Windy Tops

Tag: department of conservation

  • The Downs and Ups and Downs of Kime Hut

    I’m unsure what to make of the latest happenings surrounding Kime Hut. This Saturday the TTC had been planning to host its own “opening ceremony” at the hut. If you haven’t heard, however, the TTC has been forced to abandon that ceremony because the hut is about to be locked. This comes nine months after the hut was all-but-completed, and nine months after people began using it unofficially, but the hut was never officially opened.

    10547145703_c81abba93e_n-4260447
    Kime Hut III, in October 2013.
    10546926975_f0451283b1_n-1078943

    The reason? Kime Hut 3 hasn’t yet obtained its Building Certificate from the Kapiti Coast District Council. DOC has finally decided that it can’t legally allow people to use the hut until the Building Certificate has been issued, to the extent of needing to lock the door to keep people out.

    Kime Hut is one of the more important huts in the Tararuas, both historically and also for its function. Since the hut’s inception it’s been used as an ad-hoc ski lodge, a stop-over point for many people walking the Southern Crossing and the Main Range, and also as a refrigerator. The exposure and cold of that region of the Tararuas means it’s not always the nicest place to spend a night, but on so many nights, and days, it’s far better to have a reliable hut with an inside that protects from chilling gale-force winds than it is to be stuck outside.

    [Update 8-Mar-2014: After quite a big outcry, DOC has now said it will not lock the door of Kime Hut.]

    More than a few people have also died in the vicinity through exposure to the elements, or come close to it. The most recent deaths occurred in the winter of 2009. Many more people have doubtless avoided a likely death by having the hut there as a refuge when plans went bad.
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  • On New Zealand Conservation Estate Fees for Tourists

    It’s interesting to see that David Round, a member of the Aoraki Conservation Board, is calling for foreigners to be charged more than NZ Citizens and Residents for use of the Conservation Estate.

    From that single article, it’s unclear to me exactly what’s being proposed by Mr Round. The Timaru Herald’s headline suggests charging foreigners more for hut fees. The base complaint is about “enormous non-payment” of hut fees, and of it being very hard to police. Inconsistent with the article’s title, the proposed solution seems to involve something about an “international access pass”, which would not be directly attributed to huts but would be required to “enter larger parts of the conservation estate”.

    Charging higher amounts for tourists is a topic which comes up recurringly, but so far has not gained any traction. There are a variety of relevant factors, both to do with practicality and law.

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  • My submission about increasing maximum penalties on the Conservation Estate

    I’ve finally put my submission in for the Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill, which (if successful) will increase maximum penalties available for many crimes on the Conservation Estate by about ten-fold. Often this will be good. For example, judges have commented on the frustration with the low penalties they’ve been restricted to when sentencing international criminals who’ve been caught smuggling out protected wildlife for sale on the black market. Enabling a higher penalty will increase the risk, set a much higher black market price on our wildlife, and hopefully make the practice less common. The Bill has cross-party support for these types of reasons, and will most likely enter law. You can read everything they said about it when it had its first day in parliament over here.

    My main concern is that the existing indirectly-specified $10,000/1-year-jail penalty for entering “closed” Conservation Areas was already disproportionate and inconsistent with the $500 fine for a nearly identical National Park situation. Following the Bill, that inconsistency will be magnified to a $100,000/2-year-jail penalty compared with a $5,000 fine. This is part of what I discussed in my earlier post regarding DoC and the word “closed”.

    The Bill is now at the stage of receiving public submissions, which will be considered by the Local Government and Environment Select Committee (a selected committee of sitting MPs) to make recommendations for any changes to the Bill before it’s sent back to Parliament to be voted on again. If you’d like to make a submission, which can be as short or lengthy, formal or informal as you like, and you don’t have to agree with me, the closing date for submissions is February 28th 2013. A submission can be completed online by visiting Parliament’s status page for the Bill, clicking the Make a Submission link on the right hand side (it links to here), scrolling to the end of the page and following the instructions to make an online submission.

    Anyway, I’ve included the text of my submission below.
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  • The entry restrictions of Matiu/Somes Island

    My previous post criticised some aspects of closed public land, and how DoC sometimes handles it, and so I found it interesting to read a report on Tuesday of DoC rangers being verbally abused in a comparable scenario. It occurred after they instructed two divers to immediately leave the shore of Matiu/Somes Island, in the middle of Wellington Harbour, and return to sea. To be clear, this is not the type of land closure I referred to in my previous post. It happened in a Reserve rather than a National Park or Conservation Area, and the land is legally closed (except for entry under strict entry rules) for reasons appropriate for the purpose of the reserve.

