Windy Tops

Category: update

  • How to be less insane

    Apoligies for the double negative. The work things have finished and I’ve met up with Shaun and Sarah. We’ve already been to DC for a couple of days, which I heartily recommend — the Smithsonian Air and Space museum and the Spy Museum are both awesome. I won’t dwell on these in this post, however.

    After 2.5 weeks stuck in cities (or hotels), I finally had an opportunity to get out and go for a walk. This is good, because being stuck in hotels and in the city has been driving me insane. The only problem is that I don’t know exactly where I went. Shaun suggested the Blue Mountain Twin Summits Trail, which is part of Blue Mountain Reservation. I caught a Metro North train from New York up to a town called Peekskill, on the edge of the Hudson River. From the local railway station at Peekskill, it’s a roughly 1.609344 km walk to the entrance of Blue Range Reservation at the end of Lounsbury Lane.
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  • Yay for Taranaki

    I forgot to mention that we’re leaving to head up to Taranaki early’ish tomorrow where two different sides of Stacey’s family will be having two separate re-union things, and after that I’m hoping to get out for a couple of nights wandering somewhere in Egmont National Park, although so far I haven’t completely decided where. If the weather cooperates, it’s tempting just to try and find somewhere nice for fly-camping and sit around reading for a day or two, but I guess I’ll find out when I get there, and will write it up when I get back. I haven’t been getting out as frequently as I’ve wanted to lately, so I’m quite looking forward to it.

  • Buying packs and buying spinach

    Wow — the Tararuas have had three weekends of fantastic weather in a row, and I haven’t been there for any of them. I guess I did at least get out to the Ruahines a week ago, though. This Saturday and Sunday I stayed at home, however.

    For a while now, I’ve been keeping an eye out for a new pack to replace my disintegrating Macpac Glissade. It’s not really disintegrating, but I’ve patched it up with tape in a couple of places despite it only being a couple of years old. The major problem I’ve been having is that if and when I replace it, I want to make sure I’m getting something that I really want, and honestly there’s not a lot of selection in Wellington retailers right now as far as packs go. Just about everything is the same basic design, with pockets and openings all over the place. This is unfortunate because in essence I’m looking for a simple, relatively light single-access-point tramping pack without lots of zippers (which add weight unnecessarily) and without lots of bits hanging off it (which add more weight, and get caught on things).

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  • New Walking, Cycling and Track Recreation policies approved for Wellington

    In September I noted that the Wellington City Council was consulting on its recreation activities policy. This has now progressed, and the warm and fluffy press release branch of the Wellington City Council has now announced that three new policy documents have now been adopted, respectively for Walking, Cycling and Track Recreation.

    In summary, the press release claims that the adopted policies are a beneficial improvement over the old policies, and that the “majority” of tracks around Wellington will now be shared for walking and cycling. Although I’m not personally involved in cycling, this sounds like a sensible idea to me, certainly as far as off-street tracks are concerned. People already ride mountain bikes in many places where they haven’t officially been supposed to according to local rules that (I think) are out of date, and it works out quite well, at least as far as I’ve seen.

    I meet a lot of cyclists out and about around Wellington tracks, and without many exceptions they’ve nearly always been happy and smiley and polite and very respectful to other track users. Furthermore, mountain bike enthusiasts in particular often tend to help with keeping some of the less popular walking tracks walkable… both actively and simply through using uncommon tracks more frequently. This includes a few that I like walking myself and would probably be overgrown with gorse much more quickly if they didn’t have the odd bike pushing through.

    The actual policies aren’t yet available for objective review because the changes are still being inserted and formatted and prepared for public view, and so on, but they should be available in due course. It’ll be worth taking a proper look at them when they’re available.

  • Wellington Snowgum

    Stacey and I were in town earlier today, a couple of hours before the Tip Top Santa Parade, and we noticed that a Snowgum Clearance Shop seems to have opened in the Grand Arcade. Snowgum is an Australian outdoor retail outlet which also has retailers in Christchurch and Auckland. The new Wellington Clearance outlet is hidden underneath the escalators, in the same place where Mainly Tramping used to be before it closed down. (In fact, the old Mainly Tramping banner is still above the door.) It mostly seems to be clothes and footwear at the moment.

