Windy Tops

Tag: musing

  • Suggestion of Charging Overseas Visitors for National Parks

    The Otago Daily Times has recently been pushing a story (parroted in the NZ Herald) about a suggestion of charging tourists for entry to National Parks in New Zealand. A further ODT story from the same day (last Thursday) briefly interviewed several visitors tramping some of New Zealand’s Great Walks, and there’s also an ODT online survey requesting people’s opinions. The story’s also being followed by Queenstown’s Mountain Scene. (Update 13-Feb-2012: At the time of posting, it looks as if I missed this analysis from the Nelson Mail; Update 17-Feb-2012: Wilderness Magazine also has a look at this.)

    This isn’t a Department of Conservation thing, at least in any public way. The suggestion comes from the Ministry of Economic Development, as part of its briefing to the incoming Minister of Tourism, who just happens to be the country’s Prime Minister on this occasion. Such briefings are standard for most government departments after an election, reporting on their current state of affairs, even if their minister hasn’t changed. If you want to see the actual briefing, it’s available here. The relevant area is between about paragraphs 39 and 46, titled ‘Capturing greater value from international visitors’.

    It’s important to recognise that it’s nothing more than a suggestion at this point in time, and might easily amount to nothing. Personally I think it’s a bad idea. Something I find most attractive about New Zealand’s back-country spaces is that fundamentally they’re not run as money making tourism juggernauts, although that’s about what MED is suggesting should happen given that part of its proposal mentions taking advantage of people’s “willingness to pay”. Surrounding businesses and concessionaires do that by providing extra things on top, but the land itself is available to all for entry.
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  • GPSs and Cognitive Mapping, or lack of it

    Late in 2010, I expressed some concerns about uses and perceptions of GPS receivers and similar technology. This article published in the New York Times (copied verbatim here if the NYT tries to force you to subscribe) refers to some of the concerns I share with risks relating GPS use. It’d be silly not to agree how fantastically useful it is to be able to pinpoint one’s position, especially in situations where safety demands it. On the other hand, it’s easy to get into habits of GPS use which don’t merely reduce one’s awareness in an immediate situation, but might also hinder those mental skills from being exercised or developing.

    A point made in the article is that the more traditional use of a map, which in a back-country context would sometimes be augmented by tools such as compasses and altimeters, requires a person to repeatedly refer to the surrounding physical world. It exercises parts of the brain responsible for generating cognitive maps of the surrounding area. Once a person begins to rely more on a GPS, these skills and abilities are lost, and spatial abilities degrade.
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  • Tararua Range Hut-Bagging Board Game Experiment


    A loose symbolic representation
    of The Tararuas?

    A few weeks back, in a comment, I alluded to a thought that the Tararua Hutbagging Competition concept could make an awesome board game. I’m thinking towards the more complex and strategic Ticket to Ride kind of board game than the Ludo or Monopoly kind of board game.

    The thought hasn’t really gone away, and since that time I’ve been wondering how such a game might work. The rules could potentially be based on something like those of the recent LandSAR hutbagging competition. eg. Players get three “48 hour” attempts to enter the range, visit as many different huts as possible before getting out again, and tally up points in doing so. Strategies might be similar to what people and teams try to use in the real world competitions.
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  • Tararua Southern Crossing Track Centenary, March 2012

    March of 2012 will be a quiet 100th anniversary in the Tararuas, in a sense. It might as easily be very windy and rainy. This March, if you’re attempting a Tararua Southern Crossing, or maybe if you’re competing in the Tararua Mountain Race which could be about that time (Edit 6-Feb-12: actually the next race won’t be ’til March 2013), consider taking a moment to remember that 100 years previously, the Tararua Southern Crossing track had just barely been completed and followed from end to end for the first time. (It’s only arbitrarily significant if you like counting in base 10, of course.)

    Between the 30th and 31st of March 1912, Messrs W. H. Field (local MP for Otaki), B.C. Aston, E. Atkinson, and Frank Penn successfully crossed the range on foot between Otaki and Greytown, walking from the Taungata bridge to Bassett’s hut in two days. It involved “21 hours 20 minutes actual walking”, just in case you were wondering. They were all members of the track committee, which had just completed building of the Tararua Southern Crossing Track intended to make the route feasible for regular people. They were the first to use it, and it’s what made all the difference. Their time over two days was a record for the day. They were the first people recorded to cross the range at all since investigations for a stock route in the mid 1890s.

    The initial success was buried as part of the Local and General News on Page 4 of the Wairarapa Daily Times. There was no headline, and the section had begun with a paragraph noting that the local carpenter’s daughter had broken an arm having fallen from a swing. Publication had come nearly a week after the event:
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  • Not much to say

    I won’t comment much about the recent tragedy to befall one of the Wellington-based clubs over the new year, except that my thoughts are with them and the affected families and friends.
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  • Rivers and Ropes and Mutual Support

    I’ve written a little about river crossing techniques in the past, and I’m about to do so again. Before continuing, I’d like to stress that this post is not meant to be instructional in any way, so much as commenting on some recent happenings in the world of river safety techniques. Back-country rivers are dangerous beasts that kill people who make mistakes. Judging and crossing rivers safely in an outdoors situation is a delicate skill, and the best way to learn it is through river safety courses and by getting experience in controlled situations with experienced people.

    That said, there’s an interesting discussion developing through Federated Mountain Clubs, and highlighted in the November 2011 FMC Bulletin. In it, FMC have published a condensed edition of a report by Brian Wilkins regarding the fording of rivers. It’d be fair to say that Brian is very critical of the Mountain Safety Council’s training materials for the past 20 years which focus on mutual support methods for crossing rivers, and he proposes a return to sufficient training for rope use as an option. The abbreviated article in the printed FMC Bulletin is diplomatic, but FMC have also made the complete 32 page write-up available as a PDF downloadable from their website, and certain parts of it certainly aren’t diplomatic.

