Alps. Just two tired hikers eating burgers under fluorescent lights, the trip finishing the way it had occasionally been sustained, with cheap, hot, immediate food and the simple pleasure of not having to cook it ourselves.
The early morning came faster than we wanted it to. A six o'clock flight meant a four o'clock alarm, the dark, disoriented shuffle through the hostel and across to the airport with packs that felt strange now in a different context, no longer instruments of self-sufficiency in the backcountry but simply oversized luggage in a transit hub. Brisbane airport welcomed us back to Australia with long delays through customs, the queues winding and patient, the bureaucratic friction that travel always seems to generate at exactly the moment when you most want to be home. The delays meant missing the direct train to Gympie, the connection that would have taken Anth most of the way home in a single ride, but a redirected route to Nambour appeared, and Sal would meet us there in the bus.
And so it ended. Not with the photograph at Stirling Point in Bluff that every TA hiker carries in their imagination, but with a delayed customs queue and a redirected train and Sal waiting at a station on the Sunshine Coast.
Sitting on that train, watching the Queensland countryside slide past, the whole arc of the trip settled around us with a clarity that the daily grind of hiking had never quite allowed. It had begun, for Anth, weeks ago at Annie and Simon's place, where Torrin had arrived after his long journey from Cape Reinga and the top of the South Island, and where Anth had joined him to begin the southbound chapter together. Annie and Simon, who had welcomed us in with the warmth that good people always seem to extend to thru-hikers who turn up at their door, had set the tone for everything that followed. The trail had begun in their living room, in conversation and shared meals and the small, important rituals of preparation, before it had begun on the ground.
From there, St Arnaud and Lake Rotoiti, the first steps of our South Island walk, Anth's body protesting and the mind catching up. Travers Saddle and the rest stops every twenty metres, the quiet humiliation of a fitness gap that the trail had since mostly closed. Angelus Hut at the lake under the stars, one of the most beautiful nights of our lives. The blue river crossings of Waiau Pass. The rain that had closed Deception Gorge and the train that had carried us past country we would never get to walk. Hanmer Springs and the hot pools. Tim's twenty-thousand-hectare merino station and the impromptu detour to Lake Coleridge. The sixty creek crossings before Comyns Hut and the hidden creeks beneath the tussock that had drawn blood from our legs. Edmund Hillary's signature on the wall of Double Hut, written in 1951, two years before Everest. The frozen tent at Buicks Bridge. The feral pig that would not be intimidated by rocks. The Potts River discoloured and impassable. The pivot from south to north when the snow closed the mountains, the difficult acceptance that the southbound journey was over for now. The Queen Charlotte Track in the rain, the wekas stealing Birkenstocks, the sandflies at Camp Bay, the seventy-kilometre-per-hour gusts that ripped the fly at Bay of Many Coves, and the storm-driven slog to the Portage that had finally said enough.
It was not a complete trail. The line on the map was unfinished, broken in two places by weather and circumstance, and the final stretch to Bluff remained as a promise to ourselves rather than an achievement. But what we had walked was extraordinary. Hundreds of kilometres through some of the most beautiful and demanding country in the world. Mountains crossed and rivers forded and huts shared with strangers. The slow, accumulated transformation of a body that had arrived unprepared and finished capable, and the deeper, less measurable transformation of a relationship that had been tested and strengthened in ways that ordinary life never quite manages to do.
A father and a son had walked into the South Island and walked out again, and the son was no longer just the boy Anth had raised but a young man whose competence and patience and quiet generosity had been on display every day for weeks, and the father was no longer just the man Torrin had grown up with but a hiking partner who had earned his place on the trail through stubbornness and slow improvement and the willingness to keep walking when stopping would have been easier. We had found each other again, in the way that adult parents and adult children sometimes do when the right conditions allow it, and the trail had been those conditions.
We would come back. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe in three. The unfinished sections would wait. Te Araroa is not a trail that disappears, and the part of it that we had not walked would still be there when we were ready, the same passes and rivers and huts standing patient in the mountains while life happened elsewhere. And when we returned, we would walk those final kilometres together, and the line on the map would be closed, and the loop that this trip had left open would finally complete itself.
But that was the future. For now, there was a train rolling north toward Nambour, and Sal waiting at the station, and the quiet, deep tiredness of two people who had been somewhere extraordinary and were, at last, coming home.Read more
Traveler
Ahhhh