Snowlines: Backyard bolt-holes

By COLIN MOORE

They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. They nestle in the snow near the top of some of our highest mountains and sit in thick bush beside rushing wilderness rivers.

New Zealand's backcountry huts are a national resource often lauded only by those grateful for their shelter. No other country has such a network of unprepossessing public shelters in the wilderness.

The European versions are more miniature hotels than huts, reflected in the cost of staying in them. In Australia and the United States backcountry travellers rely more on camping.

Perhaps because of the fickle weather, for as long as New Zealanders have used the bush and mountains for leisure they have built shelters that are a little more substantial than a fly tent of canvas.

Yet whatever the hut's size or condition, it will be welcomed by its occupants.

I contemplate this staring into a roaring fire at the relatively palatial Waitakere hut of Auckland's Alpine Sports Club. The sign above the lintel reads, "Haec olim meminisse juvabit," which translates, "This place we remember with joy."

It is an appropriate hut motto because the history of the building is similar to the history of other huts up and down the New Zealand backcountry.

The club's first Waitakere hut was the dilapidated remains of an old bunkhouse and cooking shack from the kauri logging days. Club members discovered it beside the Anawhata Stream in the late 1920s. They cleaned it out, fixed the roof with tarpaper and called it Chateau Mosquito.

Other groups commandeered abandoned mining shacks, musterers' huts or, more recently, huts dropped into the wilderness by the former Forest Service for its deer cullers.

In the early 1930s the club bought some land on the ridge near the junction of Cutty Grass Track and Anawhata Rd to build the club base, from its 48 totara block foundations upward. The hut was officially opened in 1934.

Cutty Grass Track may be an indifferent tramping route, but its name is synonymous with the Waitakeres. As a boy I walked it with Mrs Bush from across the street, who was a staunch member of the Auckland Tramping Club. She took a neighbour and I on my first tramp and a night in the ATC hut, which is just a few hundred metres from the Alpine Sports Club hut.

Times spent in huts since are rich in my memory. There is the smallest, Sefton Bivvy, on the Stocking Stream route to the footstool in Mt Cook National Park. Three of us happily slept in the kennel-sized structure that has sitting room only. It is the oldest unmodified hut in the park and, in 1999, it was flown out by chopper, relined and replaced in its original position.

The most welcome hut was the Rangipo on the Round the Mountain track in Tongariro National Park. A lahar had washed out the marker poles and, in gathering darkness, my tired young daughter and I lost the trail. We were setting up a bivvy when I somehow sensed a pole, found the trail, and a welcoming fire at Rangipo Hut.

.The most frightening hut was in the Waimakariri Valley near Arthurs Pass. I was on my own and fresh from dropping out of university. At night the possums coughed, the rats scurried and the denizens of dark made all sorts of noises, which next morning had this city boy heading elsewhere.

My cosiest hut experience would be in the New Zealand Alpine Club's hut at Delta Corner on Mt Ruapehu. My club hosts were at a meeting at the Chateau of all the mountain clubs. The weather packed in and they couldn't get back to Delta Corner, so there was nothing for me to do but stoke up the fire and attempt to consume the steak and 3-litre cask of wine I had brought as koha.

The bleakest hut was Esquliant Bivvy on windswept Wright Col in the Forbes Mountains of Whakatipu, except I didn't stay there but went to help build a replacement.

We stayed in tents in the sort of harsh, snow-sleet conditions that prompted Otago climbers to shoulder materials for kilometres to build the first bivvy just beneath Mt Earnslaw. I did little more than carry rocks to make a wall around the new shelter, built in memory of a young climber killed in a fall on Leary Peak, but I am proud that my name appears on the first page of its first hut book.

Our backcountry huts are built by clubs administered by the Department of Conservation. DoC maintains about 500 huts but struggles to recoup in hut fees what it needs to keep them up to a reasonable standard. A recent proposal to raise hut fees was abandoned. The alternative is to ensure that everyone pays the existing fee.

The postscript to this story is that two years ago ASC's Waitakere hut burned down. With the help of community grants, the club replaced it with an even better structure.

* To book the ASC Waitakere Hut, contact Joe Scott-Woods at ph/fax 846 4902. DoC huts are in several categories depending on the facilities, with single night prices ranging from $5 to $15.

* Colinmoore@xtra.co.nz