Blissful Hiker discovers that having her ego tweaked just a little by a braggart can be a good thing, because it helps her decide what matters and what doesn’t. 

In this episode:

1. The day starts with a rainbow, feathery falls and then a steep climb into the stunning Richmond Range on New Zealand’s long walk, the Te Araroa. 
2. At Slaty Hut, she meets a young thru-hiker who brags about his speed, his distance and his light gear much to her annoyance. 
3. She “interviews” him and discovers he’s actually a nice guy, hiking his own hike. 

All day is a steep climb alternating between thick sun-dappled beech forests on mossy trail and glorious high ridges, the mountains like a bunched green carpet, the folds reaching to a never-ending horizon. I walked well today, enjoying the exertion and much as the views. 

I finally pop out a kind of wide and open mesa-like section and can see Slaty Hut tucked in ahead, safely out of the wind. I am the first to arrive and claim the best bunk on the far wall. Just as I begin to organize my gear, John, the American hiker bangs in followed by a few others and they take up the remaining bunks. 

And John proceeds to take over the conversation. Oh, my friends, he is absolutely insufferable. Every other sentence is about how fast he’s going and the huge distances he’s covering and all that he’ll have to do tomorrow on the trail, like somehow we won’t also be doing the same. 

“I passed two guys, but I was just flying up the hill!” “Oh gee, I’ll have to carry water for 13k tomorrow!” “I can’t believe how fast I got here!” He is about the most annoying know-it-all I have met on the trail and I am stuck in a tiny hut with him, and this is the guy I danced down the trail with on the Queen Charlotte Track. 

He must be in a fog of his own glory and forgets we’ve met. So I put my ear plugs in and set up my bunk station, John still droning on, “I’ve waited all day to finally have this rest,” as though no one else has hiked or exerted and looked forward to a rest – or deserved one – but him.

The day begins with my friend Maggie pointing out a good luck charm, a rainbow taking over the sky and framing the mountains as we drive from Nelson back to Hacket Creek where I left off a few days ago. I’m entering the Tasman region of New Zealand as I walk south on the Te Araroa. It’s a short uphill until I join the Richmond Track and head into the range, a 5-6 day tramp that’s considered the hardest hiking on the trail. 

But the sun is shining as Maggie, Steve and another friend start me off with a side trip to whispering falls. A serpentine seam glistening in the sun like a beaded curtain dripping over moss with a light hiss. Maggie loads me up with one more home made bagel with lox and extra cream cheese. I save the last piece of rhubarb cake for the moment I reach a mountain view and say goodbye feeling a familiar tightening in my chest. Fear of the unknown. It doesn’t help that my feet don’t feel solid in the damp. I decide the only way to feel better in this situation is to go more slowly. I have all day and I’m loaded down with food, just take it easy.

A sign warns of multiple river crossings which happen one after another, like a roller coaster up and over and then down to the boiling water. I begin to see peaks ahead and a hiker sitting on a rock. It’s Eline, the beautiful Dutch woman with a million dollar smile! She tells me it’s only 700 meters to the next hut, but straight up through mist, clearing every so often to reveal mountains-upon-mountains.

I cross a high plateau then head down into an enchanted moss covered forest before returning to a high plateau and the tiny hut where I try to ignore John’s bragging. I’m at least 20 years older than him and everyone here. I’m doing really well, but I just don’t fit into the world of kilometer comparison. 

Truth is, I want a kind word my way, real conversation or just to commiserate on what we’ve done together and definitely not to have to listen to this condescending comparison conversation. 

I tell myself this too shall pass then pick up an old magazine. I turn to a piece about a Kiwi mountaineer who made many daring first ascents in the 1920s, but was humble about them and ever curious. Why is it ok, I wonder, for a 30-year-old man to act this way but not, say, a middle aged woman to brag?

