Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • Recreational impressions of New Plymouth

    I’ve been back in Wellington for a week now, but I suppose there’s one lasting impression I wanted to express about Taranaki and specifically New Plymouth which I’ve now visited quite a few times over the last several years. Even when I haven’t gone tramping, I’ve always found it an easy place to get around and to enjoy walking. New Plymouth was recently named the winner of a Top Town competition in North & South magazine, and part of this decision was thanks to the recreational opportunities. I’m skeptical of these kinds of lists on principle because to me they feel like publicity stunts that get attention without much cost, but I do agree that New Plymouth has a lot going for it. There are plenty of places to escape the asphalt and the one and only shopping mall, and to enjoy natural surroundings.

    For outsiders, the obvious nearby recreation area is Egmont National Park, which has the usual range of back-country huts and trees and mountain scenery. Within New Plymouth, however, there are a lot of places where it’s possible to go walking.
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  • Walking your house through the land

    Earlier this evening I was listening to National Radio, on which Bryan Crump was interviewing Ion Soervin about a Walking House project called N55. The audio of the interview can be streamed from Radio New Zealand’s website for about another week. The website for the house itself, complete with photos, is also available, as is a short video clip of the prototype house walking.

    The idea of this specific house began in Denmark. The house is a module that can be lived in, but it has six legs attached and is designed to slowly walk through the landscape in a nomadic fashion, challenging the ideas that a dwelling should exist in a fixed place. The house is powered by solar cells and small wind turbines. It even has a wood-stove, and photos of the interior remind me of a typical New Zealand back-country hut. At present it’s more an art project and an engineering prototype, but as Mr Soervin was commenting, the plans to build it are available and they’re willing to help anybody who might want to build their own.

    What I find at least as interesting are the ideas that are being expressed in association with this house. The radio interview covered some of these ideas, but they’re also discussed on the website. Considering it’s a house that’s able to move, it should be no surprise that its creators are very interested in concepts of property rights of land, and how they’re seen. Specifically, the very concept of exclusive fenced-off property boundaries are not conducive to a house that’s designed to walk. Not surprisingly, the creators are keen to provoke discussion about whether land should be divided up and sold in exclusive ways, rather than keeping land accessible for everyone.

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  • Flashy hydration systems

    Michelle recently posted thoughts about her Platypus hydration system, which inspired me to write something about my own experiences. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a while, but hadn’t really formulated it in my head until now.

    In case you didn’t know, a hydration bladder is a water-holding bladder with a hose attached. They typically sit in a pack that you’re wearing, and the attached hose makes it easy to keep sipping water on an ongoing basis without having to stop and unpack a water bottle. In this day and age, a variety of backpacks are designed for use with hydration bladders, and often have a small gap through which a hose can be fed. Platypus is the brand-name for a well known line of hydration bladder products put out by a holding company called Cascade Designs, which also does a bunch of other well known outdoor brands like MSR and Therm-a-Rest. Their main competition in the trendy-looking shiny-hydration-bladder industry, at least in New Zealand, seems to come from CamelBak, which makes a range of backpacks designed to hold hydration systems, but will also sell the plastic bladders individually.

    A plethora of more generic brands also exist, which are typically much cheaper and probably at least as good. Thanks to the name recognition, however, “Platypus” and “CamelBak” are often used as generic names, at least in the circles where I associate, to simply mean “some kind of water hydration system that isn’t a cheap and nasty plastic bottle”. I discovered this when I noticed that many people were referring to my Platypus as a Camelbak without really caring that it wasn’t. Ironically now that I have a Camelbak, I’ve already heard at least two people refer to it as a Platypus, and nobody has yet called it a Camelbak. They’re basically all water bladders, and for some reason not many people seem to like boasting that they’re drinking out of their bladder. Maybe this is why there’s a preference for using the brand names.

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  • I really hope I’m warmer from now on

    I’ve spent the odd night over the past winter feeling rather cold. The most “interesting” of these was that episode in the wood-shed between 3am and 6am on a Saturday morning. The absence of sleep before 3am and after 6am probably didn’t help, but I suppose I’d hoped that it would have been warmer during those 3 hours. I probably managed about an hour in total, which made for a very long and cranky Saturday of walking.