    Whether it’ll stay as a permanent fixture and become a complete Snowgum outlet, or simply remain a temporary clearance outlet, is an open question. I asked one of the people there and she wasn’t completely sure, but she thought they were testing Wellington at the moment to see how it goes and what sort of reaction there is. Perhaps it’ll help to fill part of the void of outdoor retailers at the moment, which has existed since Mainly Tramping and Tisdalls closed down.

  • Yet another attempt at Kapiti Island

    We’re having yet another attempt at Kapiti Island on this coming weekend, after the previous two efforts to get there failed due to forecasts of undesirable wind. I guess it’s the time of year, but with DOC having taken our $22 for visiting permits, we should definitely get there sooner or later. Maybe third time lucky, perhaps? I’m sick at home today which has been a minor let-down, but if I’m still sick then and the weather’s nice enough to go, I’ll be very disappointed.

    Meanwhile, we’ve been down to Otari-Wilton’s Bush a few times recently, which is within an easy walking distance and has helped to pass the time. It’s a very nice place to wander around. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I enjoy Wellington so much, given that between all the population it’s still easy to find places where it feels as if you’re much further away.

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  • And now I need a new one

    That could have gone better. My compass has just been claimed by the Ruahine Range during an “unscheduled” pack-floating incident in the Oroua River near Iron Gates Hut. I think it must have floated out of my pocket while I was concentrating on other things which, to be perfectly honest, seemed more important at the time. In hindsight I still think they were, and my robust little navigational instrument was a necessary price to pay. I guess it says something for making sure that everything’s tied down. It’s probably most of the way out to sea by now.

    It was a Silva Field 7, which is a very basic baseplate compass and it does the job perfectly. They retail for about $30 so it’s no great financial loss. It’s still a bit of a downer, though, since I make an effort not to leave junk lying around in the wilderness.

    Other than that, it was a worth-while experience. I’ll write something and post photographs of the trip in coming days. Meanwhile you could read Robb’s account of his solo trip in the same area a few days beforehand.

    Update, 27-10-2008: It seems I wrote the account of the whole trip faster than I thought.

  • Bird watching, bread baking and new routes

    The Kapiti Island thing didn’t go ahead yesterday, due to excessive wind or something. The boat skipper wasn’t keen to go out, and that seems fair enough. They didn’t take any of our money and DOC is happy to defer the visiting permit to a later date. Consequently we’ve put it off until next Saturday.

    I spent some of this morning baking bread, for which I’m still trying to get my recipe exact. I’ve increased the amount of yeast I put in over earlier occasions, because wholemeal flour doesn’t seem to like to rise as much as regular flour. I’m also trying to make some bread rolls just by rolling up some well-kneaded bread slop that I mixed together and putting it directly on a baking tray, rather than a nicely shaped bread baking pan. At this point it’s not clear how they’ll come out, but I guess we’ll find out later today. Right now the yeasted slop is enjoying the sunshine. Some time I hope to get a good enough technique to make some nice bread to take tramping. The problem so far is that it usually doesn’t last long enough for it to still be around when I’m packing.
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  • More consultation processes in the works

    It must be the season for government entities to be spreading consultation documents that relate to outdoor recreation. Here’s a quick summary of three particular consultations that are going on at the moment about legislation that might affect outdoor recreation.

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  • Onward to Kapiti Island

    I’m taking a break from tramping next weekend. To help fill it in, Stacey and I are hoping to go and visit Kapiti Island. I’d been put off in the past because my speedy anecdotal investigations had implied that it must be quite complicated to arrange a DOC permit to visit the island and separately arrange the transport. I browsed the online booking system (for DOC permits) last Friday, however, and discovered that rather than having to book weeks or months in advance, there were actually quite a lot of permits available… even for the following day.

    Earlier this afternoon I ordered a couple of permits for next Saturday. I only hope that DOC’s online booking has improved since I last used it about 3 years ago, when we booked some huts on the Abel Tasman Coast Track (aka the Hiker’s Superhighway). That time we booked the huts about 3 months in advance, as soon as the online booking system was opened for that period. This seriously confused the DOC ranger at Anchorage Hut on the first night, who tried to tell us we didn’t have tickets. It turned out that because we’d booked as soon as we were able, the records of our tickets were off the end of her print-out.
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