Greenstone Caples

You know you are back at University when you wake in your van to find a half-full whisky bottle and a bear suit under the seat.


Good nights in Christchurch. Secured front row tickets for a Bill Bailey show and drove up a day early for a much mooted "Muppet Party" with the Canterbury geology postgrads. A bit of a furry scene. Great walking about a mile there in costume. Kiwis are big on yelling from their cars, and big on costumes. Put them together, and you have a whole night worth of entertainment.

Next day was the Bill Bailey show. Fantastic. First time seeing him live. Glad he was gentle with me.

Afterward we headed into the Lyttelton midwinter festival. Lyttelton serves as the port for Christchurch, sitting just over a ridge (or through the tunnel) but culturally very separate. I like port towns for just this reason. They tend to be a bit rougher but more vibrant. The bar-band scene is usually solid, and the pretensions minimal. Lyttelton is quickly gentrifying, but for now holds onto its ragged charm.

Festival night involved half a dozen bands and a couple of DJ's playing in venues and shops on various floors of buildings surrounding a central courtyard. Vibrant, chaotic, loud. Flitted from a basement with freeform jazz and scat to a standard rave scene to a jam band to a glam performance by 50 year old men in catsuits. I think I will have to return to Lyttleton when the time allows. Towns like this produce good people, and this was no exception. I have met better people sleeping on floors than in any hotel I have ever stayed. In one night I saw five bands, met an Alaskan traveler, developed my own three apostles who were convinced I was Jesus, danced and sang.

And go hear the Eastern. Lyttelton encapsulated and made music. Another example of my friends being better than I deserve.

I spoke with one of the closest companions of my early teenage years recently. He has grown into a fine, upstanding and stable family man. Like me. But in real life.

Anyway... as we discussed our most recent adventures and compared notes on the survivors of our youth he related a story which made me laugh harder than I have in many days, though it is a contextual thing. I think I laughed because of the sheer brutality of youth. Plus, it really was funny at the time.

We had an ongoing feud with a certain authority figure in our lives who had a large family, even in Mormon terms. One day as we strolled past their yard we noticed that the youngest, maybe four or five, had been strapped into a stroller-like device and was sitting unattended in the front yard (back in the day when you could do such a thing, if we weren't around). Without missing a beat one of us walked up on the grass and nudged the stroller so that it was now sitting atop an active lawn sprinkler, soaking the restrained child from the shoulders down. As the wailing began we continued our leisurely promenade up the road.

Minor but absolutely pointless cruelty. Yet deeply funny in retrospect. Humans are very disturbed creatures.

Which brings me to tramping with Travis.

Nah, the guy is a saint.


First winter tramp in En Zed, and by local standards South Island has brutal winters. They also grind up Frosted Flakes with tomatoes and one part per million jalapenos (pronounced hala pen ohs, or occasionally jala pen ohs) and call it hot salsa. Everything is relative. But the Southern Alps do get snow, which I miss terribly. I have prayed for a true blizzard to hit Dunners; when it does I shall stand nude on Cumberland Street and laugh as their civilization turns to dust and embers around them. Until then I will just snort and look disgusted when they speak of local winters. The Kiwis are genial and pleasant lot, but they need one more island half way between Stewart and McMurdo. Then this country would have everything, and they would have to pry me out like a tick. They still might.

Spent the night at Kinloch lodge on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. Gorgeous, and had it almost to ourselves. A newlywed English couple joined us and then proceeded not to speak to us or each other throughout their meal and most of the evening. Looked fun. The gent finally broke the silence by asking where I was from, and discovering it was Alaska proceeded to say: "Well, I have something to say that you should like!" He then proceeded to praise Canada and slag the States at some detail. Sitting silently watching this performance I finally realized that he thought Alaska was part of Canada and that, as a Canuck, I would be charmed by how little he thought of Americans. I smiled and told him that I liked Canada too, but that sometimes crossing the border from Alaska to Canada was a bit difficult. His face clouded briefly, and he wandered over to speak to his wife in low tones. He offered one look full of horrified embarrassment, and the silence fell again.

The hot tub on the hillside made up for all such Brit awkwardness, especially given the lack of sandflies and mozzies in the bone-chilling weather that ALMOST WENT BELOW FREEZING. Quelle horreur!


First Morning. The Caples/Greenstone was our target as the more classic walks were either on the North Island, had already been done by us (Heaphy, Abel Tasman inland/coast), or are actually impassible during winter despite my sneering dismissal (Routeburn, Milford, Kepler, etc.). The alpine areas in the Alps get huge amounts of snow, very quickly, and avalanches are a constant danger. The Caples and Greenstone valleys are low river valleys with one saddle between them. Perfect for winter walking, assuming weather holds. For the most part, it did. The Caples is fractionally more difficult, so we attacked it first.


It hovered around 0 C for most of the journey, dipping a few below at night and melting in the sun. The streams in the shade produced incredible displays of ice as the running water splashed over plants and stones. Beautiful, but deadly to walk on.