    The highest concern here with people landing uncontrolled on the edge of this island is a biosecurity concern for the Scientific Reserve, whereby unwanted pests could enter the island and wreak havoc amongst its local eco-systems that rely on the island’s status for their protection. Scientific Reserves are specifically set aside “for the purpose of protecting and preserving in perpetuity for scientific study, research, education, and the benefit of the country, ecological associations, plant or animal communities, types of soil, geomorphological phenomena, and like matters of special interest”. (That’s from section 21 of the Reserves Act.)
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  • A Brief Question: Public Land Access Rights and DoC

    The introduction below was an opinion piece thefor the November 2012 Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin. With permission I’m republishing it, plus extra content that includes legal references and various opinions of my own. Please be mindful that nothing here is legal advice. I’m trying to learn about this and be accurate from my own research but would appreciate notification of any errors so I can correct them. As always, constructive discussion is welcome.

    Introduction [from Pages 40-41 of FMC Bulletin 190 (November 2012)]


    No it isn’t.

    We often take for granted our freedom to access public land, and over time I’ve encountered confusion about what’s meant when DoC labels places as “closed”. Some people ignore such directives, confident that reasons are often trivial and they’re not enforceable. Others would avoid a “closed” place, believing there’s likely a good reason, or through fear of being caught breaking rules.

    My layperson’s reading of the law (and I welcome correction) is that it emphasises the importance of free access to public land. DoC is not automatically permitted to close access to anything except specific maintained facilities like huts and bridges. Closing access within National Parks and Conservation Areas (including Forest Parks) requires the Minister of Conservation, although the Minister has confirmed a current ongoing delegation to DoC’s Director-General, who has further delegated this authority to Area Managers and Conservators. If part of a Conservation Area is “closed” under Section 13 of the Conservation Act, DoC must advertise the closure, and entering becomes an offence with a penalty of up to a year in jail or up to a $10,000 fine. Access restrictions within National Parks require the Minister to create a bylaw, which can’t be delegated away and which must be consistent with the park’s Management Plan. A person entering could potentially be fined up to $500. Severe penalties are unlikely, but the fact that it could happen is meant to convince us to avoid “closed” places.

    Despite these provisions, the law’s tone is that restricting access is serious and genuine closure of public land shouldn’t be easy, which is consistent with a view that DoC is a caretaker and not a gatekeeper. How, then, is a term which represents an offence used by DoC so frequently? Often the “closed” label is applied for discontinued maintenance, or a heightened risk for certain classes of visitors but not for everyone. It’s also commonly attached to tracks, as if they’re facilities which define where we may go rather than impressions on the land of where we have been. “Closing” a track makes little sense to someone who’d happily tread on public land alongside it, but referring to a track as “closed” may still impart to the less initiated that entry to the land beyond, or to any non-tracked land, is illegal. In most if not all cases it seems unlikely that closure is official, but with official looking signs, alerts and press releases being used by DoC to communicate about such “closures”, how can we know the difference?
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  • A New Trusted Contact Service for Outdoor Safety in New Zealand

    About a year ago, DoC announced that it was pulling out of the business of taking intentions for visitors to New Zealand’s back-country. It was only ever doing so inconsistently anyway, through ad-hoc arrangements at various visitor centres, but the announcement still created controversy. One way or another, all of the nominated alternatives (encapsulated by directing people to the AdventureSmart website) required people to have their own trusted contacts.

    For a New Zealand local, arranging a trusted contact is generally manageable. People here know other people here, and those people are generally in the same time zone, speak the same language, know the important phone numbers, and are usually familiar with New Zealand’s systems, conditions and expectations. For visitors to New Zealand, however, finding trusted contacts is often not so easy, especially for visitors who simply don’t know someone who can be trusted to reliably report if they don’t return on time. Some visitors don’t even realise how important it is to have a trusted contact.

    I’m perfectly happy with DoC not being in the business of taking people’s intentions. It’s a very time consuming and expensive thing to do, especially when many of those people were never bothering to properly sign out, resulting in needless efforts to chase up and ensure they’d safely exited. It’s never been a clear statutory requirement for DoC to look after people in this way. Nevertheless, the fact that the staff of some DoC offices in touristy places have been acting as trusted contacts until recently has ensured more reliable oversight for some people visiting the outdoors than would otherwise have existed.

    A year ago I wondered if there might be room for a business to set up for taking and managing people’s intentions as a trusted contact. Very happily, it seems that someone else had a similar idea, and actually acted on it. This afternoon a random press release popped out, from a company/website called Safety Outdoors.

    According to its press release, the Safety Outdoors service, due to launch tomorrow (Thursday) and accessible via http://www.safetyoutdoors.com, will allow people to sign up for a trusted contact as a service, with a fee per activity. [Edit 9-Dec-2012: It seems to be taking longer than advertised for the SafetyOutdoors website to get underway. Meanwhile, you could also check out Adventure Buddy, which is an alternative (and free) service which is also now available.]

    From the Safety Outdoors press release:
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  • Check Out FMC Bulletin Number 190

    A Track Closed sign in the Eastern Tararau Range.
    A Track Closed sign in the Eastern
    Tararua Range. Photo: Craig McGregor.

    If you have access to the November 2012 copy of the Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin Number 190, please take a look at pages 40-41 on which I have a small opinion piece.

