Kiwi Tracks (3 page)

Next morning we set off reluctantly under falling blobs of wet, semi-frozen sleet. The upper valley is masked by a much thicker snowy veneer, from which avalanches cascade. We zigzag up to the pass, the snow underfoot becoming deeper, falling continuously in great clinging flakes. As we walk under the trees, clumps of snow slip off branches and fall on us with such regularity it seems as if forest trolls are ambushing us. Fiordland is so like Norway. I found the Norwegian winters impossible, but trolls thrived in that darkness. While the summers were paradise for me, they were lethal for the trolls; a single ray of sun would turn them to stone. They would thrive here all year round.

In several areas, we cross open spaces cleared of trees by previous avalanches. Eventually we reach the bush line, where the trees end and there is nothing to shelter behind. Frequently we hear the noise of what sounds like a jet fighter flying up the valley; an indistinct grumble. Almost as often we locate the avalanche as it tumbles down the mountain. This dull pattern of background rumbles is broken by a resounding crack, louder and more threatening, like the clap of thunder we had been warned about. A cloud of upwelling snow billows as an avalanche cascades down, a semi-fluid river, carrying away everything in its path. It is on the same side of the mountain and frighteningly close to us.

Although we are freedom walkers and therefore theoretically responsible for our own safety, Ruth the DOC hut warden leads
the way. A retired and diminutive schoolteacher, she plods through fresh drifts up to our knees and her thighs. Ralph from Kerikeri takes over the lead; being considerably taller than her, he makes faster progress. We are now well above the tree line, over a thousand metres high, which is nothing in terms of mountains, but with these stark alpine weather conditions we could be much higher. There are no points of reference, no cairns, no poles to mark the route. In several places, we wander off the track and fall into deeper snow up to our hips. Finally, we distinguish the vague outline of the stone monument marking the top of the pass.

Ruth stops, almost hidden in the swirling snow. ‘The shelter hut is another twenty minutes further up. I have to stay here and wait for eleven other trampers.’ The quiver in her voice does not inspire confidence.

Trusting Ruth, we trudge timidly towards the bearing indicated. The snow is deep enough to be difficult to walk through, especially for those at the front breaking the trail. I fall into a crack, snow up to my waist. With my heavy backpack, it takes two others to help pull me out.

‘What the hell are we doing here?’ one of my rescuers asks. ‘Doesn’t she realise we’re in the middle of a bloody blizzard?’

‘I’m not going on, even if she tells us to,’ the other replies. ‘It’s too dangerous and I’m freezing.’ No wonder he’s freezing, he’s wearing running shoes.

We wander around blindly without any real direction, not sure where the path is, nor the shelter we are trying to locate. Ralph leads us, assuming the role of Sir Edmund Hillary II; but Ralph is from Kerikeri in the north part of the North Island, where they do not have anything remotely resembling snow.

It occurs to me to take photographs, as if I have a premonition that something will go wrong and I will need photographic evidence later on. An English girl who immodestly calls herself Amazon Woman is taking reams of film of herself, holding her camera at the end of her long arms. She wears short shorts, what used to be called hot pants, and is so tall she looks as if she is
walking on stilts. I photograph her as she takes another satisfying self-portrait.

The storm blows harder and it is difficult to see more than ten metres ahead. The temperature is below freezing, and with the wet snow and the wind-chill factor, some are complaining of the cold. Many trampers only have running shoes and, amazingly, three women besides Amazon Woman are wearing shorts. It seems there is a drop to one side of us, but it is impossible to tell how far. Despite having Kerikeri’s own version of Hillary with us, there is no real leadership. Snow collects on our jackets and backpacks, slowly burying us.

Over the previous few summers I had led tourists on ten-day trips into the Norwegian mountains and onto glaciers. Even in summer it would occasionally snow like this. If I were leading a group back in Norway in such conditions, there would be no question of going further, especially with so many ill-equipped, inexperienced people. When Ralph becomes lost and we make a full circle, I tramp back to locate Ruth. She stands immobile, almost impossible to see through the advancing snowstorm, still optimistically waiting for the eleven others to come up the path. I shout into her ear, my voice loud in the eerie silence of the snowstorm: ‘Even if we find the shelter, we will never find the way down the other side. Visibility is almost down to zero, the storm is getting worse and several trampers do not have proper equipment for these kinds of conditions. We still have time to turn around now and find our way down.’

