Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • Te Araroa to avoid Oriwa Ridge in the Tararuas

    New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has decided not to establish a track along Oriwa Ridge in the Tararuas as part of Te Araroa — The Long Pathway. Instead, DOC is recommending that Te Araroa go via the exposed tops in the Tararuas, via places like Te Matawai, Dracophyllum, Nichols.

    The full published results are available on DOC’s website.

    The original proposal of the Te Araroa Trust was to go more or less via this route, but the Trust put together the alternative proposal to build a track along Oriwa Ridge, below the bush-line, after the DOC Wellington Hawkes Bay conservancy expressed concern that the earlier route could be too dangerous for the often less experienced trampers that Te Araroa might be expected to attract. This has been brewing for about a year now, and has unveiled much controversy over balancing the seclusion of dedicated wilderness areas and the promotion of recreation, and all that.

    Having gone through the submission process with 218 submissions, DOC has decided that its initial concerns are no longer relevant. It’s decided that for various reasons Oriwa Ridge probably isn’t that much safer anyway, that the reasons against the Oriwa Ridge proposal out-weigh the reasons in favour, and ultimately that there will be no track built through Oriwa Ridge. Reasoning that the Te Araroa Trust has since included rugged exposed alpine routes in other regions of the track, DOC has now also come out in favour of the original Te Araroa proposal that it initially had concerns about, to follow the existing and more exposed route through the Tararuas at higher altitude. As long as everyone who walks this section of the Te Araroa Trail takes standard precautions (ie. doesn’t take undue risks), this should be a win for everyone.

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  • Perspectives from Laos, and mining the Conservation Estate

    I’ve just returned from a few weeks in South East Asia, much of which was spent in Laos, albeit mostly on the tourist trail, and it’s a wonderful country. Much of what’s recently been in the media, as well as reading one of Robb’s recent posts regarding our government’s new policy of “stock-taking” the conservation estate in preparation for mineral extraction, has prompted some thoughts.

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    I’ll dispense with the complete story of our holiday, except to say that Laos is a fantastic place. (Some photos of the whole thing may be found here.) It’s not yet quite so touristy as neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam (having to pay the US$1 going rate to the Vietnamese immigration guy at the land border just so he’d stamp my passport was a disappointing introduction to Vietnam), and Laos has only been generally open to tourists since the 1990s. There’s a project to at least double tourism over the next decade, adapting facilities in to bring in more overseas money. The place will probably change a lot in that time, and I only hope the attraction of the tourist dollar doesn’t cause any more of the country to become like Vang Vieng, which ten years ago was a tiny village but has now turned into a giant pub crawl town aimed at young English-speaking young backpackers who typically go there to get hammered.

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    Laos has a devastatingly war-torn history through the last few centuries, having been hastily usurped into “French Indochina” in 1893 as part of the race between France and Britain to be first to colonise as much of the world as possible. Not long after the communists finally kicked out the French, Laos became tangled in the Vietnam war, and the USA dropped more bombs on eastern Laos between 1964 and 1973 than were dropped during the entire second world war. (Reportedly that’s about one B-52 payload being dropped every eight minutes day and night over 9 years!) To this day, Laos holds the unenvious title of being the most bombed country, anywhere, ever. It’s a sad story, especially having seen how polite and generous the people are, but on the other hand it’s good to see it’s no longer happening. The entire region is full of limestone, dotted with numerous pinnacle structures and caves. During the various wars, people frequently hid in caves, surrounding themselves with Budda statues for protection. Until relatively recently, typical life expectencies were as low as about 45, with about 25% of children dying in their first few years. With roughly 1/3 of the 260 million bombs that were dropped never having detonated, people who live in that region still suffer indiscriminately from tripping unexploded live ammunition.
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  • Wellington [anti] smoking petitions battling it out

    Nearly two years ago I wrote about how I often find the lingering smoke annoying when I go for walks around town. It’s difficult to walk along a main street in Wellington’s CBD during certain times of day without having people in front breathing out cigarette smoke (much worse than campfire smoke), holding cigarettes venting smoke in the faces of people crowded behind, and throwing used cigarette butts into the city’s drainage system, causing even more problems [Ref 1] [Ref 2]. Anecdotally, I think this has become more of an issue since the Smoke-Free Environments Amendment Act of 2003 came into force. The act made it illegal for people to smoke inside most workplaces and also any cafe’s/restaurants (because they’re other people’s workplaces), but didn’t do much to account for the changes this would cause in outside environments. It forces people to smoke on the streets rather than inside, and it means virtually all restaurants, pubs and cafe’s (not wanting to lose customers to competitors) have pushed their smoking sections onto tables outside. Frequently these outside areas around footpaths are specifically designed with extra shelter from the elements, which helps cigarette smoke to linger for a very long time.