In the morning, I’m the first one out heading steeply up the ridge, clouds below me like a bubble bath. The sky is crystal clear, the wind keeping me cool as I push up and over and back down into mossy, sun-dappled forest. I feel insecure after John’s bragging and relive the evening trying out new comebacks.

Of course John catches me up and I suddenly decide why not have him talk about himself into my microphone. I apologize to him I should have asked yesterday and I know his schedule is ‘pressed.’ He’s happy to talk, so we sit on a rock with a view out of the wind.

You know, he really is not that much of a jerk when you talk to him one-on-one. Of course remember I’ve interviewed conductors, composers and performers, all with, shall we say, ‘healthy’ egos and I’ve gotten quite good at putting people at ease and letting them share about their favorite topic – themselves.

He explains he simply likes moving fast but he also realizes he needs to stop and enjoy the view too. I’m surprised he shows a humble side, the one grateful to organize his work life so he can take huge chunks of time off.

A small revelation. He still talks too much and uses “I” way too much, but I feel different after our chat. He agrees we all have to hike out own hike and it’s something I continually have to tell myself.

John flies up – just as he described – as he takes off to Old Man Ridge, where I top up my water bottle at a mini rain barrel. The trail is crumbling and eroded with tricky footing and just ahead I see the monster mountain Rintoul looming above, the ridge going deep into forest, then up and back down a few more times.

By the time I reach the final forest, I slow the pace so I can keep moving up. I pop out onto stones at a flattish spot with a gentle breeze. I lean against the orange pole, a triangle shoved into the top looking a bit like an arrow pointing where? Who cares, I splay out my feet and pull out salami and cheese for lunch, yellow and white mountain daisies in bunches grabbing hold of what little earth there is between rocks. 

The mountains lie in waves, choppy and sharp and a thin ridge reaches past me. Am I meant to walk that? I pull out my map certain the trail continued to my right and not ahead. Warnings tell me that the scree is loose and dangerous – and that there’s another mountain to summit.

Whoops! This mountain I’m feeling so chuffed about climbing is Little Rintoul. The real Rintoul is next to it, and just like that Simpsons episode when Homer points to a giant peak, but the actual peak is next to it and even more giant, everything comes into sharp focus. I’m meant to climb down – way down – and then right back up. 

And this time through a gravelly, ball bearing-like scree nightmare. I wipe off the dirt from my behind and pack up. Might as well get started. 

It’s loose dirt, stones, and boulders, clingy some of the times, but then spilling its way over steep rock. It’s use-the-poles, use-your-hands, use-your-butt kind of climbing. It’s slow – inching-along slow – as I carefully creep down the side of the baby mountain, nearly back into trees, before I finally heave a sigh of relief and shoot right back up on scree stones of all sizes, up and up to a summit. It’s worth it, affording me a view of mountains for miles and the impossibly turquoise water of the Abel Tasman coast. 

A little dusty, a little scratched up, but pretty well ok, I sit at this second summit for as long as I like. Aptly named Rintoul Hut is right below, and it’s still early, the sun warm and the air fresh. Remember the saying, getting to the summit is only half the journey, and it’s down even more epic rubble ready to cut loose under my feet. I’m fooled in thinking it’s all downhill as I climb up another small ridge before plunging yet again down. Sometimes skiing, most of the time just breaking a fall.

The rock tripping hazards follow me into the forest until I finally reach a clearing looking straight at the bay and over to tomorrow’s mountain. Rintoul hut is hot and buggy, so I set outside with two young American firefighters who tell me Rintoul was, a friend of Wakefield, the man who developed the “colonial theory” to lure British colonizers to New Zealand with promises of perfect weather and large tracts of arable land. In actuality it was more like thick bush and months upon months of rain.

Everyone soon arrives – Eline, Kaçka and Kuba, and a French-Canadian named Jamie. I put off making dinner as long as possible not sure I can ration food for five more days. The two firefighters engage me in conversation and offer a few drams of Southern Comfort. I’m the age of their mothers and they sweetly – but clumsily – compliment my being out here and how good I look. 