    This event, and some other recent events, have convinced me that maybe it’s time to fork out some cash and replace the Kathmandu PaceSetter bag that I’ve mostly used recently. I think some people would see the words “Kathmandu” and “Sleeping Bag” in the same sentence (or any gear for that matter), and immediately think that it’s a horrible product. I don’t want to criticise it too much if I can help it, because it’s served me pretty well. At this point I still plan to use it during summer because it’s adequate and probably better suited. It’s usually okay in huts and under an open fly at the low-ish altitudes where I’ve used it, but I can vouch from my own experience that for a sleeping bag that was marketed near the top of the Kathmandu range, I still thought it was… well… flimsy and unreliable, and sometimes cold, at least when it was exposed to places that weren’t under much other shelter.

    Consequently, and just in time for mid-Spring (I’m brilliant at timing), I’m now the proud but uncertain owner of a new Macpac Sanctuary 700XP sleeping bag, which I hope will turn out to be more appropriate for some of the winter-like things I want to do in the future. It’s not the warmest bag in the range, but when looking at the relative weights and the loft and down fill, it already seems much warmer than what I already have and without being any heavier.
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  • Thoughts about river safety issues

    427987563_d39a33e0c0_m-1877303
    The Waiohine River in flood,
    seen from Totara Flats.
    It’s probably not a good idea to
    attempt a crossing.

    In the past few days there’s been another river crossing tragedy in New Zealand, this time at Eggie. Once again, as often seems to be the case, it sounds as if it was someone quite experienced who may have simply made a bad judgement call about whether or not to try and cross, possibly distracted by the bad weather, as well as the thought of being so close to home compared with possibly having to spend another night out.

    Drowning accidents are one of the most common ways for people to be killed in New Zealand’s back-country, especially after cases of hypothermia have fallen with the advent of better gear for keeping warm. This is why, I guess, it seems a good idea for anyone who goes tramping a lot to get properly educated in river safety, and to get as much experience as possible. I’ve been working on trying to learn about river safety for a while now, partly through experience and I also signed up to a river safety course about 18 months ago. I’m still nowhere near being an expert, but I’ve noticed a few things I find interesting.

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  • Being hip and groovy, just like skiers

    Trying to help dig a snow cave during a blizzard a couple of months ago (during that training course) really made an impression on me. I realised that although handy at times, regular sunglasses can be seriously out of their depth in some conditions. For much of the weekend it was difficult to choose between being blind from perpetually fogged up glasses (thanks to warm breath coming up the balaclava) or being blind from a stinging and freezing wind in my eyes. In the end I guess it was fortunate that we were digging the cave about 30 metres from the club lodge, so it didn’t really matter.

    It’s true that we were there on a weekend that was noted for its unusually severe weather, and as we were sipped hot chocolate in our toasty lodge, about 2,000 skiers were being hastily evacuated from the mountain. Perhaps I’ll never experience that kind of thing again, but one thing I learned was that the people with proper goggles protecting their faces were a whole lot better off than people like me who’d decided to try and put off getting any. It inspired me to buy some proper snow goggles before my next alpine trip, primarily for a safety thing I suppose, just in case. This will probably be a few weeks away, but I thought I’d try to go shopping now before all the stock’s gone, since it’s getting towards the end of the ski season.
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  • Reflecting on tramping and the transformation of New Zealand

    For a while now, the third floor at Te Papa has hosted an exhibition titled “Blood Earth Fire — The Transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand“. The exhibition looks at the effects that human settlement has had on New Zealand over time, and I think it’s one of the most insightful exhibitions I’ve seen. The whole thing is fascinating, but the small part I find most telling every time I visit is a display which shows three maps of New Zealand, side by side.

    The first map shows native forest cover throughout New Zealand before humans arrived, which is effectively everywhere except for certain alpine locations where trees won’t grow. The second map displays native forest after Maori settlement, but before Europeans arrived, at which point several large areas of native forest had been cleared. The third map shows the cover of native forest as it is today, by which time the vast majority of the country had been cleared, leaving behind a few delicate islands of native forest. Most of what’s left surrounds mountain ranges, and wasn’t cleared due to the difficulty of farming there anyway. The display very effectively expresses just how much of New Zealand’s original environment has been destroyed to make way for human settlement. It wasn’t only when Europeans arrived in the 19th century, although the European settlement had a major impact.