‘What do I do?’ she asks.

‘Call them back. They trust you as the leader.’

Blusters of snow engulf us, swirling around Ruth’s small face, which is almost hidden under the hood of her jacket. Her lips are drawn tight, blue with cold. ‘Can you get them all to come back?’ she asks. Her eyes betray fear.

I follow my own trail back to the others. Removing my insulated leather gloves, I shove four fingers under my tongue and whistle loudly. I call out to the group, telling them we are heading down. Amazon Woman relays the message with a lot more
authority. She takes one-handed photographs of herself with her other hand cupped around her mouth, calling to the others: ‘Come back! Come back!’

Two bearded Swiss men in Gore-Tex, hi-tech walking sticks in both hands probing the snow, head off in the rough direction of the shelter, as does Ralph. They take one direction; he takes another. The rest of us retrace our steps to the monument where Ruth waits. Already the tracks from our ascent have filled with fresh drifts. Within fifteen minutes Ralph and the two Swiss men descend as well. They could barely find their own footsteps; the blowing snow filled in their trail almost immediately.

As we traverse an avalanche area, the steep mountainsides exposed and without tree cover, we meet stragglers from the guided group also returning from an abandoned ascent up to Mackinnon Pass. Together we descend into the protective custody of the dense forest. All of us end up back at Mintaro Hut. Eleven of our group – the ones Ruth kept waiting for – hadn’t even bothered to leave. Two Germans are still wrapped up snugly in their sleeping-bags.

It is high season and now there are forty unhappy, name-tagged members of the guided tour sheltering in the hut, in addition to our own group of forty frustrated and tired freedom walkers. Like a factory line, the first arrivals from the next group of freedom walkers arrive up the path from Clinton Forks Hut. Soon there will be one hundred and twenty cold and miserable trampers packed into a hut designed to hold only forty. Yesterday it was crowded and a little claustrophobic. Now it is mayhem.

One of our ill-equipped trampers, a young German, has hypothermia. He is allocated a corner of the hut and two medical students hold his hands. There is a hush, everyone subdued by the seriousness of his condition. Using the hut radio, Ruth calls for two helicopters – an air ambulance and another to haul the rest of us over the pass.

Some hours later, we hear the unmistakable thumping of helicopter blades amplified by the steep-sided mountains. The ferry helicopter nestles onto a raised wooden platform beside the hut;
it flits backwards and forwards until evening, evacuating six passengers at a time, starting with the guided walkers. On one flight, the helicopter carries backpacks below it in a swaying sling. Because it is fully loaded, the pilot must execute figures of eight in the narrow valley before gaining enough height to fly over the pass. Between the ferry runs, the medivac chopper arrives with a doctor and a senior DOC staff member from Te Anau. The hypothermic German is transferred to the air ambulance where the doctor hooks him up to monitors. The jet turbines whine louder, the blades rotate and the helicopter takes off, changing the gentle rhythm of falling snow to a gyrating vortex. Then the hovering ferry helicopter takes the ambulance’s place on the platform. It loads up again and efficiently disappears into the mountains, which are hidden behind layers of congealed precipitation. It reminds me of an efficient military evacuation, some troops heading to the front, while the wounded are taken to the rear. It must be costing DOC a fortune to bail us out this way and yet there is no mention of charging us for the service.