    Late last month, a petition was opened on the Wellington City Council’s e-petition page titled Ban on smoking along the city’s “Golden Mile”, with the idea being that smoking on the main central Wellington streets should be completely banned — so far, the only CBD street in which a by-law prevents smoking is Cable Car Lane. As I write this, it has 550 signatures. To add to all of this, however, another e-petition titled Continue to allow smoking along Wellington’s Golden Mile was created by another local today, intending to show support for an opposing view that smoking shouldn’t be banned.
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  • Origin of The Rain

    People in Taranaki are proud of their mountain, and they’re also proud of it’s usefulness as a forecasting tool. A popular saying is that If you can’t see the mountain, it’s raining. If you can see the mountain, it’s going to rain. When I visited DOC’s Dawson Falls’ visitor’s centre in 2007, they’d pinned a very funny and typical poem on the wall, all about rain and attributed to an anonymous tramper in 1984. I neglected to write it down at the time, but I made a point to transcribe it when I visited again early this year once I found it still there:

    Rain

    It rained and it rained and rained and rained
    The average fall was well maintained
    And when the tracks were simply bogs
    It started raining cats and dogs

    After a drought of half an hour
    We had a most refreshing shower
    And then the most curious thing of all
    A gentle rain began to fall

    Next day was also fairly dry
    Save for the deluge from the sky
    Which wetted the party to the skin
    And after that the rain set in

    — Anonymous tramper, 1984

    I thought this was the end of it — just a very amusing poem from an anonymous tramper in 1984, seemingly very New Zealand-like to me (as a New Zealander) — until I started to look around the web.
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  • My new GPS and digital red-lining

    I’ve spent the last few weeks playing with GPS receivers, initially with Craig‘s old one and very basic Garmin eTrex which he loaned me. (Thanks Craig!) A basic eTrex was certainly nothing flash at all. Having only a low-sensitivity antennae, it barely works when there’s a tree on the horizon let alone being under bush cover. This aside, it was great having something to play with to simply get an initial idea of all the basic GPS terms and ideas. A little over three weeks ago, I finally bought my own more sophisticated Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. This new extension to my tramping hobby has also manifested itself on this blog, which is why several of the trips now have Download GPX and Load map links. (The former downloads a GPs eXchange Format file, and the latter opens a Google Maps box with the described route overlaid.) I’m hoping to keep this up in the future, and I suppose time will tell how it works out.

    It’s been a surprisingly difficult decision for me to get a GPS receiver, and not strictly because of the cost. I’ve been putting it off because I’ve really wanted to get a good feeling of how to navigate without one, and I’ve not wanted to have the temptation lying around that would encourage bad habits of using a GPS without understanding the surrounding land. I definitely think that understanding maps, compasses and (sometimes) altimeters is the way to go, perhaps with a GPS to fall back on when things get unexpectedly bad or chaotic. I certainly don’t ever want to get myself into a situation where I go out relying primarily on an electronic device that runs on batteries. There’s a stigma in some tramping circles that’s attached to openly carrying a GPS receiver. To some extent I do even agree with the origins of this stigma, I think, though mostly because there do seem to be some people out there who really are relying primarily on a GPS to get them through a tricky situation without necessarily having the more fundamental navigation expertise and experience to back it up. I suspect it’s asking for trouble, which is why I’m hoping I don’t fall into the trap myself.
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  • Benefits of self-arrest

    A couple of very lucky people have been in the news in the last few days. Both involved slipping, sliding for hundreds of metres down icy mountain slopes, and unusually getting away with it. Reading about them both prompted a few thoughts. This post is not a criticism of either of these people, but I think their accidents help to illustrate some useful things about what can go wrong.

    The first in the news was a Wellington man who slipped whilst descending from the summit of Mt Tapuae-o-Ueneku, slid about 400 metres, and managed to walk away with little more than a few bruises. This strikes me as extraordinarily fortunate. The second is the case of Victorian government minister Tim Holding, who spent two nights disoriented in freezing conditions near the top of Mt Feathertop in the Victorian alps, after he slipped off the track and slid several hundred metres. He was lucky to be found, and now he’s recovering.

