Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • Walkability, Connectivity, and Te Araroa

    Two months ago I wrote about Te Araroa (The Long Pathway), and it seems apt to point out that there’s now a set of forums which attempts to build a community of people wanting to discuss walking of the route. I heard about it during a typically tangenting discussion on the NZ Tramper website, which caused me consider more clearly what Te Araroa is for me.

    I guess it’s possible to perceive that Te Araroa is (or should be) a top-down consistently-designed, clearly-marked and well-managed walking track. Perhaps this will be the case some day with sufficient motivation throughout its length, but presently it’s a bottom-up effort to link together a massive collection of smaller walk-ways. Much of Te Araroa already existed, but the project (approaching 20+ years of effort) ensures that individual routes and walkways are connected and defined as part of the network. In places where there’s been no reasonably direct or useful connection between sections, access has been negotiated or built to complete the continuity.

    Being a bottom-up creation rather than a top-down creation, Te Araroa is not automatically a sparkly, consistent and necessarily easy-to-locate walkway for the entire length, despite ongoing efforts to improve it. What it does mean, however, is it’s actually possible to walk legally between any two places along the route with the exception of occasional bodies of water. At no place is it necessary to stop and get a bus, or drive a car between two points.
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  • Completing a Kaiwharawhara Stream Walk

    It’s good to read (via The Wellingtonian and Stuff) that some positive effort is being made to open up a small section of land on the harbour side of Wellington’s incoming motorway. The article doesn’t mention it, but the beach being referred to is, I think, just around the corner from the harbour outlet of Kaiwharawhara Stream. Although it’s public land, this stretch (here’s a map) has been almost completely cut off from public access thanks to the barrier of 4 lanes of moderate speed regular traffic on the old Hutt Road, 6 lanes of motorway, 4 railway lines, and some Centreport land in the vicinity of the Interislander vehicle loading area on the south-western side. Presently, the only legal way to access the coastal section is from the sea.

    Several years ago, I made an effort to walk the greater part of the Kaiwharawhara Stream, down from the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary (aka Zealandia), through Otari Wilton’s bush, a feast of suburbia and Trelissick Park around the Ngaio Gorge. It’s a very nice and relaxed journey which tells a story of history and local ecology. For me, it was rather frustrating to discover that after all this, the entire thing ends behind an ugly and impregnable industrial wall, just before the stream enters the harbour. The stream flows underneath all of this and through a channel between the various commercial/industrial properties, but sadly no provision has been made for any practical form of walking access.

    If an access way can ever be created so that people can see where the stream finally enters the harbour, it’d make it possible to have a nice sense of closure for the journey.

    3051254847_476a627851-6943208
    Goodbye, Kaiwharawhara Stream!

  • Safety In The Mountains (review)

    Safety in the Mountains, 11th edition cover

    I’ve never read a copy of Safety in the Mountains until now. It’s a booklet, first published in 1937 by Federated Mountain Clubs (FMC), to collect important points of safety for exploring the back-country, and designed as a carry-with-you reference guide. Over 75 years, 130,000 copies have now been printed. The 11th and latest edition of 2012 was launched earlier this month.

    Not having read previous editions makes me inadequate to comment on changes or make other comparisons with what came before, so here I express my impressions of the 11th edition from an isolated viewpoint. I’ll also state a disclaimer for a potential conflict of interest, because I’m indirectly a member of Federated Mountain Clubs (via the Wellington Tramping & Mountaineering Club), and tend to be aligned with much of its advocacy.

    About the book

    The text says it best: “This booklet is intended as a collection of reminders for use in the field rather than to replace any instruction manual, or textbook. They are for the guidance of readers and are binding on fools.”

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  • Cooking gas to be removed from some Tararua Huts

    I realise there will be concerns about the Department of Conservation’s Wairarapa Conservancy deciding to remove cooking gas from several huts on the Wairarapa side of the Tararuas. DoC’s current Wairarapa Alerts page lists three of the affected huts as Mitre Flats, Totara Flats and Tutuwai. I’d guess Powell Hut and Jumbo Hut will also be targets, but can’t find this officially stated. The reasoning for the removal of cooking gas is that budgets are tight, and providing cooking gas for these serviced huts is quite an expensive operation.

    Personally I’m not concerned about this move. To me it seems that cooking gas (if required to cook one’s chosen meals) is something that should really be carried by a party already, even if they expect to find cooking facilities at a hut, simply for self-sufficiency. If you happen to fall over or otherwise get stuck part way to an intended hut, and don’t have the necessary equipment to cook your meal, you could very well be going hungry and find yourself in danger.

