Camp Cookery

Kerry Clapham of CUTC is completing his Master’s in Southland with me. That he hasn’t been tramping for only two weekends this year tells me that, like me, he has figured out where the best tramping in New Zealand is. I am torn every Monday morning between wanting to know where he went and not wanting to know because of the inevitable feelings of envy thus knowing will induce! Kerry is not an engineer for nothing. I thought we were reasonably clever in my student days when we cooked upside-down pizzas on tin plates over the kero stoves at Tasman Saddle Hut using ‘free’ Parks Board kerosene. We had figured out that a lot of tramping rations are also pizza ingredients, including cheese, dried tomatoes, onions and salami. We used to carry around enough flour and yeast to cook the occasional loaf of bread, too.

I was put in my place when Kerry showed me photos of his bush pizza oven. Pretty simply put, you find some adequately flat large rocks and place one so that it overhangs the fireplace that has been constructed on another flat rock. Light a good fire, get everything hot and then clear away the embers to make room for the pizza dough to cook directly on the bottom rock. If that is not stylish, then I don’t know what is. Kerry said that he had tried making bread this way, but had still to figure out how to get the middle to cook nicely before the bottom of the loaf charred. I guess he is fit enough and strong enough that he should just cart in a campoven on his back and do the job properly. I am hoping to report progress in this department before he graduates next year.

Kerry did level some criticism at UJCC saying that there wasn’t much cookery in it. He muttered darkly about misleading labelling and the Consumers Rights Act. My counter was to point him in the direction of Don Cowlin’s Camp Cookery, published by the NZFS. You can download it at www.nzhuntingandshooting.co.nz/attachments/ f56/1902d1339926035-nz-forestservice-cook-book-forestservice-cookery.pdf, albeit without the orange cover. It’s a good read, even if you don’t ever get around to cooking anything described in it.

Takitimu Mountains

Over Queen’s Birthday Weekend, I introduced Kerry to Takitimu Mountain winter tramping. A strong ‘lazy’ wind (a wind that is too lazy to go around you and so just cuts straight through your bones) near the top of Clare Peak saw us more or less fluttering on the end of our ice-axes at one stage. What is great about these mountains is that with limited visibility and snow, even minor rock outcrops on the ridge loom through the cloud looking like the North Face of the Eiger. A high alpine adventure can be had at 1,400 meters. Should things really turn to custard, you can always find your way down into the bush and out of the weather. The peaks clearly get some wind, as the north-facing wind-sculptured beech forest below Bog Burn Saddle testifies. Indeed, one year we hit wind so strong that we could only progress along one broad ridge by linking arms as if crossing a river. There are plenty of two-person NZFS bivvies and few get much use. Indeed, we were the first party in Upper Princhester Hut for two months, and the fourth party all year.

I spent a decade or so gnashing my gums at DOC and then the Walking Access Commission trying to improve public access into the area, which hardly gets visited other than by those following the Te Araroa Trail. I counted hundreds of TA (Te Araroa) Nobos and Sobos (north and southbound TAs respectively) in the Aparima Base Hut book between October and March this year. That’s okay for us Hobos (homeward bound?) as that hut is far too close to the road to interest me. The numbers give an indication of how much use the place could get and I am now rather relieved that my attempts to improve access were futile, otherwise I am sure that the place would by now be overrun with tourists.

GPS

On the Queen’s Birthday trip I discovered that the maps in my Garmin GPS had been corrupted. I could look at any area in Southland and Fiordland, except for a 50 by ten kilometre west-east swathe, where the map just didn’t exist. Murphy’s Law was in play, for of course, that was where we were. I can find no explanation as to the cause, or the fix. I tried powering off and holding down possible reset buttons, but to no avail. I had printed from WAMS, the Walking Access Mapping System (www.wams.org.nz) , a map of the area, so we were inconvenienced rather than lost. If someone would like to suggest a mechanism and fix for this problem before I give in and buy a full-colour TopoMap GPS replacement, I would be grateful. In the meantime, I suggest you check out your GPS maps as well as your batteries before you next take your GPS into the Hills.

As an aside, I notice that The Safety Experts always admonish trampers who don’t have PLBs. When we were fluttering on our ice-axes in storm force winds and 20 metre visibility on Clare Peak, it did occur to me that no heli-pilot was going to come anywhere near us if we had come to grief and set off a PLB. All the PLB would have done was locate the body in a few days’ time, though probably no faster than if the pilot looked out the window. Actually, our biggest likelihood for embarrassment would have arisen from descending a wrong ridge in the murk and not getting home until uncomfortably late at night. It seemed to me that our best personal safety device was in fact my GPS unit, which we did use a few times to avert such an outcome. I wondered if some of the people who let off PLBs would have more usefully brought a GPS unit along on their trip – and prior had figured out how to use them – so they would not need to set off their PLB in the first place. Besides, GPS units are cheaper than PLBs. For the record, I have a GPS unit and I don’t own a PLB, though I would if I got serious about solo tramping, or hunting.

Eagle-eyed trampers with a political bent will have noticed that the Government has appropriated $2 million in the budget for a Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS). The money is only for preliminary work, but if you are planning to buy a new GPS, you want to confirm that it supports SBAS so that you can improve the unit’s accuracy to within a metre, and all going well, maybe ten centimetres when the SBAS service gets switched on in a few years.

Maps

Geoff Aitken of NewTopo NZ Ltd in Takaka printed a new edition of his Arthurs Pass map late last year. He posted me a copy to look at and you can order your own at www.newtopo.co.nz. The somewhat odd scale of 1:55,000 makes this map less than straightforward to use as a direct navigation aid, but I think there is a place for this sort of map. It solves the big problem of having maps only in digital form, provided they work, which is that you lose The Big Picture. You can get any amount of highly detailed information off a small screen, but with little appreciation as to where you are in the world. Sure, you may be able to get down the ridge looming out of the murk in front of you, but is that actually going to get you into the right watershed? The Topo50 maps aren’t really big enough, always seeming to have the interesting country in a corner, requiring four maps. When things really come unstuck, I think you do want ‘The Big Picture’. Geoff’s map would do the trick just nicely and when you do find that your electronic map isn’t working, at least you have a backup navigation tool. Besides, you can’t dream, scheme and plan tramping trips on a smartphone screen, so you need a decent sized map at home.

Aluminium Fire-Starters

It would appear that not everyone knows how to light a fire using aluminium foil, judging by the amount of failed aluminium fire-starters we found filling the Upper Princhester Hut fireplace. Aluminium foil can make a very effective fire-starter, but to quote the Cat in the Hat, it’s fun to have fun but you’ve got to know how. Basically all you have to do is roll the foil up in a loose roll and blow pure oxygen down the tube. Apply a match to the far end and you are away laughing. Be a bit careful as it burns sufficiently hot that it can melt its way through plate steel, given the chance. Of course, having a ready supply of pure oxygen in the Hills is not too common below 6,000 metres, which perhaps limits this technique to the Himalaya rather than Fiordland, where it would be really useful. Without the oxygen supply, aluminium fails miserably as a fire-starter so it is best not to bother trying to use it for that purpose in such situations. And don’t leave any aluminium foil in the fireplace for the next party as a gesture of kindness, for they probably won’t have brought an oxygen cylinder with them either!

Hakili Matagi,

Robin McNeill
r.mcneill@ieee.org