Rainy Routeburn: My First Great Walk

I’ve been backpacking before. Though, in my family, our backpacking trips are usually hunting trips. It’s not quite the same as backpacking–there’s a mission involved!

Our packs are heavy, but the muzzleloader hanging on my shoulder is always the heaviest. (And the most awkward). Also, we spend very little time “in camp.” We set up the tent, eat our dinner, maybe look at the stars a bit, then we’re off to bed only to wake an hour before dawn and head out in the dark. The ground is frosty, our breaths mist, the air is completely still and silent. It definitely feels like there is no one else in a hundred mile radius.

New Zealand’s Great Walks aren’t exactly backpacking. (And they definitely aren’t hunting.)

New Zealand has an impressive backcountry hut system and a few decades ago the Department of Conservation (DOC) decided to make several multi-day tracks “Great Walks.” This is because the tracks were so busy that people were camping all over, huts were overcrowded, and the biodiversity of the areas were potentially being damaged. So, the Great Walks were essentially created to protect the unique flora and fauna of the areas and to limit the number of people using the track on any given day.

Today, this looks like nice new huts along the routes capable of sleeping, on average, 50 people per night. Hut wardens stay in residence to look after the tracks. All major streams are bridged, the tracks are well maintained–wide gravel-lined ways and plenty of well-looked after steps in steep sections. In fact, it really doesn’t feel very “backcountry” at all. Especially if you go with a guided option. Private companies have built their own “luxury” lodges along the routes with real beds, in-house chefs, and hot showers. Basically, by creating these Great Walks, New Zealand has made backcountry backpacking accessible to a much wider range of people.

This was reassuring to me. While I love backpacking (hunting) in Colorado with my family, I would not chose to the do the same here in New Zealand by myself. The well-marked track, the shelter of the huts, the provided gas cooker in the hut (so my pack is lighter), and the many people = Maddie feeling safe enough to head out for a three day, two night trip through the mountains on her own.

Still, to be perfectly honest, I was not feeling all that excited the night before I was set to do the Routeburn Track.

Because of the popularity of these Great Walks, you generally have to book your huts far in advance, which means you have no idea what the weather is going to do. When I checked in with the DOC office the day before my big hike, the ranger told me to expect rain all day on Day 1 and to wake up to snow on Day 2.

Additionally, I was missing my family. They would love to do a cool hike through the New Zealand mountains with me. But the hike-part wasn’t my concern. Hiking is easy to do alone–I am perfectly content with just me and my thoughts and the rhythm of my steps on the track.

I miss, more so in huts than anywhere else, having the comfort of family and friends around. I miss being one of the people in the groups that isn’t just waiting for night to fall so I can crawl into my sleeping bag. I miss sitting close to people on the bench to keep warm and miss having a history that means conversations actually mean something. I miss easy camaraderie (extroverts might not understand this, but small talk is hard for some introverts). So, the night before my hike, I was caught up in a swirl of all of this.

And the morning of, I felt like I was shrouded in a bubble, like it wasn’t the real world. Like I wasn’t really driving to the shuttle office, like I wasn’t really parking my car, like I wasn’t really climbing into the bus to be dropped off at the track. Like I wasn’t already exchanging small talk with the other people on the bus.

And then I started hiking. It wasn’t raining yet–in fact, I had my sunglasses on.

Each step up the incline, each breath in my lungs, each part of the trail where I thought this is idyllic or this is beautiful or this is charming or look at that little waterfall or there’s a glimpse of the peaks through the trees or I love how the birds are always singing–and there I was, no more bubble. I was there. I was doing it. I was hiking through the trees and the forest and up a slope and my legs had found their rhythm and my lungs were sucking in sweet air at a steady rate.

Of course the melancholy still lingered at the fringes. The slight ache in my chest that always misses my family when I’m doing something I would love to share with them. But I was anchored by the satisfying physical task of hiking, by the soothing natural world, by the excitement of getting to the next bend, of maybe finding an opening in the bush that would allow me to see down the valley. The world beyond–the distance between my home and me, the approaching hours in the hut cursed with small talk and a numb butt, the possibility of rain and snow–it was all still there. But it didn’t seem quite so horrible. Because I feel the most real when doing two things.

The first: creating a world and a story.

The second: physically inhabiting my world and my story.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

The world isn’t perfect. I had a few moments where I had to wipe away home-sick tears. I made small talk. I liked one of my dehydrated meals but didn’t like the other. I did actually have an evening and a morning of good, interesting conversation with a few people from Australia. I wasn’t always cold in the huts, but often I was. One night, everyone in my bunk room slept in the common room because there was a particularly loud snorer who basically rattled the windows and didn’t speak any english.

I was drenched by the rain. I was awed by the views. I was annoyed by a fellow American. I was happy and I was sad. I was surrounded by people and I was, often, hiking alone through stunning scenery as though it was made just for me.

Already, my mind has edited out the hardest parts, softened the edges of loneliness, of chill, of hard benches, of smelly socks. And all that I really remember–bright, vivid sensations–are how the forest smelled in the rain, how the waterfall fell so swift and hard that it created it’s own buffeting wind, how flowers sprouted from the rocks, how I could see the Tasman Sea from the highest point on the trail, how I was alone at the center of the world while traversing the edge of the Hollyford Valley. All those moments where the world felt the sharpest and realest. If I can’t be with the people I love, at least I can be in a place where I feel awe, doing something that makes me feel physically and mentally connected to the earth.