Surviving my first Great Walk: The Kepler Track

Since I’m only in New Zealand for 6 months, or possibly a year if I decide to extend my trip, I examine everything I do much more than I would if I was living at home in the United States. I want to use my time here well and only do things that I’m really interested in. It also helps that most things in New Zealand are so expensive that you have to choose well, or you’ll be out of money in a week. Think it’s hard to spend $1000 in a week? Come to New Zealand; it’s not.

I listened to an NPR story about seasonal workers a few weeks ago, and it mentioned that since we are all working in positions for such short periods of time, seasonal workers never stop examining how much we like or don’t like the work, the industry, the company we’re with. We never settle in and accept the day-to-day hustle because we’re not in a job long enough. In New Zealand, seasonal work is pretty common, but only if you’re working in an industry like tourism or farming.

But I wish that all jobs could be seasonal, so we could all go through life trying out new things and companies and cities, and examining our choices as we make them. Maybe we’d all be happier.

Since now I do live that way and am constantly stopping to examine my choices, when Abe revealed his desire to hike all 9 of the Great Walks in New Zealand, I was a bit wary. The Great Walks are the most popular tramps in New Zealand, but the difficulty levels vary and all of them are multi-day hikes. Before coming here, I had never even considered doing a hike for more than a day. “Going on a hike is fun, but the next day I want to wake up clean and dry in my own bed,” I reasoned. But Abe wanted me to try a hike with him, and I felt like I should give what was clearly one of his top interests—camping and hiking, or tramping as they call it here—a real shot. So, he suggested we hike the Kepler Track, a three day-two night tramp around Lake Te Anau and up the mountains. “It’s supposed to be gorgeous,” he said. “I guess I’m doing this,” I thought.

Reading the NZ Department of Conservation brochure on the track made me nervous again. Their list of things you needed to bring on this hike was long and included things like emergency blankets, waterproof matches, and thermal underwear. And then I read about the weather on this tramp:

“Be prepared for at least one wet day or more on your trip…. Centred at latitude 45° south, Fiordland National Park lies in an area of predominately westerly airstreams, known as the Roaring 40s, delivering high rainfall and changeable weather patterns to the area. Cold temperatures, snow, strong winds and heavy rain can occur at any time of the year.”

Um, hmmm. I read further down, and there were separate sections on Hypothermia, Infections, Floods, Avalanches, High Winds, Getting Lost, and Heat Exhaustion. Crap. Now I was just flat out scared. Abe chuckled at all of my concerns, saying we would bring all of the right things, so I shouldn’t worry. But I was already nervous that I wouldn’t be able to hike for three days straight, especially if I wasn’t getting great sleep: we were planning to spend one night in the DOC huts—I wasn’t sure what to imagine for those—and one night camping in the wilderness.

My worry increased when Abe and I had dinner with our two friends here who also happen to be Girl Scouts, and they teased me about not knowing how to build a fire or pitch a tent, and asked me kiddingly, “What will you do if something happens to Abe, and you have to do all of this stuff yourself?”

I knew they were kidding, but it still bothered because I really didn’t have any idea how to do this stuff.

Our first day hiking, it rained. And the wind blew. And since we got a late start the sun was also setting which meant it was really freaking cold. We were just getting out of the woods, about an hour away from our hut that night when the rain turned into a downpour, and I started to lose feeling in my fingers. “What the fuck am I doing?” I thought. “I just want to go home, and I have two more days and nights of this.” But I couldn’t go home, and so I tried to carry on. Hiking with a big backpack was way harder than I expected too, I felt I could barely make it up each hill. A fellow hiker gave me her walking stick on her way out of the track, and I leaned all of my weight on it while I tried not to cry. “Can you walk a bit faster?” Abe asked me since we were getting wetter and colder with every minute that passed. “Actually, no! This is as fast as I can go,” I practically wailed. And it was true; I was dead on day one.

