Dancing Through the Mountains in the Cameron River Valley

One quirky fact about New Zealand is that they measure most hikes in terms of hours instead of kilometers. My suspicion is that this is to create more accurate expectations for tourists who may not know their own hiking pace, and may underestimate how long it takes to walk a certain distance. For us, as young and spry fast hikers, we usually far out-pace the hiking times for Great Walks and other easier hikes. On more difficult hikes, though, we tend to line up more accurately with the expected pace, a truth we are only just coming around on. The Cameron Hut was a bit of a turning-point in this realization, and in general a classic slightly-underprepared misadventure with fantastic results (and a great story). 

A few days before we set off, I found myself asking: “10 miles? 10 kilometers? 10 hours?” in regards to our upcoming hike. Clearly, I had no idea what we were in for when we set off a few Saturdays ago for our one-night venture into the mountains. With a trailhead less than two hours from Christchurch, Cameron Hut is famous for having a pink door and for having panoramic views of mountains and glaciers. 

We set off a bit later in the day, leaving Christchurch around noon and setting off close to 3. The drive into the valley involved some beautiful dirt-road driving around lakes and up a huge glacial plain, and after a wrong turn, we found that the last mile or so to the trailhead was a completely rutted-out track through the shrubbery complete with huge washouts and plentiful boulders. For those of you not familiar with the build of a 2006 Mazda Premacy, they have approximately 8 inches of clearance on a good day, without six people and six heavy packs sitting heavily on the suspension. After I tried my best on the road for a few minutes, leading to some truly horrific noises from beneath us, I slammed the car into park and decided to walk the rest of the way, jogging alongside the car as Lily drove. As she got close to the car park, she started shouting about the “Plymouth Rock of all boulders” in the middle of the track, which ended up being a dead sheep. Oops. A harrowing start to say the least. 

When we arrived, my questions about our expected mileage were quickly cleared up, and we geared up for a 10 mile hike in, expected to take 6 hours. “Pshaw!” we exclaimed, slinging packs on our backs, feeling confident our strong legs would have us at the hut by dark. 

The trail itself wound up through a river valley, with tall shrub-covered slopes on either side of us as we followed the river up towards the mountains. It was overcast when we started, so we had a cut-off view of the mountains that awaited us up-valley. About an hour in we encountered a group of older folks who warned us we had a long, long way to go. “Pshaw!” we shrugged, stopping to have a snack, feeling confident our warmed-up legs would have us at the hut by dark. Maybe you can see where this is going. 

Onwards we wove, at one point scrambling straight up one of the scrubby slopes to a beautiful view point. Onwards we pushed, feeling confident we’d be able to see the hut from the top as a light rain started down on us. Not so much, so off we went, descending the other side of the hill and back into the river gorge. By now, it was 7 or so, and our hope for finding the hut before sunset was fading. The way forward was obscured now by another bend in the river, and seemed like it ascended into a gully that was unlikely to contain a hut. The group started to split, with those of us in front hiking ahead and then stopping to wait. We played a ridiculous game of tag, peripheral vision obscured by the edges of our raincoat hoods, scrambling around the wet rocks and trying not to laugh so hard we fell down. 

After this the group in front scooted ahead, trying desperately to at least sight the hut before nightfall, which was now rapidly approaching. By around 8:30 we had pulled ahead of the second group of three, who were moving slower but possessed a map, which we did not. Nervous that we had gone astray and that they might pass us on their way up valley, and anxious that we would get too cold if we waited around in the dark for them, we decided to forge ahead, using a headlamp to illuminate the not-quite-fluorescing trail markers ahead of us up the valley. 

We continued to scramble upwards: me, Dylan, and Frances in the moonscape, scrambling on all-fours up a gully ringed by hut-sized boulders. Every once and a while we’d turn backwards, where seemingly the whole world was barely outlined in rapidly fading soft light, and where somewhere, far below us, our friends were toiling upwards towards us. We flashed our headlamps at them, seeing the beam stop short only a few feet in front of our faces, trapped in the oppressive fog. 

We talked about the edges of the universe as the fog closed in on us. It felt like we might be clambering over the edge of the known world, or making our way through a valley on the moon, or stepping over long-sleeping rock trolls that would pop to life at any moment. We humored ourselves with these fantasies as the night soaked deeper into our bones. At one point I explained the idea of stretch zones and panic zones to my friends as I tried not to slip into my own panic zone, thinking about everything that could go wrong with our split group and still, no hut in sight at 9pm. The WFR in me was going nuts thinking about our friends behind us, and I was getting hungrier by the minute. Talking it through helped, and before we knew it the hut was upon us, sneaking up on us until we were no more than 30 feet away from it before we saw it. We took a moment before we entered to turn our lights off and take in the eerie form we’d nearly missed. Then we whooped and cheered, making way too much noise for the poor guys trying to sleep inside.

In we went, stripping off our soaking layers and setting out to make dinner. We told ourselves that if our friends didn’t get there by 10, we’d send two of us out to look for them. At 9:45, as Frances and I poked our heads out the window as our mac and cheese cooked, they appeared suddenly before us, and we all broke out in shouts and cheers again. Dylan and I finished dinner and we all snarfed our mac and cheese happily, recounting the adventuresome night and winding down as the two grumpy men looked on. 

By 11 everyone was tucked into their sleeping bags, still drying out, grateful for a cozy hut and a sure-to-be-awesome view the next morning. 