    The rest of this post documents a collection of thoughts that I’ve had over the last few years about the state of conservation in New Zealand. It’s a fairly wide topic and I’m not really sure where it’s going, but I’ll see how things go in writing it down.

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  • That’s great service

    A couple of weeks ago we visited Penn Creek Hut, and I noted in my trip report that there were a couple of leaks in the hut. Well, like a good little tramper I flicked an email to the Department of Conservation when we arrived back in Wellington to let them know, hoping that perhaps someone would add it to their list of things to expect next time a maintenance team was in the area. I’ve had mixed reception when reporting this kind of thing in the past (such as this time), probably depending on a lot of things such as how busy the office is, how important the issue sounds, and how much I might appear to be a pedantic troublemaker who’s exaggerating a problem.

    Anyway, within a short time my email had made it to the Visitor Asset Manager at the Kapiti Area Office, who responded immediately to let me know that they were onto it, and to try and confirm some more details of what the exact problem was, and offering some hypotheses about possibly lifted lap joints around the skylight. I was impressed, but I was really impressed when I received another email a few days later saying they’d visited Penn Creek Hut for a look, letting me know what the problem was and indicating some plans to re-roof the hut next spring.

    DOC often gets criticised for all sorts of reasons, especially being such a big department with so many responsibilities to so many people, many of whom have conflicting interests. It’s great to get responses like this though, I think, which just demonstrate that underneath it all there are still a lot of really great people whose main job and interest is to keep things running well.

  • Consultation of building codes for New Zealand Backcountry Huts

    As of a few weeks ago, it’s been possible to make a submission about proposed changes to the building code as it applies to New Zealand Backcountry Huts. If you have an interest in this kind of thing, I’d strongly suggest making a submission, even if you mostly agree with the proposal. The deadline for receiving submissions is Monday 23rd June 2008, and the consultation document is available online thanks to New Zealand’s Department of Building and Housing.

    A few weeks ago when I wrote my trip report about visiting Cattle Ridge, I made a comment about the apparent absurdity of DOC’s decision to remove a bunk from the 6 bunk hut. This is apparently due to some ambiguity in the various New Zealand building codes which imply that these days, certain kinds of structures that are intended for a certain number of people require a certain number of fire exits, as well as various other things that seem more suited to populated areas. The consequence? Well somewhere along the line, someone decided that back-country huts with 6 or more bunks would require at least 2 fire exits. Because the design of many back-country huts makes it impractical to add an additional fire exit (there’s simply not enough wall space), DOC adopted the policy, in some cases, of removing one of the beds to turn 6 bunk huts into 5 bunk huts. [Edit, 19/3/2012: It turns out the sixth bunk in Cattle Ridge Hut may have been missing for other reasons, but there remain other examples of Doc staff removing bunks from huts to meet safety standards.]

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  • Ambiguous measurement in the media

    A couple of weeks ago I was listening to the 7am news bulletin on National Radio and heard the phrase “five times deeper than”. It was part of a report about a new earthquake detector installed in West Auckland. The phrase caught my attention because it’s ambiguous. Strictly speaking, “five times deeper than” should mean “six times as deep as”, but I think most people would probably assume it means “five times as deep as”. Judging by the report, which states the depth was 250 metres, it seems likely that the actually did mean “five times as deep as”, which would have put the original figure at a nice, round 50 metres instead of a confusing 41.666666666666666666666666…. metres.

    It’s unusual to hear this kind of ambiguous grammar on National Radio (at least the parts that I listen to), and to be fair they were supposedly quoting a GNS Scientist. Inaccurate, misleading and ambiguous grammar is rife in other New Zealand media, however, particularly around maths and logic. There’s an aversion to good maths and logic in New Zealand journalism, and I find that frustrating because it’s opening up information to be mis-interpreted when there’s no need for that to happen.

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