Cellphone Batteries
In the last UJCC, I suggested you could use your cellphone battery as a fire-starter. I can confirm that this really should be a last resort, as there are much better ways to light fires. I discovered this when I was exhuming a poorly working cellphone battery with a sharp knife and was rewarded with a very small but ferocious yellow flame. I guess that had I been trying to light a cooking fire, I would have been lucky to get more than 15 seconds of flame with which to start it.
If my experience is anything to go by, you definitely risk getting seared finger tips, so keep some ice handy. For the record, the intense yellow flame rushing out of the battery didn’t set the smoke detector off and I didn’t burn the house down.
Konnichiwa
The other month I climbed Mt Tskuba in Japan. I am given to understand that Mt Tskuba is the second-most sacred mountain in Japan after Mt Fuji. There were many Japanese and no Westerners other than me on the tracks up it that day. I concluded long ago that most outdoors people greet each other according to social crowding.
In the back of Lake Poteriteri, if I meet some hunters, we will stop and yarn for a while. On the Rees–Dart Track we all say ‘gidday’ in passing. On a Great Walk or on busy European tracks, everyone keeps their eyes down and pushes on without a murmur. This is not so in Japan, where people all say ‘konnichiwa(aaaa)’ to everyone they meet on the track. I found it rather charming. There is a parallel – where you normally give a wee wave to an approaching driver on a rural gravel road, although not on the gravel road into Aspiring Station, which is full of campervans. That is in part because your need to keep both hands on the steering wheel in order to take evasive action quickly if necessary.
As an aside, in Sāmoa you say ‘malo’ (hello) to someone you would like to talk to when you meet them on the street and ‘`fa’ (short for tofa, or goodbye) if you want to keep going. I always feel the Beatles song, ‘Hello, Goodbye’, has congruence in Sāmoa.
Friendly Japanese queue to say ‘konnichiwa’ to a party descending Mt Tskuba; Photo: Robin McNeill
Mt Fuji
On a clear cold morning it is sometimes possible to see Mt Fuji from a ten-storey hotel window in the city of Tskuba. Capped in snow, Mt Fuji is indeed beautiful, and I was impressed. It was not hard to see why the Japanese revere it.
Two months later I was in Taranaki looking at the maunga. I could understand why Japanese who had seen The Last Sumarai could be discombobulated by Mt Fuji not looking quite right in the film, although the similarities are great. I have also found that anyone living anywhere near Mt Taranaki, Māori or Pākehā, has an affinity to it of a kind not really found anywhere else in New Zealand. Even Mt Aspiring Tititea, which I hold to be the most beautiful peak in New Zealand, doesn’t evoke the sentiments that Mt Taranaki brings to its locals.
Upon reflection, I felt I could understand a little why Māori around New Zealand have such affinity to their local and mostly more modest maunga. That Pākeha can somewhat share these feelings tells me that Māori and Western worldviews are not necessarily too different on this point. We called at the Visitor Centre that local iwi are building on Taranaki Maunga as a consequence of their settlement deed, and hopefully by the time you read this, their settlement will be enacted. The excitement and pride I could see in the iwi members was contagious and I look forward to developments there.
Prominence
I assert that Mt Taranaki’s symmetry and shape make it special, though Mt Ngāuruhoe is not dissimilar in shape. The other factor that makes the maunga so beautiful is its prominence – Mt Taranaki’s isolation means that it stands without rival, and this is also true for Mt Fuji. It is not true for Mt Ngāuruhoe, or Mt Tasman.
The term ‘prominence’ represents the elevation of a summit relative to the surrounding terrain, and may be defined as the elevation of a summit relative to the highest point to which one must descend before re-ascending to a higher summit. In other words, it is the difference in elevation between a summit and the highest saddle that connects that summit to any higher terrain that gives you the prominence of that summit.
Alan Dawson’s 1992 book, The Relative Hills of Britain: Mountains, Munros and Marilyns, set the scene for peak baggers, noting that ‘Marilyn’ is a play on words. Hugh van Noorden alerted me to ‘ultra prominence’, which requires the peak to have a somewhat arbitrary height difference of 1,500 metres. There are nine ultra-prominent mountains in New Zealand – one of them extremely hard to guess – and only some of them are technically difficult. Google with search words ‘ultra prominence’ to get started.
Huntaneering
Greg Duley of NZ Hunter magazine and the NZ Hunter Adventure TV show has introduced me to a word, but not a concept, that is new to me. A ‘huntaneer’ is a hunter who arms themself with an ice axe and crampons as well as a rifle. Huntaneers set out to bag the occasional peak, as well as an animal or two on their outings into the Hills.
Greg tells me that huntaneering is growing in popularity, something he finds a mixed blessing. There have always been hunters traipsing around the tops in Westland and Fiordland, particularly before helicopters made the tops unhealthy for deer, but those with ice axes had mostly been after tahr and chamois. As anyone who has seen Greg’s TV show will know, you do need a bit of puff in your lungs and wiry legs to cart a 10-kilogram rifle up a hill as well as mountaineering gear. Good on them, I say!
Hunny Puffs
I learned with dismay the other month that Sanitarium is to discontinue making Hunny Puffs. Some readers may recall that I used to consider Hunny Puffs the ultimate breakfast of champions since they are not only lightweight, but provide the same or better energy per mass as other breakfast cereals. I asserted that the honey coating provided an instantaneous boost to one’s blood sugar levels and the wheat puffs provided a longer-term energy release to get you through to lunch.
I haven’t been doing too many full-on expeditions in recent years and so hadn’t bought any Hunny Puffs for a while either, until I became aware of their imminent demise. All I can say is that it was clear to me upon opening the box that very few bees had gone hungry over winter supplying honey for coating my Hunny Puffs. As I feared from first inspection, these pale, homeopathic imitations of yesteryear’s Hunny Puffs tasted as insipid as I imagined the cardboard box they came in would taste.
A closer reading of the box revealed a slogan happily proclaiming that the puffs were ‘lightly’ coated with honey – Sanitarium adhering to the marketing adage ‘If you can’t fix it, feature it.’ Glib marketing might work once, but it’s pretty darned obvious to me why Sanitarium can’t sell enough boxes of Hunny Puffs to make it worth its while to continue making them. I’ll have to settle for Harraway’s porridge for my future hard trips.
This article was re-published from the June 2024 issue of FMC’s Backcountry magazine. To subscribe to the print version, please visit www.fmc.org.nz/
