Windy Tops

Tag: great walks

  • It’s about the spending as much as the funding

    Last March I expressed my views here on calls to add more charges in various forms to parks and their facilities, and particularly on differential charging for tourists.

    Recently this topic has been refreshed in media. It might be because the NZ Tourism Industry Association (the main association of subscribing businesses who charge tourists for experiences) having released a report arguing that there should be more privatisation in the operation of public assets, and suggesting more money should be raised directly from their users. The report is announced here, which includes a download link for a 24 page executive summary.

    Here’s some more random and recent coverage on the topic, all from Fairfax: Kiwis risk losing an ‘unalienable right to wild places’ (23 Dec 2016), Dominion Post Editorial (27 Dec 2016) – Yes to a tourist tax, Tramping group fights plans to charge tourists for using Great Walks (30 Dec 2016).

    Great Walks have been singled out in the popular media discussion, with much made of the point that Great Walks “lost” around $3 million last financial year. The Tourism Industry argues that DOC runs them inefficiently, and that much could be gained with forms of privatisation.

    In my March 2016 post I’ve already expressed most of my views and reasoning around charging for access. On the Great Walk thing, I’d just add that since their inception, Great Walks were never intended to make a profit. There are multiple intents with Great Walks, but part of their purpose was to attract the masses of visitors to a few very specific places where so many people could be more easily managed.

    It’s safer, and often more enjoyable, for people with lower skill and experience levels. At the same time much of the visitor pressure is lifted off the rest of the network. If costs get too high, there’s a higher incentive for people to disburse through all the other random places which are harder for DOC to predict and preempt their management for higher visitor numbers. That’s especially a risk when everyone’s so easily trading secrets in the internet forums and back rooms of backpackers about the best next place to go which authorities haven’t yet caught up with.

    It should be about the spending

    Something I didn’t address in my previous post is that I think much of this discussion is being misguided from the start. Reports and discussions and social media threads are mostly considering methods of funding DOC, or funding the Conservation Estate if not DOC. Maybe it’s about whether there should border taxes or entry fees or conservation passes or increased facility fees. Anything to make up for the lack of public funds which we’re providing! Talking about funding sources, though, doesn’t actually address the question of how much money is needed, nor what we could expect from it.

    My own view is that New Zealand’s issues, at least when it comes to spending, are largely about how much we, as a population, value the land and what’s in it.
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  • Overseas tourists and park access fees

    It’s difficult to comment on recent calls for tourists to pay a larger share of maintenance of the conservation estate without detail of what’s being proposed. So far nothing’s been formally proposed.

    This is a recurring topic. The most recent iteration seems to have begun with a Listener article about Te Araroa. One tangent included the following paragraph. It’s derived from an interview with DOC’s CEO, Lou Sanson, when discussing the impact of international tourists on the New Zealand conservation estate:

    He hints at the possibility of a differential pricing system being introduced for backcountry huts to help protect Kiwis’ access. “We are moving to the stage where we have to look at this, because it may be quite unsustainable if you put another million people on top of it,” Sanson says.

    Fairfax’s Stuff website picked up the story a few weeks later, headlining “DOC may charge overseas visitors to enter national parks“. Three days after, the Dominion Post (also Fairfax) carried an editorial titled “Yes to a fee for tourist trampers“. Then, Fairfax also published “Fewer Kiwis doing Department of Conservation Great Walks“. (The actual numbers quoted at the end of that article seems to show more New Zealanders walking Great Walks, despite dropping in some and increasing in others.) Following this came “Conservation boards say Department of Conservation is facing crisis“. Next, with the recent public purchase of Awaroa Beach comes “Should we tax tourists to it?“.

    It seems fair to say that Fairfax, which controls a significant portion of New Zealand’s print media, has definitely adopted a theme, complete with a point of view. It’s triggered significant discussion in social media and elsewhere about whether international tourists, and particularly those who make use of New Zealand’s conservation estate, should somehow be made to pay more towards its maintenance.

    I’m not diametrically opposed to the concept of using tourism-sourced income to subsidise the conservation estate (particularly the part of it which is affected by tourism), but implementation is everything. There are many problems with implementation.
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  • That Paparoa National Park Great Walk

    In September I wrote about precedents around Great Walks seeming to become skewed. This morning I think that’s finally happened. Nick Smith has announced that a new Great Walk will be created in Paparoa National Park, to commemorate the 29 people killed in the Pike River Mine accident of 2010.

    I do not for a moment wish to belittle the obvious tragedy for the people who died in the Pike River explosion, their families and their friends. But purely as justification for a Great Walk, I really don’t understand this at all. If there’s to be a new track, then why a Great Walk instead of a regular track?

    In 1992, DOC itself justified the Great Walks concept as being “to manage impacts on New Zealand’s most highly used tracks” [FMC Bulletin 111, Oct ’92, page 18]. This was stated at a time when all of New Zealand’s current Great Walks were either in place, or planned. 23 years later, the newly-planned Paparoa Great Walk is not highly used. Therefore what has changed, why has it changed, and can we expect the same new principles to be applied for a new batch of Great Walks?

    In recent years, Great Walks have become a major brand. Tourists seek out the Great Walks because they’re great walks. The only rationale I can detect in this is to latch on to that brand and attract tourists to a local area, and in fact Nick Smith’s raw press release stresses that “it will bring tourism and economic development to the West Coast”.

    Smith’s press release also mentions a couple of other things (protecting the area, ensuring access to the resting place of 29 miners), but neither of those other two actually require a Great Walk. They could be achieved with a simple track combined with applying protection already available under existing law. Therefore those claims are really just government spin.