There’s yet another mountain to climb tomorrow plus a deep river gorge to negotiate. I know John is far ahead of all of us now and I probably won’t see him again. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel bad without your consent.” The truth is John is just who he is and the fact that he twinges my insecurity in not going fast enough is my problem. 

As we sit outside without a sandfly in sight so far from water, I wonder what would have happened had I not talked to John and rather than see him more as a peer just hiking his own hike, taken his bragging as fighting words. I might have marched up those two mountains and missed out on sitting up there, almost an hour on each one enjoying the view, the air, the sunshine and my food. 

Maybe it’s good to get tweaked every now and again by someone making you feel a little inferior. It makes you test your assumptions and then decide what matters and what doesn’t.  

1. It’s steep up Little Rintoul, though she realizes it’s only the fist climb of the day as the real, and higher Rintoul is an eroding, scree-field of a trail.
2. Rather than take John’s bragging as “fighting words” she continues to hike her hike, taking the time to enjoy the view, air and sunshine from the summits. 

MUSIC: MUSIC: Poema del Pastor Coya by Angel Lasala and Suite Argentina by Horacio Salgan as played by Alison Young, flute and Vicki Seldon, piano

Transcript:

After a road walk, I reach Mt. Richmond Forest Park, loud with cicadas and birds and the Pelorus River singing beside me. Asign tells me to listen for rifleman, tomtit, South Island robin, fantail, bellbird, tui, brown creeper and warbler and that I might see whio. 

The track is dry and rocky, finally no mud. It almost feels like trails in the Sierra. I’m surrounded by black beech trees, huge and ancient sporting tiny serrated leaves. Brown and curling on the ground, they make soft carpet. Beeches weep sap which a bug called a beech scale lives on secreting the excess in a sugary liquid called “honeydew.” It looks like amber dripping down the sides of the tree. I reach out to touch the puzzle-piece bark, looking charred by this process. A cicada buzzes heavy, popping briefly into my face. I walk on with my mouth closed. 

The river bank is nearly white limestone, and the river itself an impossible to describe emerald green. Large pools are still and deep and I can see to the bottom. The day is sunny and hot and I’m closing in on the hut, so I drop Olive Oyl to contemplate taking a swim. As I take off my clothes, a cloud of sandflies swarms my body. Tiny, looking like miniature houseflies, they attack any and every bit of exposed skin. 

It’s a battle with my clothes, hard to pull of my sweaty body. But I’m out of them and in the water fast, cold, refreshing, clean. They don’t seem interested in my wet head as I bob in what appeared from the shore to be still water but is in actuality pulling me downstream towards the small rapids. I kick a little a pull myself over to the grippy limestone, balancing on my feet so I can dig my fingernails into my scalp like a shampoo. 

OK, back I go but just exactly how am I going to get out of here without alerting the sandflies?

Very quickly, I tell myself. Very, very quickly. 

Sandflies didn’t seem to find me on top of the Onahau Lookout on the Queen Charlotte Track. I have just started the South Island on my epic walk of the Te Araroa, New Zealan’s long pathway, a thru-hike of nearly 2,000 miles. Already, I’ve had some wonderful experiences – harvesting mussels to cook up and eat at my first campsite, then stealth camping up high with a 360-degree view of Marlborough Sound, the bush-covered mountains seeming to grow right out of the turquoise water. 

I wake with the dawn, and leave this glorious spot heading steeply down through bush into the Iwituaroa Reserve, the finest preserved lowland, sub-tropical forest in the world, and full of a dawn chorus as I work my way back to the ocean and on to Anikiwa. It’s beginning to get very hot, and passersby tell me ‘Good on you!’ when I say I’m walking the whole country. It’s road for a long way, with one of a very few number of warning signs to motorists that walkers are on the road – helpful since Kiwis pretty much never yield to walkers. 