I could not believe my eyes when I peered out the window the next morning. As it turned out, our moonscape from the night before had led us up a gully and out onto an incredible glacial flat, where we now perched surrounded on all sides by the characteristic well-graded stacks of gravel called glacial moraines. Stepping out of the hut and into the frosty morning, I found myself with 360 degree views of jagged mountain peaks, dirty glaciers filling the space between them upvalley. We were at the entrance to an incredible corridor of mountains, and hadn’t even realized it amidst the mist and darkness. 

I set to work making my morning coffee, journaling, and reading in the quiet morning sunlight, as friends slowly woke up and wandered over to my grassy patch, to share oatmeal and marvel at the view. I wrote this in my journal about the view, our changed sense of scale as we hiked and explored, the amazing flip of the switch from the blind night’s hike upwards to the bright clarity of the morning.

Last night, winding our way up the gully through the pressing fog, there was a sense of closeness, of the world pushing in at us as fast as it was expanding, as discussions of space and infinity swirled around us in the wet dark. We arrived at the hut and I forgot it all–the house-sized boulders tricking us in the bleached-gray dark, the slick rocks sliding away underfoot, our friends far below us by the rushing river bends. All there was in this vast, close, pressing world was four walls, warmth and light and a hook to hang our dripping clothes on. 

The morning tells a different story. The hut sits silent, alone, in a bowl scooped out by ice thousands of years ago, among walls of rocks stacked high by the scraping motion of time. Space and ice are retreating here, high above us and far away. Scale is incomprehensible, scree-topped stacks of stone like gods peering down at us. The past is alive here, water that was once ice streaming past to join the sea. The past is alive and change is not an abstraction and the world is one large rock, carved out for water and life to fill in the gaps. And here we are, with this green and pink hut, our Gore-Tex and gorp, our handwritten lyrics and stories of the rest of this fast-moving, noisy, color-filled world, filling in the gap. 

It’s time to go for a hike. 

Frances and Lucca had woken up early to go scramble around in the mountains high above us, and the rest of us were more than content to just sit and soak it all in as the sun climbed higher, illuminating glistening waterfalls and shining patches of snow all around us.

After a few hours of this, I found myself itching for an adventure of my own and I set off uphill, still in my camp Chacos and many layers. One thing I love about many of the landscapes in New Zealand is that you can often see where you’re going for a long way off, whether it’s over a glacial flat, up a river valley, or up the side of a moraine into a mountainscape. I could see my destination as I approached it, a highpoint atop the lateral moraine deep into the valley, for the whole of my trudge uphill. 

Spot the hut!

As I walked, shedding layers and disturbing the morning’s peace with my shouted song lyrics as they came through my headphones, I realized once again how little of this year I’ve spent alone, especially adventuring outside alone. It felt incredibly freeing to be working my way uphill, in the late-morning of a spectacular Sunday, completely and utterly alone in this otherworldly landscape. Goodbye friends, goodbye earthly concerns, I was off on an upwards journey into the scree, no idea where I’d spit myself out. Up I wound, the distance upward growing ever-smaller but not particularly quickly, realizing that trick of distances I’ve often experienced on trails here, where you can see where you’re going but you’re not going there fast. After half an hour or so I found a perfect boulder, perched on the edge of the moraine with spectacular views of the glacier and waterfall descending out of it, and I sat, heaving and sweaty. Beebahboo. I took it all in, this spectacular setting, the hut a wee dot a long way below me, soaking in the splendor of the moment and my gratitude for the place. I can’t recall the last time I’ve felt such peace, all alone in the thick of it, cool breaths of mountain air breathed by no one but me. 

After a few solo minutes, I saw some brightly-colored speckles approaching from the mountains, and realized that I had intercepted Frances and Lucca on their way back to the hut. We exchanged stories of our mornings and took pictures of each other with the spectacular backdrop, then started picking our way back down to the hut.

Frances, always saying beautiful things, told us she’d come to an important conclusion about her own artistic abilities. She said, “I’ve never considered myself very artistic, but I’ve realized that my art is the way that I dance through the mountains”. Following her quick, light footsteps through the scree, I was hit with yet another wave of gratitude, to be surrounded by such thoughtful and curious friends on these most grand adventures. 

Spot the Frances!

Back at the hut, we heard the lyrics to the new song our friends had written in our absence, ate a sun-soaked lunch, and started making our way back down the valley, reluctant to say goodbye to the soft morning, the pink door, the outline of the slate-gray peaks against the sky, riddled with patches of dirty snow and bright green shrubs. 

We didn’t start off again until a little after 1, and faced another longer-than-anticipated hike back down. After stopping after only thirty minutes for a luxurious swim break in yet another incredible glacial river, we worked our way back down the valley.

Our hike back was probably the most dejected I’ve felt on one of our backpacking trips so far, in that it felt we covered no ground fast, and perpetually had a ton of mileage left. I had another emergency Cliff bar break and busied myself talking to Frances about her relationship to home and college experience. 

Nearing sunset, we made it back to the car and, swarmed by sandflies, shoved ourselves back into sweet, hardy Sal. Lily handily drove us out through the horrible track and we were back on the road and desperate for, per usual, pizza and beer.

With our late departure, our best bet was a Domino’s 15 minutes from campus, where we piled in, scoffed 5 “large” pizzas in exactly 7 minutes, piled back into the car, and drove back to campus, arriving around 9am. (Two big qualms with this country: the milkshakes are horrible, and they don’t actually make large pizzas–they’re all personal pizza-sized. In moments such as this one, I really really miss the silly little luxuries of the States). 

Back at Ilam, I marveled at another jam-packed 24 hours, the delights of the alpine world, and my gratitude to have such excellent companions along for the ride.

A very, very happy Riley in the mountains