    If generating local tourism and boosting a local economy is the real reason for creating a new Great Walk, we should be asking some serious questions around what impact it will have on future decisions, because this decision seems very politicised.
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  • Streetview on Great Walks

    Several days ago, Google announced that it has adapted its Streetview technology for use on most of New Zealand’s Great Walks (also from Stuff, and from the Herald). Thanks to some guy who was employed to walk most of them with an 18kg camera on his back, it’s now possible to see a glimpse of any point along the walks from a web browser.

    Crossing Awarua Inlet.

    Streetview has potential to be a very useful tool. I have a couple of concerns about how it’s come to be (mentioned below), but there are several potential uses which I like.

    The most obvious is simply being able to see a place without going there. Since Streetview on Great Walks was announced, I’ve seen this very advantage criticised in social media. It’s been declared a waste of time, or people have expressed outright offence that certain places which some consider to be personal experiences might suddenly be so easily available on the web to people who aren’t actually going there themselves. Popular media’s framing of the whole thing being about “armchair trampers” and little else has probably encouraged some of this view, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
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  • Justifying Great Walks

    News emerged yesterday that a new Great Walk is being considered through Mount Creighton Station, near Queenstown, once tenure review has been sorted. Most references point at this Otago Daily Times’ article, but the original rendition seems to have been produced by the same author on behalf of Mountain Scene, and specifically links the claim back to a document from the Overseas Investment Office that was obtained under the Official Information Act. Wilderness Magazine has also chimed in, and produced a clearer map of the likely route.

    I’m not sure what to think except to have some looming concern that the Great Walk concept may have become very skewed in the last few years. Great Walks have a wow factor where tourism is concerned. They tend to attract tourists, who hunt them out, but the presence of a Great Walk can also have a negative effect on an area, certainly for its atmosphere and the freedom and flexibility with which one might visit it.

    In addition to cutting a walking super-highway through what might once have been a more remote environment, Great Walks come with baggage. Bylaws frequently restrict camping. Back-country huts tend to shift from the flexible back-country ticket system onto a rigid booking system. Accommodation as a whole is sometimes only available in highly structured sequences, making it difficult to plan a trip which does anything other than follow a tourist conveyor belt. Tracks are hardened and widened, to make them more durable.

    The presence of Great Walks, and their rigid structure, is in conflict with the traditional legally enshrined values of our National Parks and Conservation Areas. These values prioritise freedom of entry and exploration for as long as it’s not unreasonably destructive to the rest of the park. Great Walks are, therefore, a compromise which should only be used where needed.
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  • Recap on the recent Milford Track accident – DOC’s Review

    Kathryn Ryan interviewed Allan Munn this morning on Nine to Noon (Radio NZ National). Allan Munn is the Department of Conservation’s Southern Region Services Director. The interview regards changes being made following the death, in May 2014, of a person who was swept away from the Milford Track.

    This morning’s 20 minute interview can be listened to here. It’s also been reported on in The Press, and by Wilderness Magazine.

    The incident which sparked this review occurred when the group were on the Milford Track out of the main tourist season, after many of the standard “Great Walk” style facilities are removed. It’s not uncommon for people to visit outside the booking season, whether to avoid higher hut fees or after having been too late to book at an earlier time. It remains public land with open access, and can be relatively safe with good preparation and advice, and an ability to assess conditions. The group didn’t seem to have been be prepared for the reduced facilities, nor properly aware of it. This combined with other factors probably led to bad decisions and eventually resulted in the accident.

    I wrote down some of my own thoughts about this a few months ago.

    DOC has now completed an internal review. It’s decided that safety processes are fundamentally sound, but certain things could still be improved upon. During the interview Mr Munn noted that DOC had “a range of contacts with that party” prior to the event. The party members either didn’t hear the available advice, or chose to ignore it and take their chances. In the face of this, there’s probably little that could have reasonably and immediately been done in that specific case.

    More generally, though, DOC’s review has acknowledged that there are problems with getting key messages across to the masses in the face of modern forms of media, much of which is out of DOC’s control. It’s also noting higher numbers of visitors of limited skills and experience aiming to walk the Milford Track during the buffer zone between the end of the tourist season and when the most dangerous winter conditions set in.
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  • The Price of Great Walks

    Last month an incident occurred, out of season, on the Milford Track. I’ll reflect on a few things before getting to it.

    In New Zealand we have an enshrined legal right to enter most parts of the Conservation Estate. (I wrote more about how this works, over here.) By design in law, it’s difficult for people to be fenced out for their protection. In exchange visitors are considered responsible for their own safety. After all, one person’s dangerous place could be another adequately skilled person’s source of adventure.

    Great Walks, however, don’t always fit nicely into this framework. Similar concepts have existed previously, but the modern idea of “Great Walks” began with the Department of Conservation’s effort towards its mandate of fostering recreation. The idea has been to consolidate and market several of the most iconic tramping trips, and make them relatively accessible for a large number of people of varying abilities.

    Over time they’ve become intensively used. By the latter end of the 1990s, booking systems were being introduced to control overcrowding. A booking system can’t restrict anyone’s entry to the land, but tactical limitations of facility use (especially huts), combined with bylaws to disallow camping in certain areas, now makes it impractical to walk some Great Walks without booking ahead.

    The Milford Track is one such Great Walk. In the booking season, between November and May, it becomes a beautifully iconic conveyor belt of tourists. The speed at which you might want to walk it doesn’t matter, because “the track takes 4 days to walk“. This is thanks to the requirement of booking all three huts at once for sequential nights, with these huts being the only legal place to stay. If this doesn’t work for you, you could either search for a way to camp further than 500 metres from the line of the track (difficult with the geography), or run the entire track without stopping.
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