    The Dominion Post article quotes a manager of the Kuranui Outdoor Education Academy as saying that loss of cooking gas could be a safety issue because he might need hut gas to heat up a brew for students, and that carrying their own cooking equipment will make students’ loads heavier. If it’s an accurate quote, however, I have serious trouble accepting this reasoning. Children or not, if the party isn’t carrying self-sufficient cooking facilities on the way to a destination, it’s a safety issue already.
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  • Risks of Experience

    Recently an incident in Auckland’s Hunua Range provoked a discussion in parts of the outdoor community. It wasn’t a discussion about a man’s getting lost for four days when intending a 4 hour daywalk so much as a discussion about the way he was repeatedly described in media as ‘experienced’, despite many of the things he did having been categorical opposites of what is typically recommended for those stuck in his situation.

    Once eventually found, an exciting story emerged. The man had at first made a mistake by following a trapping line off the main track on which he’d intended to remain. Despite having two maps (I’m unsure what sort of maps they were), neither proved useful. Intent on saving himself because he knew he could get out…

    …A determined Fong barely rested for the next four days as he followed water courses in the park, picking himself up from falls down hills, losing his map and running out of food.

    Unable to catch the attention of the searching helicopters, he even tried unsuccessfully to use an old tree trunk as a raft to paddle himself to safety, all the while never entertaining the thought that he would not make it.

    “I knew with my fitness I could get out, it was just a matter of time. In my head I just put one thing in my head and said I’ll get out and that’s it.

    “When I saw a mountain, I just thought ‘I’ll bust through that mountain and just keep going and going’.

    “I never felt tired, I just kept walking and walking. I never thought that I would die in the forest.”

    [—snip—]

    The bush was so dense that searchers could have passed within two metres of Fong and missed him if he was unresponsive. Duthie [the SaR coordinator] said it was a massive relief when Fong was located because there’d been little sign of him and as more time passed the chances of him safe decreased.

    Even after it was clear to him that a search was underway, he walked roughly 50 kilometres through thick bush where he would not have been visible from the air. He didn’t remain in the same place, and was eventually located in a region that had already been searched.

    This post is meant to be about the general media’s interpretation of experience within outdoor contexts more than any specific incident, but I’ll refer to this and a couple of other incidents for demonstration. There’s another discussion about similar things on the NZ Tramper website. As usual this is all just my own musings, and thoughts are welcome.
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  • DoC Track Time Calculation Nightmares

    5228080613_d3bd26e585_n-2644337
    HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Sometimes it’s
    just fun to leave the sign there.

    I found it really interesting to read Alistair Hall’s article in Wilderness Magazine, which describes a recent Official Information Act Request to the Department of Conservation regarding how it estimates the track walking times that are typically advised on signs around the place. If you’ve spent any amount of time in New Zealand’s conservation estate track network, it’s likely you’ve experienced inconsistencies in the accuracy of such times. It shouldn’t really be unexpected, given that every sign presents a single time whilst people clearly walk at different rates. No stated time can be correct for everyone.

    Most interesting for me from the article, I think, was not the revelation that estimated times aren’t pulled out of thin air so much as the mish-mash variety of different methods that various conservancies use. Some conservancies have slow staff walk the track and time it at a leisurely pace. In the Marlborough Souds, a fit staff member walk the tracks, then times would be weighed slightly downwards… unless they were shorter walks in which case they’d find a staff member near retirement. (No mention of how fast this older person might be—many “physically mature” people can still crack it through the outdoors pretty fast.)

    Some conservancies make informal guesses and then consult staff from their experiences. Times on signs around Egmont National Park were estimated by paying a contractor to walk every track in the park and time distances between signposts, and the times were then adjusted depending on the track type. Conservancies throughout the central North Island use a formula based on the Naismith Rule of thumb, basically looking at a map and taking hill ascents into account, and then weighting the results further for the kind of track and expected type of visitor.

    None of them, however, allow for variation in the type of person who might be walking on a track. They all produce a single time for the signpost next to any stretch of track, and typically don’t indicate who it’s for. Irrespective of how much calculation occurs for variations in the track, an assumption is always made about the visitor. It might be an assumption that people are very fit, or alternatively that the visitor could as easily be pushing a baby stroller, but the signs don’t say.
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  • Mokihinui River Saved

    After walking from the southern branch a couple of years ago, it’s fantastic to see that the Mokihinui River has been saved from flooding by a hydro dam. The project was granted resource consent in 2010 pending a likely appeal and further permission from DoC and the Minister of Conservation. It’s been dragging through the Environment Court for some time now, but today Meridian Energy decided not to pursue it further. Further details are available on Stuff, or via the NZ Herald.