    Before continuing (and please remember this when reading what follows), I should stress that the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council has since responded to Brian Wilkins’ article with a statement issued on 9th December 2011 (PDF), explaining why it pushes mutual support methods and avoids rope techniques. In short, mutual support methods have been carefully developed by experts over a long period of time, after many trials it was decided that ropes can become very dangerous unless used correctly… which few people can do, and “it was concluded that ropes can give people a false impression of their abilities and can tempt people to try unsafe conditions”.

    The entirety of the debate is an interesting read.
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  • A Storm Brewing in DoC Intentions

    There’s an interesting storm brewing in Canterbury over DoC’s decision to phase out paper-based intentions forms in favour of instructing people to use the AdventureSmart website instead, which either helps people to create their own intentions forms with their own trusted contacts, or (after many clicks) appears to eventually direct people to the RoughPlan website as the only “approved provider” for recording intentions via a website. Kingsley Timpson, of DoC’s Waimakariri area office, stated (to The Press) that it isn’t DoC’s role to manage people’s intentions, and DoC’s head office has stated the new web system is “safer and easier to use”. [Edit 7th May 2012: Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon hosted a panel this morning to discuss this change.]

    Graeme Kates, the now-former chair of Arthurs Pass Search and Rescue, has just resigned his chairing position, and also his front-desk DoC visitors’ centre position, in protest over the change, claiming that the decision will cost people’s lives. Mr Kates is well known in SaR circles, running a comprehensive website for Arthurs Pass Mountaineering on which he continually documents accidents and rescues, and which I’ve cited from here on several occasions. He’s documented his concerns on his site in more detail.
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  • Commercial Consents and Pest Control (watch that space)

    Maybe this is old news, but I was interested to discover tonight, through a press release of a speech last night, that the Parliamentary Commissioner of the Environment (PCE) is beginning an investigation into commercial use of conservation land.

    The PCE was in the news in June, at the release of an evaluation of the use of 1080 poison for pest control in New Zealand forests. The findings were very positive towards its use, and strongly encouraged a big increase in its use, as long as it were being done with due care. This inflamed criticism from some areas because 1080 poison is controversial in some communities, particularly parts of the hunting community.
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  • NZMS 260 and 262: Our Metric Topographical Heritage, edited by Graeme Jupp (review)

    Topographic maps worldwide often appear utilitarian, if not a little boring graphically. By comparison the new 260s were stylish and modern without losing any utility. They were undoubtedly among the best looking topographic maps in the world.

    —David Balm, In Order to Make a Good Impression: Printing 260 series topographic maps, 1976-1984, (reproduced in the book being reviewed)

    Cover image of NZMS 260 and 262: Our Metric Topographical Heritage, edited by Graeme Jupp

    This is a review of Graeme Jupp’s recently published booklet, titled “NZMS 260 and 262: Our Metric Topographical Heritage”, which was published in February 2011 as part of the CartoPRESS series by the New Zealand Cartographic Society. I’m not giving a complete qualified review, because I’m neither a cartographer nor am I very familiar with much of the history the material to comment on accuracy. It’s more of a perspective from someone who’s enjoyed using New Zealand’s topo maps over the last few years from a tramping perspective. If anyone notices mistakes in some of my comments to do with mapping history or technical issues, please feel welcome to correct me in the comments below. An alternative review by Shaun Barnett has been published in FMC Bulletin 184 from June 2011 (see here for a download link), which has been republished by the NZ Cartographic Society.

    If you’ve spent any of the last several decades using New Zealand’s official topo maps to plan interesting trips, you might find a moment to turn an eye to a short collation of recent cartographic history. This book combines a history with a comprehensive tabular appendix of maps. The combination of the history and the tables means it will make a handy reference item to have on the shelf for many people with an interest.

    The 260 and 262 map series are now obsolete, having respectively been replaced by the Topo50 and Topo250 series as of September 2009, but until that time they became extremely popular, and many are still in circulation today. As concluded by the editor, more than 2.8 million maps of the 260 series, and a further 408,000 maps in the 262 series (which shared the same geodetic datum but was drawn to a different scale) were printed between 1978 and 2009. Production of the 260 and 262 series provided a platform, and also established techniques and technologies upon which New Zealand’s topographic map-making continues to be built. The influence of this period of time in the production of maps in New Zealand seems hard to argue with.
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  • DoC announces its camping restrictions

    As was noted in this thread in the NZ Tramper forums (thanks madpom), the Department of Conservation has published its list of places where it prohibits “Freedom Camping”. Note that this list only relates to DoC land, and doesn’t include any local authority land on which freedom camping might also be prohibited under the Act.

    This list follows from the enactment of the Freedom Camping Bill, now known as the Freedom Camping Act, and which I’ve posted about previously [1] [2]. Among other things, the Act provides for DoC and for Local Authorities to issue instant fines for people found camping in places where camping has been prohibited or restricted, under the Act, by either DoC or the relevant Local Authority depending on who manages the land.

    As might have been expected, the DoC list is mostly composed of carparks, picnic areas and occasional lookout points, where DoC has supposedly encountered or has good reason to expect problems. This is consistent with the marketed intent of the Bill to give power for authorities to restrict tourist-style camping in problem spots. An odd exception to this list seems to be the inclusion of “Aoraki Mount Cook National Park (except at approved camping sites)”.

    Yes, DoC has actually stated that Freedom Camping is prohibited in The Entire National Park. [Update, 7th October 2011: Some helpful people at DoC have clarified a few things which I’ve noted in this comment.]
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