    One valuable quote from Tim Holding’s insights into his experience was in the above-linked article.

    “I slid very, very fast and if you’ve ever slid in the ice before, you’ll know you start slowly and you slide faster and faster and you gather huge momentum.”

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  • A snapshot of Search and Rescue

    The story of Liat Okin has entered the news again lately, specifically because the Southland Area Coroner has been unable to find any explanation of why she would have left the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks which is targeted predominantly at tourists. Back in May 2008, Liat sadly died when she left the Routeburn Track, apparently to follow an unmaintained emergency bush-bashing route for no clear reason and (apparently) out of character, before she slipped and fell. Photos from her camera implied that she wasn’t especially concerned about her situation, and there are still disturbing murmurings (though no solid evidence) about possible foul play, or at least that a person unknown may have shown her the route and encouraged her to follow it, then left her alone. It was a big story at the time, first because Liat disappeared without a trace, and second because after the Police-coordinated Search and Rescue team gave up the search, her family resorted to privately funding one of the largest Land Search and Rescue operations that New Zealand has ever seen.

    Shortly after the search concluded, one of those involved posted an amateur 4 minute video that shows an interesting snapshot of a SAR operation in progress. If you’ve not already seen it, it’s worth a quick look, and if you click through to the YouTube page you can read a better description about what’s going on.

    http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/WhhcaJMKfVY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&border=1

    One outcome of the Coroner’s report seems to be that DoC review its branding of “Great Walks”, noting that the term “Walk” might create confusion for some tourists whose first language isn’t English and who might incorrectly interpret the term to mean that there’s no potential danger. On the face of it and without all the information at hand, I’m not convinced it would have helped in this situation, but perhaps there’s something to the idea.

  • New Topo50 and Topo250 Maps for New Zealand

    If you stay informed about maps, you may already know that Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) will be officially changing New Zealand’s Mapping System in September 2009. There will be several obvious changes for people who use LINZ maps for navigation, one of which is that New Zealand’s map grid will change. This is a consequence of the Geodetic Datum (from which latitudes and longitudes are derived and on which the entire maps are based) having been changed several years ago, and LINZ is finally updating its maps to catch up with its techniques. When this happens, LINZ also intends to make a collection of other substantial changes to how maps are produced, how they look, and how they’ll be used. Most obviously for people into tramping, the well known NZMS260 series (1:50000 scale) and the NZMS262 series (1:250000 scale) of maps will be completely withdrawn from publication, and respectively replaced by two new series’ of maps called Topo50 and Topo250.

    LINZ has a large section of their website which describes the project in detail, explaining how it will affect people’s use of maps, GPS devices and other related systems. It’s good to see this actually happening — we’ve been hearing about it for several years now.

    Everything you need to know is behind the link above, but I thought I might try to summarise the changes, perhaps to help people understand it better but as much to help myself to get a grasp on what’s changing and why. I’m doing my best to get this as correct as I can, but please keep in mind that I’m an amateur at this. If you notice inaccuracies or omissions, I’d appreciate it if you could point them out by posting a comment. If necessary, I’ll correct the post and credit as appropriate. Meanwhile if you’re keen to get more authoritative information from the source, a good place to start is the LINZ Publications & Other Resources page. The downloadable Topo50 map Reading Guide and the Where in the World Are We? booklets are especially helpful, and much of what I’ve written here is really just a dumbed down version of them.
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  • Tragedy near Kime Hut

    Also see Tragedy near Kime Hut, part 2 and Tragedy near Kime Hut, part 3.

    It’s always sad to hear about tragedies in the outdoors, but it hits home more than usual when it’s nearby. The recent occasion in which the bodies of two trampers were found in the Tararuas will no doubt be remembered for some time not because two people died, but because one of them was particularly well known. Even now, most media reports focus their attention on obiturising one of the trampers who is presumed to be of most interest to their readers and about whom there is probably more readily available information, mentioning his companion almost as an afterthought. I can fully understand why this happens from the media perspective and its audience, but I think it’s important to remember that irrespective of the profiles of both people, two people were equally unfortunate.
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  • Dreaming of Moonlight Southern Crossings in the Tararuas

    It’s been an interesting last few days, watching the weather. Several days ago, Craig invited me to head into the Tararuas tonight and attempt a Moonlight Southern Crossing. We’ve just decided to cancel the attempt within the past hour or so, and might try again in another month if the conditions fit. For me, thoughts about a Moonlight Southern Crossing go as far back as the first ever tramp I went on with the Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club.

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