Windy Tops

Tag: department of conservation

  • Thoughts on the Barker Hut Trio

    I’m often behind on current events. I don’t spend much time listening to New Zealand’s news media, and I don’t have much respect for a lot of it. (Some of National Radio is an exception.)

    Over the weekend, I’ve been catching up with the plight of the three people who were caught at Barker Hut down in Arthur’s Pass National Park. Reportedly they were stuck behind flooded rivers and down to their last energy bar between them. They attempted to arrange a helicopter out via mountain radio, and even offered to pay for it, but were denied this after the Department of Conservation and Police decided their situation wasn’t an emergency. (Helicopters are banned in Arthur’s Pass National Park except for emergencies.)

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  • Legally winding through the Kaimanawa Range

    Last weekend I was on a trip with the Wellington Tongue & Meats to Kaimanawa Forest Park. I was going to post my thoughts about the whole private land thing as part of the trip report. My thoughts ended up being quite long, however, so I thought I might post them separately. (The report regarding the trip which inspired this is also available.) This post is mostly a collection of background material that I’ve looked up to do with getting access to the area of the park that we visited near the Urchin road-end, which may be useful in some way to others planning something similar, and is completely open for discussion since I haven’t been looking at this for long.

    A very brief background of this post is that the Kaimanawa Range itself has a big hole of private land cut out of the middle of it, much of which is mountanous and generally looks interesting. Public regions around the outside are administered by the New Zealand Department of Conservation. The majority of the land is Maori land (according to Map 6 of the maps included in the park management plan), and much of that land is leased to third parties. On our particular trip, parts of the private land located near where we wanted to go are leased by Air Charter Taupo, which exclusively flies hunters into the region for a price.

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  • Hooray! I’m not a nutcase.

    Excellent; It turns out I haven’t lost my mind. On this trip over High Ridge, back in March, we found that one of the signs in Powell Hut had an incorrect phone number for the nearby DOC ranger. In fact, the number didn’t even have enough digits. I exchanged some emails with someone in a DOC office shortly after that trip, who eventually decided I must have been remembering things wrong, because the sign could only have been an orientation map, and the PDF of that map which he had in front of him did indeed have the correct number. Basically I was told outright that people scribble all kinds of crazy things in huts and that this wasn’t a DOC sign, and I shouldn’t take too much notice of it.

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    Well, a few weeks ago, Amelia went past Powell Hut and took a photo for me that proves that I’m not a complete nut-case, or at the very least is consistent with that theory. Eight months later, it looks as if someone’s crossed out the number and written the correct one, but that doesn’t really bother me. (Thanks Amelia.)

    In other news, I joined an informal WTMC group this evening, walking up the Tip Track to the Radar Dome in Te Kopahou Reserve. Bronwyn, Marie and I all compared our identical $40 altimeters. They did quite well staying consistent with each other, whatever that means.