I see two very tan and very young walkers ahead hitch a ride. I guess I’d be too embarrassed to hitch a ride unless I was injured. Walking is what I do. It take ages before I finally round a corner to a lookout for Havelock far below, its mussel beds laid out in grids. Havelock is the Green-Lipped Mussell Capital of the world – and I eat an entire pot meant for two before popping in the hardware store for some fuel. 

I just happen to mention to Michele at the register that I’d like to go a bit further today than Havelock so I can stage reaching the first hut on the Pelorus River by tomorrow night, but have no idea where to camp as the campground is too far to walk this late. She tells me to hang on a sec, picks up the phone and calls a friend and just like that, arranges for me to camp on their lawn. 

It’s so New Zealand and so perfect for me.

And what a hoot at Heidi and Sam’s. They moved here from Auckland looking for a place to fit their menagerie including a horse, a pony, a pair of pigs and goats, numerous cats, one dog and twenty chickens. They’ve lived here five months, a house and grounds that was allowed to go to seed by a couple becoming too old to manage it. But pink and purple shag has to go, birds get trapped and die in the chimneys and cupboards are coming apart. Still it has “good bones” – and the view is out of this world. I set up the alicoop on the lawn after we devour a fish dinner courtesy the salmon farm where Sam works. Life is good.

Tui and Sam’s loud morning stretch greet the day. I get to Dalton’s Track where the trail notes tell me I must not walk on road. But the industrial sprinklers are running right on the path. I understand farmers don’t want to dodge hikers, but first thing on a long day I don’t want a mud fest. It will take me an hour to walk here and I’m hoping I can just move along without being seen. Not sure why a public road can be off limits, I grumble.

Dang, it’s because this is not a public road. I am on a working farm and now surrounded by animals and machinery. Ugh. I really don’t want to be that ugly entitled American hiker.

Aha, a young Samoan farm hand races over to me on his 4×4 and guides me away from the huge herd coming down the road like an immovable tidal wave. I’m saved! And the field walk is not too bads.

I come to forest loud with cicadas, and reach the Pelorus River. Someone scrawls 1800 kilometers in the gravel. I take a break at my half-way point, still early in the day, but never too early for a thru-hiker to eat lunch. A lovely South African Englishman walks by who started just five days ago as he’s only doing the south island. He introduces himself as Pierre and I say ‘ça va?’ to which he replies his parents were just making a joke when naming him. We’re headed to the same hut called Captain Creek, and somehow seeing another hiker makes me feel strong and capable, like I can get there too. 

The river tuns on a bed of white-gray rock, emerald green and crystal clear like glass. I climb steeply away from the water, twisting and turning and negotiating roots and rocks. Beech forests are so much more open and light than what I walked through on the North Island. Ferns and palm along with podocarp give it an ancient, primeval feel. Oddly, the sand flies don’t land on me while I walk.

Kiwi Rob is there and Pierre plus a family of three with a plump and sassy black Scottie in tow. None of us stay in the hut because it’s beastly hot, and the Kiwis sit at the picnic table not a care in the world as sandflies work their way up my pant leg. 

No, the Pure New Zealand campaign left out the epic sand fly nasties. It’s Maori legend that they were created to keep us focused on the ephemeral quality of this Garden of Eden. They tell us we are visitors and can only pass through. 

That may very well be true, but I’m going to savor this paradise as much as possible. So off go the clothes again, and in I go back as fast as possible into the delicious water. Leaving me, for right now anyway, completely “in this moment” and bug free. 

The night is cool and the stars come out. I see them through my bug net as diamonds displayed on black velvet. It’s not long before I’m packed and off crossing a one-person-at-a-time suspension bridge then straight up and away from the river, leaving the sandflies and the emerald green behind. 

It’s humid, the cicadas crackling like live wires after a storm. Time loses meaning on a thru-hike. An hour slips past, then another. I like to hike early because it’s cooler and the whole day is in front of me to do whatever I want with it. Wind is gently blowing in the tree tops.