    In it, I discuss a creeping issue which I think exists with the Department of Conservation’s tendency to declare places as ‘closed’, after which it’s legally ambiguous and often misleading as to whether they’re actually closed or not. I don’t want to under-cut the FMC Bulletin’s distribution by posting it here immediately, but once it’s had a reasonable chance to get around, I’ll re-post it here with much more elaboration on the issue and the laws involved.

    I’m ultimately hoping to provoke a discussion about this. As much as I enjoy people commenting on this blog, I think such a discussion would be more effective and useful via entities such as Federated Mountain Clubs, which I know reaches many more people than my blog does. Therefore, if you have something especially engaging to say and are equipped to respond in that forum, I’d like to suggest considering a response via the FMC Bulletin or a similar forum. (eg. Write the editor a letter if you’re so inclined — Shaun likes letters. 🙂 ) Otherwise please tell your friends, or comment here if you’re not so organised or aren’t affiliated enough.
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  • It’s All in the Context

    Federated Mountain Clubs, in its October newsletter [PDF], notes the appearance of fake Department of Conservation signs around huts at the Otago/Southland end of the country. Some have political undertones and some just prompting cheap laughs. I’m not aware of any appearing elsewhere, but FMC is keen to know if you’ve spotted any.

    Josh Gale of Wilderness Magazine has since picked up the story, suggesting that at least one source of these signs is strongly suspected.

    DoC comes under recurring criticism for its proliferation of signs in the back-country (more on some of the history here). In this light, I think the most amusing aspect of this whole story for me, so far, has been a particular quote of Department of Conservation Senior Media Advisor, Herb Christophers, who was reported in Wilderness to have said:

    “Most people wouldn’t even read the thing because they’d think it’s just another DOC sign.”

    To be fair to Herb Christophers, Josh points out that he was freestyling at the time of the interview, and also said “I’m not too worried about it, it’s just some funny way people like to express themselves”. I just think it’s a gem of a snippet to come from one of the senior people involved with DoC communications. 🙂

  • Cooking gas to be removed from some Tararua Huts

    I realise there will be concerns about the Department of Conservation’s Wairarapa Conservancy deciding to remove cooking gas from several huts on the Wairarapa side of the Tararuas. DoC’s current Wairarapa Alerts page lists three of the affected huts as Mitre Flats, Totara Flats and Tutuwai. I’d guess Powell Hut and Jumbo Hut will also be targets, but can’t find this officially stated. The reasoning for the removal of cooking gas is that budgets are tight, and providing cooking gas for these serviced huts is quite an expensive operation.

    Personally I’m not concerned about this move. To me it seems that cooking gas (if required to cook one’s chosen meals) is something that should really be carried by a party already, even if they expect to find cooking facilities at a hut, simply for self-sufficiency. If you happen to fall over or otherwise get stuck part way to an intended hut, and don’t have the necessary equipment to cook your meal, you could very well be going hungry and find yourself in danger.

    The Dominion Post article quotes a manager of the Kuranui Outdoor Education Academy as saying that loss of cooking gas could be a safety issue because he might need hut gas to heat up a brew for students, and that carrying their own cooking equipment will make students’ loads heavier. If it’s an accurate quote, however, I have serious trouble accepting this reasoning. Children or not, if the party isn’t carrying self-sufficient cooking facilities on the way to a destination, it’s a safety issue already.
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  • DoC Track Time Calculation Nightmares

    5228080613_d3bd26e585_n-2644337
    HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Sometimes it’s
    just fun to leave the sign there.

    I found it really interesting to read Alistair Hall’s article in Wilderness Magazine, which describes a recent Official Information Act Request to the Department of Conservation regarding how it estimates the track walking times that are typically advised on signs around the place. If you’ve spent any amount of time in New Zealand’s conservation estate track network, it’s likely you’ve experienced inconsistencies in the accuracy of such times. It shouldn’t really be unexpected, given that every sign presents a single time whilst people clearly walk at different rates. No stated time can be correct for everyone.

    Most interesting for me from the article, I think, was not the revelation that estimated times aren’t pulled out of thin air so much as the mish-mash variety of different methods that various conservancies use. Some conservancies have slow staff walk the track and time it at a leisurely pace. In the Marlborough Souds, a fit staff member walk the tracks, then times would be weighed slightly downwards… unless they were shorter walks in which case they’d find a staff member near retirement. (No mention of how fast this older person might be—many “physically mature” people can still crack it through the outdoors pretty fast.)

    Some conservancies make informal guesses and then consult staff from their experiences. Times on signs around Egmont National Park were estimated by paying a contractor to walk every track in the park and time distances between signposts, and the times were then adjusted depending on the track type. Conservancies throughout the central North Island use a formula based on the Naismith Rule of thumb, basically looking at a map and taking hill ascents into account, and then weighting the results further for the kind of track and expected type of visitor.

    None of them, however, allow for variation in the type of person who might be walking on a track. They all produce a single time for the signpost next to any stretch of track, and typically don’t indicate who it’s for. Irrespective of how much calculation occurs for variations in the track, an assumption is always made about the visitor. It might be an assumption that people are very fit, or alternatively that the visitor could as easily be pushing a baby stroller, but the signs don’t say.
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