  • Proposed Tararua Cycle Track

    The Dominion Post and the Manawatu Standard both carried the story of a proposal to build a cycle track through the northern Tararua Range, between Shannon, into the Mangahao Dams and out to Ehetahuna. It turns out that this idea has been around for at least a couple of years (and here’s an earlier article on Stuff), although it’s the first time I’ve noticed it myself.

    The map, taken from a 14MB PDF hosted on Stuff, doesn’t give much detail and I’m having some trouble matching the squiggles to realistic geographic terrain on the topo map of the area. I think the proposed route from west to east appears to enter the range from Kakariki West Road or nearby, climbs up Pohehe and Ratapu, up to Ngamaia and Conical Knob, then around Massey Knob and Ngapuketurua. From here, I’m guessing the idea is to head down a spur via spot-heights 959 and 851, 675 and 670 to get to Harris Creek, and follow the Mangahao River back to the dams and out to Shannon. Apparently the plan would involve building a hut around Ngapuketurua.
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  • Detecting a faulty baseplate compass

    A Silva Field 7 Baseplate Compass
    My Silva Field 7 Baseplate Compass.

    Usually when intuition says one thing and a compass says something else, it means your intuition is wrong. More than a few times, I or a group I’ve been in have had a compass bearing telling us to go one way that intuitively seemed completely wrong, and after some time it’s turned out that we really were meant to push through an area that looked completely un-navigable. A couple of times, my sense of direction has become bizarrely flipped somehow inside my head, only to be corrected by a compass. On occasion, this has resulted in my sitting down in a flummoxed state for a few minutes trying to flip my head over, but it usually works out.

    One problem with a compass, though, is that the needle can occasionally flip—the south pole of the needle becomes north, and north becomes south, meaning the red end of the compass points south instead of north. This is exactly what happened to me on this occasion. The needle flipping actually happened some time before I left, and happened to be wrong when I first pulled it out to use it whilst inside visually encumbering cloud at 1400 metres elevation. Flipped needles are often a consequence of exposure to iron, in the same way that you can easily magnetise a pin by stroking it with a magnet a few times. In my case, I didn’t have a clue what’d caused it because my compass spends most of its time sitting on a shelf, but there are many things that might have caused it. Clearly this can be a problem, and if you’re trying to navigate it can also be a little risky if you’ve not realised what’s happening.

    There are a few ways to detect this in the field, though, and I’m keen to hear of any that I don’t mention here. Obviously if you know where you are and can see a known landmark, you can compare the compass to see if the needle’s pointing where you’d expect. If you have multiple compasses, you can compare them and at the very least determine if one compass is misbehaving. In my case, the first sign was that it tried to point me directly back the way I’d just come from, but in most such cases I’d still expect a compass to be more correct than my own intuition. Fortunately my GPS (usually packed away) includes an electronic magnetic compass, which I spent a few minutes calibrating, then compared the two.

    There’s yet another sign which might be common knowledge, but I can’t find any references on the ‘net so I thought I might share it. What should have been a dead giveaway for arousing suspicion in my case, especially in hindsight, was that the weighting of the needle within the compass was completely wrong.
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  • Research of Interesting Outdoor Whistles

    Several years ago, and soon after a couple of occasions when I’d wanted a whistle on very short notice but didn’t have one, I went out to buy a whistle to attach to my pack. With very little research I bought a Fox40 Classic whistle because it was easy to find and because their marketing said they were fantastic, and also that they were the "standard choice for personal safety and rescue professionals worldwide". Besides giving me greater opportunities to annoy people, I thought that maybe it’d be useful in a SAR situation some day, too.

    Sadly I felt let down after some time. Despite the Fox40’s ability to momentarily deafen me any time I blew it, I found it often didn’t annoy people at a distance in an open space, or even reach their ears, as much as I hoped. I put this down to various issues in the bush, like the frequency of corners little hillocks around which sound probably wouldn’t be travelling well, and probably also some audio absorbing properties of thick vegetation. Recently though, I was pointed to some research that’s been done on whistles, and (even better) it’s about the effectiveness of different whistles in New Zealand back-country conditions.

    Specifically, in 2006 a group of New Zealand Youth Search and Rescue members ran tests that compared a variety of whistles, as well as a giant honker and “yelling and screaming”. The tests have very recently been updated in 2012 to include comparisons of some extra whistles that were provided by Safety Whistles NZ. [Edit 9-Sep-2015: The above-linked page is no longer available, but it’s helpfully still hosted by the WayBack machine.]

    From personal experience I’m not surprised in hindsight that the Fox40 whistle tested badly, coming 6th out of 7 whistles and (after the 2012 tests) being barely comparable with a newly tested Safety Whistle. I was surprised by a couple of things, though.
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