Being valleys much of the area was shaded throughout the short winter days. Frost developed in layers, as fog would rise from the sunny areas each morning and settle in nearby trees. Given the absolute lack of anyone else on the trail (we saw one hunter in the first 15 minutes of the first day, and no one else until late on the second) the noise of our footsteps crushing the frost on the grass, and me jumping on every piece of white ice I could find over puddles and streams, echoed without answer.

Perhaps because of this we talked little. It felt like a quiet place.



Though not as dramatic as the alpine stretches of the great walks, when out of the trees the crystal clear skies and the expanse of the valleys we wandered up impressed deeply. This is a radically different experience than the summer slog flanked by sandflies and other trampers trying to be the first wherever they are headed. It is difficult not to hurry yourself when you are passed by a succession of people on a trail. Travis and I had the peace to just be here, and the art formed by the undisturbed effect of winter on the landscape encouraged our slow, deliberate travel.




At the midpoint of the first day's walk is the Mid Caples hut. As you approach across a solid, unbroken valley floor you suddenly find a very narrow gorge, filled with water so violent and distressed as to seem like a relic of an entirely different place. Nowhere else on the tramp had any structures like this.


The Mid Caples was in the sun and commands a beautiful vista. It was also well stocked with coal and dry wood, but the sun was bright and we were young. A break, a dram, and a bite; then we were off. We would regret not packing a bit of the coal with us.


The hut for the night. A bit higher, a bit shadier, and completely lacking in coal and dry wood.


A night spent encouraging wet wood to burn so that we could dry out other wood to burn to dry out other wood. And poker. And whisky. And food. My diet these days is pretty limited but on the tramps anything goes. Daily chocolate ration is somewhere around a kilo.



Next morning found as a bit less bright-eyed, but not a smidge less darling.



The second half of the Caples led us mostly in cover, albeit as unique of cover as snowy fern gardens. After midday we broke out onto the highest portion of the tramp, the walk over the down up to McKellar saddle. Best views of the trip, and the weather held clear and cold. Perfect walking day.



McKellar is gorgeous, though I would guess in warmer weather it might veer toward the muddy side of things. For us it was ice and snow, fantastic for walking but a bit problematic when it came to descent. The climb up McKellar from the lower Caples is gradual, but the descent certainly is not. The pictures do not do it justice, but the trail comes to an edge, then drops precipitously more than 400 meters. The trail follows a streambed cut into the face of the steep slope. The stream, of course, now being nothing but a curtain of ice. And your intrepid narrator somehow forgot his ice axe and crampons.


I reached the streambed first, turned to Travis, and announced: "We are going to die."



Others had come to this conclusion as well. Where the drop began a cairn of prayer stones had been built. We offered our brief Aves, placed a rock each, and dropped down. No pictures of the descent, both hands being busy.

I used to think of people as basically sane. An incident one night around a wine bottle completely dispelled this idea. I had secured a bottle of cheap white wine from my housesit and brought it over to share with a friend as we watched a film. Upon opening the bottle and pouring two glasses we smelled the wine, which stank exactly of human urine. Commenting on this, rather than throwing it out we looked at each other and tried a sip. Terrible. It tasted of rancid fish with undertones of nothing else. What would a reasonable person do? Throw it out, perchance? Instead, after both of us recoiled in horror and commented on the abomination, we looked at each other, the glasses of wine, and both took another sip.

What the hell. Sanity is over-rated.

We did make it to the bottom nonetheless, without any help from our reason.



After a stroll around the lake we came to yet another beautiful, empty hut. This one held a bit more in the way of fuel, and our night of feasting and cards included reveling in the relative warmth. This served as sharp contrast to the solo German girl who was one night ahead of us on the trail, leaving increasingly depressed and bitter notes as she traveled without a cooking stove or light source, alone through the winter. We would have rescued her, but she never slowed down.



The next day broke a bit colder, clear and sharp. The Greenstone was wider and less steep than the Caples, with a braided river dominating most of the valley floor. Hugging the tree line we walked without sign of others, aside from faint footprints in the snow.




A magnificent day.




Our last night was spent in a new hut just off the junction of the Greenstone and the Mavona. The hut system here deserves the praise it receives. This hut was spacious, insulated better than any home I have lived in here, and generally pretty sweet. Especially for just Travis and I.
The scenery held charms as well.



Final day of walking through frosted forest.




The valley held a few last surprises. The waterfalls were the loudest things we encountered in four days on the trail, and perhaps the most beautiful.



The peace that comes with a walk across a white plain in the absence of all but your close companions, sounds tamped by the snow cover and the mundane interruptions of other humans nowhere to be found, this is one of the great joys.

Next, the Routeburn in October with another trip down the Greenstone. It will be interesting to observe it covered with determined Kiwis and psychotic Europeans slogging through the mud. Somehow, I suspect a great deal of nostalgia for Travis and the snow.