I stop at Rocks hut and see on the register that friends have passed through. I eat the rest of my salami, fill the water bottle then head to Browning hut along a saddle. It’s a lot of hard work for virtually no view this far, though giant mountains peak through the trees. Maybe I should count my blessings I’m not hiking in direct sun.

I come to a special spot of dappled light on moss and lichen-covered boulders – Hobbit Haunt I call it. Just now, a cool breeze dries me off and I hold out my arms like a cormorant. On the Totara Saddle, I finally see the monster range, big mountains to my left and the ocean to my right. No snow, but lots of scree pouring off jagged summits.

The wind is up and I run into the two TA hikers I met on the way to Wellington. It’s the American gal who never gave me her name. She’s unfriendly behind her radiant smile. 

All these young people pair up and I march on alone most of the time. I’d like a ‘hi, how are ya?’ once in a while. 

Or maybe she’s just boring.

At a steep downhill with washed out roots and mud, I pass her struggling to get past. 

OK, maybe she’s just tired.

I really need to chill on being so judgy.

Or not.

I think about this theme of being alone and finding very few companions that want to hike with me, that check in on me, that give a crap about me. These last days, while the weather’s been good, I feel strong and brave and self-directed. I ask for advice, and some is critical, like the Kiwi at the hut who told me the trail would go straight up after Middy Hut and that the ridge had absolutely no water sources.

I observe too, and try to ascertain what sort of changes I can make, like watching TA hiker Rob sketch out his plan for the coming range and Pierre doing shorter days fully resupplied, then building k’s as the food runs out. Ultimately, though, every decision is my own.

With no one that I’m paired with, I need to rely on my wits and in turn, be accountable just to myself. Sometimes it causes fear so overwhelming, it’s physical, closing off my throat. I can’t breath. I can’t speak.

When I first started hiking solo, I remember being unable to close my eyes at night. I felt terrorized by every sound, and every thought. In time, it passed and I am most comfortable when in my little tent, cuddled in with my quilt. I close my eyes immediately and sleep well.

Perhaps my fear of the unknown will pass too. I can prepare, assess risk, plan an escape, and then simply let go. I wonder if learning to manage things on my own is one of the lessons of this long hike.

As I reach Browning hut at 480 meters, I see some familiar faces. Floris and Marjolain! “No way!” says Floris to which I reply “Way!” We catch up and then wonder when we’ll see each other again since I’m headed out to Nelson and Abel Tasman National Park for a few days. 

As they head up to the Richmond Range, and I head down a huge washout that takes the trail to rock hopping and weird down climbing. I cross the incredibly refreshing Hacket creek several times as I head to the car park and notice plastic envelopes on the trees – wasp bait stations. Another introduced pest.

The good news is this short track out – which I’ll take right back up in a few days – is a flat superhighway and I fly down to another swing bridge just as a man begins to cross.

“Alison?” he asks.

It’s my new friend Steve meeting me exactly at the end! A Minnesotan-classical-music-lover-tramper-now-New-Zealand-citizen. In no time they’re calling me Al. 

We visit the restored old town, the Saturday market and later I meet their friends and play a few notes on Maggie’s Koauao, (koowhoawhoa) her Maori bone flute

On a side trip to Abel Tasman Park, I walk on golden sand in a private cove and swim in the deep blue water, the salt helping heal my itchy and oozing sandfly bites. But mostly on those two days off from hiking, we sit outside with the gentle Maitai river flowing past only a stone’s throw away, talking and laughing. They even ask me to set up my kit on the deck so they can see how everything fits together.  

Not a bad way to rest up for the big mountains ahead in the Richmond Range, a exposed and high alpine crossing that will take me five days to cross.  The conversation lulls for just a moment and we simply sit and look out at the natural habitat surrounding the rive and Steve says to no one in particular, “It’s hard to be more perfect than right now.” 

The man speaks truth. Whether escaping the sandflies by treading water or simply being in the moment were in fully, each moment is a perfect and wondrous now.