We made it to the hut about an hour later where we had access to gas stoves, and little mattresses on wooden bunks. Thankfully, this hut was really nice. I thought I might never be completely warm and dry that night, but after a few hours in my awesome mummy sleeping bag—I totally found it in the Salvation Army in Wanaka for 20 bucks!—I was actually sweating.

Day two is when I changed. We had hiked so far uphill day one, that day two seemed like a piece of cake. Yes, we still had some uphill, and yes, some parts of the path were frighteningly narrow despite being on top of the mountains, but I felt like a pro at this point. AND it was only raining intermittingly which meant from the gorgeous mountaintops we could stop and enjoy the breathtaking views of Lake Te Anau shrouded in wispy clouds and take pictures of each other looking like Frodo and Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Abe even taught me how to pitch our tent, and I cooked our dinner on our mini spider gas stove. I could do this! And actually have a lot of fun.

Day three it rained nearly all day again. At first I didn’t mind because it wasn’t as cold as day one, and hey, it was our last day. Abe and I had a private room in a hostel in Te Anau waiting for us, and we had already planned out our dinner for the evening once we got back. I could get through this last day. But as the rain poured on, it wore on me because it meant we couldn’t stop to rest and take off our packs because the ground was wet. And what were once pristine paths were now mudslides. When we stopped at a picnic area where we could have lunch, we found that we were swarmed with sandflies—think tiny mosquitos whose bites actually hurt and then itch for two weeks and then scar—so we didn’t stay there long. But what really got to me was that the land we were hiking through in this rain was all forest. Sure, occasionally the forest would change from being completely moss-covered to being full of huge ferns I thought were only found in some kind of South American rainforest, but really, there wasn’t much new to look at. And this was after day two when there was so much to see that I had to pull my gaze away from the scenery long enough to make sure I wasn’t falling off the side of the mountain.

Right when I started to complain that I seriously could NOT take any more of this forest, Abe and I crossed a bridge that looked eerily familiar. “Weird that they would put two bridges like that over the forest clearings,” I thought. And promptly forgot about it. About 30 minutes later we hit a sign we had already seen, and we realized we had somehow changed directions and just walked back to the hut we departed about 45 minutes before. That is when I really lost it. I had to trek through 45 minutes of the SAME forest I was dying to get out of? Fuck no. We should have been close to finished by then, and instead we now had over an hour of tramping to go. A few minutes after we turned around, my knee started to ache. Then my toes started curling up, and then my shoulders started refusing to straighten. I told Abe I wanted to sit down on the forest floor and just make the DOC personnel come pick me up. It seemed like that forest was never-ending, and the worst part was we could not see anything past trees and more trees.

But somehow I kept walking. I told myself to push forward because even though I could not see the end, it was somewhere. It was today. And eventually, though it seemed like hours instead of the one hour it was, we reached that ending sign: Rainbow Reach. And that was it: I had completed my first Great Walk on the Kepler Track.

It’s pretty amazing to me how adaptable humans are. I really thought I was going to freeze to death on day one, but I pushed myself through it and even got up on day two without complaints. I wanted to sit down on that forest floor and go crazy to myself until someone carried me out of there on day three, but I didn’t. I kept walking, and I found things to think about to get me through it. And though I told myself many times throughout the track that maybe I just wasn’t meant to tramp and that I’d never do it again, I was already composing a list of things to do differently for the next track. I wanted to go again, and I wanted to do it better. I felt physically dead upon completion of the track, but emotionally I felt strong and confident. If I can do this, I can do anything!

And so, even though Queenstown—the home base for most of the Fiordland National Park hikes including three of the Great Walks—is best known for “adventure sports” like bungee jumping, canyon swinging, and skydiving, I think it is much more adventurous to go hiking. I think it takes way more endurance, strength, and guts to push yourself through tests for 3 days or more in the wilderness than it does to have one moment of courage and say yes to jumping out of a plane.

So, fuck skydiving, I survived the Kepler Track. And my new gutsy, confident self is hitting the Routeburn Track next.