Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • 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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  • Smoking through the streets of Wellington

    Something I’ve noticed, having been on a lot of trips with a tramping club in a short space of time, is that the people who go on such trips are almost never smokers. The only time I actually remember being on a trip with someone who smoked was the trip to Rangiwahia. The club rated it an Easy trip, and on that occasion we reached the night’s destination within two hours. The smokers stayed behind in the sun at the hut while the rest of us went further up the hill into the snow after lunch, for an afternoon walk.

    Walking around town is quite the opposite. There are people smoking everywhere. Perhaps it’s just more obvious since the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Act was passed in 2003, making it a legal requirement that all workplaces be smoke-free as of December 2004. Naturally this has driven people who like to smoke out into the streets. It probably also means that people’s smoking tends to be more concentrated during the times when they’ll be outside for other reasons, such as during their lunch breaks, and before and after work. These tend to co-incide with the times that everyone else is outside, and as someone who walks around streets a lot, I’ve found the apparently lessened quality of the outdoor air to be off-putting.

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  • Branders as retailers

    Lately it was announced that the Fairydown brand is under new management (again) for about the millionth time in its history, although I don’t feel as if I’ve been around on the scene long enough to really appreciate all the changes it’s gone through. (Ben of Cactus Climbing has a brief summary of the recent situation.) Well done to these three guys and good luck to them. The new business plan, rather than manufacturing quality NZ-made goods for NZ conditions, is to manufacture it all in Asia (as everyone does these days to be fair), and open New Zealand Fairydown retail outlets in the main centres. I guess I’ve been wondering from my limited perspective about some of the changes that have been going on in the Wellington retail sector of tramping shops.
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