There are only three of us left when the helicopter comes in for the final run. It is 8.30 and getting dark. Patches of fog and black clouds threatening to dump more snow add a foreboding dimension to the evening. We throw the remaining packs into the vibrating cabin and climb in. The pilot throttles up and backs the helicopter off the pad as if reversing a car out of its parking spot. He flicks the tail around with the foot pedals, and with his left hand gripping the collective and right hand pushing on the control stick between his knees, we head straight for the wall of mountains on the opposite side of the valley. Deliberately giving his last three passengers – a relatively light load – a thrill, he makes us wait for the turn. We are almost into the sheer cliffs before he pulls a steep bank. The flesh of my face sags as I sink into my seat with the gravitational force. We aim for the pass and effortlessly skim over it, then the pilot banks hard right, the helicopter almost on one side before he rights it and descends, hugging the mountain. He flies the machine gracefully, as if it were an extension of his own body. In a cul-de-sac of a valley he banks hard left and cruises in
to land, without bothering to hover, outside the guided trampers’ Quintin Hut.

By the time we three stragglers arrive at Dumpling Hut, which is further down the track, it is dark and all our fellow freedom trampers have already turned in. Only Amazon Woman is still up, reliving the day’s experience in a letter to an ex-boyfriend. It stirs her emotions, and bending my ear she tearfully recounts how she quit her job to join her boyfriend, only to discover he was having an affair with someone else. I hadn’t noticed the matching label of LONELY GIRL tattooed on her forehead; amazing how effectively we disguise our afflictions.

Then she asks if I would mind taking a photo of her writing in her diary, several photos in fact, from different angles.

‘Just to be sure,’ she says, as she tidies her hair and poses, still wearing her hot pants.

The final day walking the Milford Track, the sky is reasonably clear for the first time. The clear weather has brought in a plethora of sightseeing tourists in small aircraft. Walking down to Milford Sound I see a line of nine single-engine planes following one another up the valley, an airborne invasion. Having spent the last few years in Norway, it’s a shock to be in similar mountains in New Zealand and experience such an intrusion. That morning I count a total of twenty-seven aircraft passing overhead. With each noisy flight the magic of walking in the primeval forest is diminished.

Return to beginning of chapter

It is almost five in the evening at Milford Sound. The horde of tourists has gone back to Queenstown or Te Anau and sightseeing boats no longer dominate the fiord as they had earlier in the afternoon. The terminal building is empty except for a motley group
waiting for the motor-sailing yacht and the overnight excursion down Milford Sound. Among them I meet a German couple, Gert and Giselle. He is a neurosurgeon; she has a PhD and works at a pharmaceutical company. They are clearly in love, touching each other frequently. It drives me crazy being in the presence of lovers who are so affectionate; sometimes just the holding of hands can seem like an intimate act. Their public display of affection – PDA – only reinforces my own solitariness.

She asks me: ‘Isn’t it lonely travelling on your own?’

‘Nah,’ I reply bravely, although I could break into tears quite easily. I like meeting people, but right now I need my own space to reflect. Time is a magical healing process and walking in these rainforests is the perfect environment for it to do just that. ‘I like travelling on my own,’ I respond, not telling the whole truth. She looks at me and smiles. She knows I am lying.

We board the vessel and it casts off from the dock. The Sound is dark and grey, the sun effectively blotted out by the overhanging clouds. Within minutes, we see fur seals and then penguins. Enthralled, I stand at the bow with a few others, undeterred by the drizzle. Untamed waterfalls plunge down vertical cliff faces, their spray, despite the massive volume of water, turning to vapour long before the cascading water reaches the sea’s surface. It has been raining and snowing heavily for weeks; great swollen gushes of water tumble and slide off the mountains. This is the way nature should be seen. Even the longer Norwegian fiords have nothing on this untamed wilderness.

Giselle and Gert stand silently with me at the bow. The steel-hulled boat hugs the sides of the fiord, sometimes manoeuvring under overhangs, sometimes under the showers of waterfalls. We cruise the fiord’s short length to the Tasman Sea, where we ineffectively hoist sail. The vessel thumps into oncoming ocean waves, giant swells which drench those of us still on deck with spumes of salt spray. Finally we turn tail and head back into the sheltered fiord, to cruise under hanging layers of undisturbed mist to calm Harrison Cove, where we anchor. As darkness descends, dinner is served in the mess. The main generator is turned off at eleven.